Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl — a Reminder about Why Governance Is Necessary and, When Properly Done, Valuable

© 2012 Peter Free

 

26 November 2012

 

 

Citation — to Ken Burns’ documentary film

 

Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl, Public Broadcasting System (October 2012)

 

 

The point — competent, interventionist government is often more beneficial (and more necessary) than we Americans like to acknowledge

 

The Dust Bowl covers the environmental and economic disaster that centered in adjoining areas of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado during the 1930s:

 

"Let me tell you how it was. I don't care who describes that to you, nobody can tell it any worse than what it was. And no one exaggerates that; there is no way for it to be exaggerated. It was that bad." [Don Wells, Boise City, Oklahoma]

 

© 2012 Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl, Public Broadcasting System (October 2012) (quotation posted under “About the Film,” here)

 

What struck me in watching The Dust Bowl is how much Americans have forgotten about an episode that inarguably justifies the existence of competently active government.

 

 

Disclaimer — perhaps you had to be there, sort of

 

I have lived much of a lifetime in spots near the Dust Bowl’s core region.  I am familiar with arid high plains, farming, drought and looming economic disaster.

 

People who do not share a similar background may not be able to closely relate to the family circumstances that The Dust Bowl addresses.  Those whose immediate livelihoods do not include a good deal of anxiously looking skyward for rain may not intimately comprehend the environmental dependence that we share.

 

The Dust Bowl attempts to bridge experiential gaps with film, photographs, and interviews.

 

 

A parallel with Hurricane Sandy

 

Hurricane Sandy last month demonstrated how environmental and economic disasters have to be met with a large enough governmentally sponsored risk pool to “insure” those affected with financial and labor support from the rest of us.

 

The Dust Bowl was a decade-long, Great Depression era, dry version of Sandy.

 

The parallel between Sandy’s surging water and the Dust Bowl’s blowing soil is closer than one might think:

 

Plowing the sod of semi-arid grasses that had evolved to protect the plains through the ups and downs of aridity led directly to the blowing soil and crushed hopes of the Dust Bowl era.  Agricultural greed, and the government policies that supported and encouraged it, caused the mess.  It was fitting that New Deal policies then tried to assuage the damage.

 

Similarly, today, humanity-aggravated climate change has led to higher ocean levels and apparently stronger storms.  Zoning and insurance coverage continue to encourage building and re-building of structures located too close to foreseeably rising water.

 

 

A not-so-aside observation about the arguable utility of “arts”

 

The photographs and film footage that make up The Dust Bowl came in critically significant part from photographers employed by the federal government’s Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administrations.  Without them and their work, we would not today have much of a clue as to what had happened.

 

Personal memory, without material evidence, lasts only a generation.  Many of the arts seem superfluous, until we need them.

 

 

The moral? — Watch The Dust Bowl — then reconsider poorly thought out political ideologies

 

Comprehended history should nuance thinking more than it seems to.