Do you remember reading either The Jungle or The Brass Check by Upton Sinclair? I was in high school and we explored The Jungle in English class. I felt a bit of kinship with the protagonists. They were Lithuanian immigrants to Chicago; my maternal grandfather was a Serbian immigrant to Milwaukee. I could empathize with the difficulties faced by the Rudkus family. The stories told to me by my grandfather, although nowhere near as horrific, were cut from the same cloth. He was a 13-year-old “unaccompanied minor” when he landed in Ellis Island, though he came legally and had an invitation to join a cousin who had come to this area earlier. His path was not direct, though. It necessitated a stint building the railroad in Iowa that lasted a few years until he could cobble together enough money to eventually buy a grocery store with that cousin.
To those not familiar with the troubles of those immigrants in The Jungle, it paints a series of hardships caused by greedy and unprincipled individuals who drove the protagonists to injury, loss of dignity, death and despair. Spoiler alert….Jurgis loses everything dear to him, the whole reason for immigrating in the first place, and becomes a passionate supporter of socialism, as socialists of the time were the only people who offered him sincere help.
The novel exposed the public to the unhealthy aspects of the meat packing industry and resulted in the eventual passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. It was an uphill fight, though, as many of the politicians of the time thought Sinclair was an unhinged crackpot and over-exaggerated the problems.
The Brass Check is written in a similar style, exposing the monopoly of the “mythic free press” that censored most information from the public. To Sinclair, the press was ultraconservative and failed to give any semblance of a balanced view.
Fast forward to today… If you ever played the video game The Legend of Zelda, somewhere along the line a switch was thrown and we switched locations from the Kingdom of Hyrule to The Evil Realm. We still have those who are taking advantage of people, with deadly consequences. We still have a monopolistic press that largely ignores what is going on and actively imposes censorship on those seeking to expose the truth. We still have politicians who fight to support the status quo.
But the problem is not unsanitary and dangerous conditions in the meat packing industry. It is the dangerous and unhealthy conditions in the pharmaceutical industry. Those responsible are not the capitalistic companies supplying unsafe meat, but the pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies who limit potentially life-saving drugs and impose lockdowns and mandates on the entire population. The “Progressives” and Socialists are the ones banning free speech and clamoring for lockdowns. The very agencies responsible for insuring safe and effective pharmaceuticals seem to be the ones pushing unproven and risky agents and burying any hint of a problem. The agencies that should be free of political and financial bias are controlled by those who apparently have huge political and financial biases.
And the modern muckrakers? Those such as Naomi Wolf, Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, Paul Alexander, George Fareed, Bryan Tyson, Scott Atlas, Lt. Col. Theresa Long, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and countless others? They are there and courageously speaking out despite intense efforts at vilification and character assassination. There are the health care workers, members of the military and first responders who went from official hero to equally official villain simply because of their ideology. The political party that made “my body, my choice” their mantra stridently condemns these people for refusing to take part in a massive medical experiment, without anything remotely resembling Informed Consent, with an agent that does not confer immunity or prevent passage to others but entails huge known and even larger unknown, risks.
If Upton Sinclair and Franz Kafka collaborated on a novel, it would read like the history of this mess…..Unfortunately, it would be rejected as far too unbelievable…..
