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The Ghost of Inequality – From Dust Bowl to Rust Belt with Springsteen and Steinbeck
What makes fear turn into wrath?
At what point does silence break, and despair ferment into solidarity?
In this episode, I revisit a thesis I wrote twenty years ago — about Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Two works separated by decades, yet both haunted by the same ghost: inequality. Steinbeck warned that “the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.”
Springsteen sang “Welcome to the new world order.”
Both asked us to see the people left behind.
And today? Maybe hunger is no longer just about food, butabout security, dignity, and the fear that even our basic needs — housing, health, justice — will no longer be guaranteed.
Some ideas rot and vanish. But others — like Steinbeck’srage and Springsteen’s lament — keep composting, feeding us, and returning in every new crisis.
Read my original thesis (PDF-Italian) here: BruceSpringsteen and the Ghost of John Steinbeck
Guiding Question:
When wrath comes — will it turn fear into solidarity… or just more ghosts?
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By samara.crociWhat makes fear turn into wrath?
At what point does silence break, and despair ferment into solidarity?
In this episode, I revisit a thesis I wrote twenty years ago — about Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Two works separated by decades, yet both haunted by the same ghost: inequality. Steinbeck warned that “the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.”
Springsteen sang “Welcome to the new world order.”
Both asked us to see the people left behind.
And today? Maybe hunger is no longer just about food, butabout security, dignity, and the fear that even our basic needs — housing, health, justice — will no longer be guaranteed.
Some ideas rot and vanish. But others — like Steinbeck’srage and Springsteen’s lament — keep composting, feeding us, and returning in every new crisis.
Read my original thesis (PDF-Italian) here: BruceSpringsteen and the Ghost of John Steinbeck
Guiding Question:
When wrath comes — will it turn fear into solidarity… or just more ghosts?