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dust bowl

Last night -- watched a Ken Burns documentary about the dust bowl. God that Peter Coyote gets a lot of voice-over work. A second career, with that open but serious timbre of his. All I can remember from his acting life is this forgettable movie called Heartbreakers -- which had something to do with art and threesomes. I wonder why I remember it.

The documentary about the dust bowl was sort of awful. Not in the way it was done, not the film, but a lot of the content. Wholesale rural poverty has a kind of God-stricken quality to it. Like a nuclear poverty bomb, unleashing infernos of dirt.

One scene described a jack-rabbit slaughter (the jack-rabbits were overrunning the place, apparently), all these men and kids making a party of it, clubbing away with wheel spokes, throwing the rabbits in quivering piles.
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  1. Susan Schwake9:12 am

    Ken's from our neck of the woods. This one looked like an era that was never taught in school and might be a good educational watch. I think I'll read the book. .... is there one?

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  2. Unknown7:44 pm

    i watched this as well and thought the same thing about the ken actor's voice, thought about that same movie, thought about the long and awfulness of whole era in the same manner, have ancestors who survived the dust bowl and made it to Indiana where we live now, and yikers, the jack rabbits-had to turn off the tv from the whole of it~

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