The Monolith
He mentions one part that is quite instructive about the reality of The Monolith, that millennia-old entity that does the proper work of prosecuting the standard evildoing of a World Devotee populace. The bank is poised to take his farm, and he fervently exhibits a righteously justified resistance.
The author of the piece does make mention about having enough courage to just get out there and labor really hard to make change happen with the very best rhetorical convincing with the help of a lot of others who feel really really bad about how exploitive The Monolith is and want to help out and expel lots of great rhetorical plappings to just make things better, dangit.
Excuse me, but...
Futile.
Very very very inspiring and courageous, but futile. That's also kind of the point of The Grapes of Wrath theme. Extraordinarily compelling, but very sad.
No matter what you are trying to do against The Monolith, you can never get to whoever is ultimately responsible. You can't. You can always seek to expose things, and talk about things, and understand things, and yes, live and work and worship righteously by Christ and His Kingdom Ways -- you may always do that.
But The Monolith mandarins that are really doing the chessboard maneuvering? Sorry about that.
It may be said things today aren't like the way it was for Tom Joad back in the Great Depression Dust Bowl days, but, well, you'd be wrong. There are all kinds of new exploitations that are killing people, precisely what The Monolith is supposed to be arranging. I could list however many of them, and have, and many have, today, happening right now, as a matter of standard-practice human sacrifice to keep the population at a manageable level.
Recently it was suggested 50-year homeowner mortgages should be made available, you know, to make nice houses more affordable. It sounds so good, but it doesn't make things better. It is just a way to keep people further enslaved to creditors who already infuse ridiculous levels of usury into the economic mainstream with the greatest impunity. The true answer to the unaffordability problem is for wise, thoughtful developers -- and I might add Kingdom-oriented community leaders, all at least a little bit unimpeded by The Monolith -- to go crazy making new single model family dwellings, getting people on their feet doing jobs they like and can do well, and putting them in vibrant communities of people they may find joy interacting with.
How about all the young adults absolutely enraptured with socialism? The number of "Democratic Socialist" potentates winning civil elections in the United States right now is frightening, inspiring more to run for office with the masterfully virtue-signaling plank of "just plain getting government to do more for the poor and downtrodden." It isn't even that there are so many of these candidates for office hypnotized by the stuff, but that there are so many voting for them. How has this happened?
Furthermore, how ludicrously ironic that the conservative federal powers-that-be who generally try to keep the socialist spending free-for-all under control a just a bit are cheering reopening the government that actually results in the renewal of the public assistance grocery benefits to millions of people who are thrilled that hard-working Tom Joads are paying for it all. In fact the news just came out that there are thousands of dead people on those benefits and tens of thousands of people who are getting double paid. This isn't even to mention all the other fraud occurring in all the other USAID-like agencies of whatever stripe wherever they are?
All those NGOs, supposedly non-government organizations, what about them? Thousands of them right there to virtue-signal about how much money they are mak-er-excuse me -- how much they are doing to help out the poor and downtrodden and this and that bad thing people need rescuing from. I've called them FCGOs, really, "Fully Connected Government Organizations" because The Monolith in some way is doing something to enable those things. Literally, thousands of them! I wrote my last home page piece about this condition, and there is so much to note about those things -- too much for this modest post -- but that in and of itself makes it impossible for any principled and industrious Tom Joad to do anything about it.
What is less understood is the veritable religious component to all the do-gooding that actually ends up killing the Tom Joads of the world. "Oh please, 'killing,' isn't that a bit melodramatic?" Excuse me, but The Grapes of Wrath? What was that about? Why was the drama so compelling? Why is that theme so real even today? Again, there is a very pronounced religious element that governs all of this, allowing people to keep up appearances, because, after all, poor and downtrodden and all of them can't survive without The Monolith.
I simply can't elucidate more here. I have a bit in my webzine work and blog posts here at Wonderful Matters. The only reason any of this is addressed is to get people to see it, understand it, and turn from it to Christ. The whole point of mentioning The Grapes of Wrath passage and remarking on it is, while noble and valiant, The Monolith is impossible to contest. It's been there for millennia, for a purpose. Much of that is serving as a legitimate instrument of judgment to get people to see the horrors of the evildoing-condemnation-prosecution merry-go-round, leave The Monolith alone to do what it does for those who want that...
And go over to The Kingdom.
True, authentic, real, meaningful salvation is only there by open invitation by that place's Lord.
And Savior of those who joyfully dwell there.
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The image of Tom Joad and his family is posted all over the web, from the 1940 film. The excerpt was clipped from the Brownstone article of November 12 2025.
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