Why Cultural Appropriation Is Much Worse than Alcohol

Identity politics aside, quoting John Steinbeck out of context is an act of cultural appropriation calling for correction when the interest being served is one Steinbeck criticized in his writing. Ballantine Ale benefited from his endorsement in this 1953 advertisement, true, but the author of The Grapes of Wrath distrusted big business and condemned consumerism in Travels with Charley and The Winter of Our Discontent. “If I wanted to destroy a nation,” he confided to Adlai Stevenson in 1959, “I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.” Forbes magazine had been defending corporate power and prestige for decades when Steinbeck wrote his letter to Stevenson, and our so-called business president began his career as a serial liar by gaming his score on the magazine’s annual wealthiest-list in the 1980s. Reason enough to object to today’s cultural appropriation of John Steinbeck’s advice to budding writers by the expert who posted “How to Use Targeted Content Marketing to Gain More Customers” at the magazine’s online edition for budding entrepreneurs: “Remember that great outreach is an act of storytelling. As author John Steinbeck wrote, “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader.” If you wanted to destroy a nation in 2018, having Donald Trump for president and Forbes magazine for literary light would be a sobering way to start.