the great depression is like. such a specific interesting period to look at as represented in american literature because i think to an extent books are almost afraid of it, and it brings up these apocalyptically disturbing issues of capitalist destruction, climate destruction, violent racism, nativism, isolationism, antisemitism, agricultural disfunction, wealth inequality and the (so called) *hypothetical* space of what economic disaster means in real time for ordinary people (notice how the us now flinches from considering economic issues *significant* enough reason to be considered a *refugee). and the 30′s aren’t like the 1920′s, or the 50′s, or even now the 80′s or 90′s in that they can’t be so easily commodified into a saleable aesthetic of *the past* by certain groups and actors or consumed as pure nostalgia (something that, of course, requires stripping the above decades of almost everything that happened in them.) one on hand it’s because it’s perhaps harder to find sale-able aesthetic items in an era whose *aesthetic* if defined in terms of iconic images is marked by depravation, and ingenuity in the fact of depravation: dresses cut from flour sacks, yellowed photos of migrant workers, model-t’s and worn-out buster browns. but who wants to buy the dust bowl? all this accounts for why i think there’s this odd lost decade from the greater portion of american middle-brow literature and filmmaking and straight up pop culture reminiscence of a period that inarguably changed the us. it’s interesting.
i say on one hand because on the other, it really struck me how much of the american rendition of *cottagecore* and *getting back to nature/the farm* seems to me to dwell on some of those aesthetics of this period, removed from all context. there’s a lot of similar-silhouetted dresses, with extensive indie natural fibers fabric replacing the flour sacks that were the only thing many people could afford to dress their daughters in, and there’s washing your baby in a bucket, which looks nice, even though you do have running water. there’s an overall technological level that seems about 1930′s to me, and a focus on the kind of aesthetic sides of gardening, *farming*, washing clothes by hand and canning foods in mason jars that ignores the fact those were survival mechanisms for many people, that none of them ever stopped but changed with technology, that every aspect of food production is nuanced, messy, and dependent on extraordinarily complex factors of cost and terroir that make accessibility and sustainability contingent on a great number of local factors that don’t make such aesthetic instagram content. there are biscuit cutters and wringers for laundry and sometimes chickens, but there isn’t making saurkraut in 5-gallon plastic ace hardware buckets, or working in community college greenhouses to revive indigenous plants or food ways, or heritage seed banks, or butchering meat on plastic tarps, or replacing your ground beef with vegan replacements because that’s how you choose to decrease your environmental impact in a city of sixteen million people. and i think it’s interesting, because of the mobius strip of a (white, anglo, wealthy) turning away from so many of the exact issues that caused this aesthetic in the first place at the expense of an obliteration of historical understanding at a time when we have so much to learn from the past and for the present. you can try to sell the great depression, but how do you make money off of migrant workers, farmers watching land go dry with drought, hungry children, and climate refugees? how do you sell the dust bowl?
