If Ryan Grim and Ali Watkins are correct that John Steinbeck was applauded at this year’s Spy Prom, the whole Intelligence Community may have to be reprogrammed. Those swashbucklers have been roaming the world making it safe for union busters for going on seventy-five years now, and they might as well have cheered Che Guevara. Far better that they stick to the script which, in honoring Ernest Hemingway, was problematic enough. After all, when Hemingway liberated the Ritz Carlton in Paris from the Nazis, he did it with a band of French Communists and an OSS officer.
But Hemingway never wrote about Rose of Sharon Joad Rivers, the mysterious heroine/redeemer of The Grapes of Wrath.
Ernest Hemingway ambled into a Parisian hotel bar and ordered dozens of dry martinis. Rose of Sharon’s breast milk killed fascists.
The Intelligence Community doesn’t get that.
