I recently finished The Grapes of Wrath, a book I was almost certainly assigned in high school but likely never touched. My return to the Joad family wasn’t prompted by a sudden desire to revisit the classics, but by a rock concert.
Watching Bruce Springsteen on the Land of Hope and Dreams tour, I was struck by his nightly performance of “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” It wasn’t just the music—although Tom Morello’s solo is amazing—it was the way the lyrics drawn directly from Tom’s famous speech felt like they were being written in real-time about our own headlines.
The Authoritarian Mirror
When Springsteen sings about looking for “the ghost of Tom Joad,” he’s reaching back 100 years to find language for today. Tom’s promise to be there “wherever there’s a cop beating a guy” or wherever people are “shouting ‘cause they’re crazy” and “hungry” feels devastatingly relevant in 2026, 30 years after the song’s release.
Living through this current authoritarian administration and witnessing the actions of ICE, the parallels to the 1930s “California border” are impossible to ignore. Steinbeck was writing about a time when the powerful scapegoated the poor to maintain a wealth gap that felt insurmountable. Today, we see that same machinery at work. The novel reminds us that the “problem” isn’t the family in the tent or the migrant at the border—it’s the system that demands their suffering to protect its bottom line.
The Deconstruction of Jim Casy, the preacher
While Tom provides the political fire of the book, I found myself relating deeply to Jim Casy.
Casy is a man who has walked away from the pulpit because the faith he once held and preached “don’ work no more.” In our modern vocabulary, we’d call this deconstruction. It is a term I’ve been living with for a while but haven’t spoken much about. Like Casy, I’ve found that the faith I once held—or perhaps the way I was taught to hold it—has cracked under the weight of reality.
There is a specific kind of loneliness and disorientation in deconstruction, but there is also a specific kind of integrity. Casy doesn’t hate the people he used to preach to; in fact, he maintains a beautiful respect for the rituals and the ways their faith meets their needs, especially in difficult times. He just can’t, however, pretend the old framework still holds the truth he sees in the world.
Watching Casy navigate that space—the gap between the religion he knew and the justice he’s searching for—felt a bit like looking in a mirror. He shows us that losing your “profession” of faith isn’t the same as losing your soul. Sometimes, you have to leave behind what “don’ work no more,” to find the “big soul” that Steinbeck writes about—the one where everyone belongs to one another.
Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one… Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be everywhere—wherever you look.
Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Chapter 28
So much to process
The Grapes of Wrath is often called a “Great American Novel,” but that makes it sound like a museum piece. It’s not. It’s a map for right now. Whether it’s through a Springsteen lyric and Morello guitar solo or a novel from 1939, Tom Joad and Jim Casy are still trying to tell us something about who we are, what we believe, and who we might still become.