In a case of Okies-in-reverse, hundreds of thousands of Californians — busted and disgusted in their dead-broke, formerly golden state — are returning to the Dust Bowl. Yes, Californians are packing up their espresso machines and hauling ass to Oklahoma and Texas.

As someone who had to wait 18 years to escape from Oklahoma, I find this behavior inexplicable. I don't give a shit how bad it is in California. Oklahoma City cannot be an improvement.

But there's a lot happening in this country that just can't be explained. Unless you're a Russian TV talking head, and you're exploring the history of our Dust Bowl era.

State-run Russia Today's Boris Borisov, sick of his own country getting savaged for hosting a '30s famine, sticks it to America with an "investigation" into the millions of Americans he says "vanished" during the Dust Bowl '30s.

Borisov's got that smug confidence (even in translation) typical of nutcase ideologues like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. But if he really wants to reach America's heartland to teach his version of heartland history, he's got to pump up the volume to at least "rant" level.

When even the Wall Street Journal reports that capitalists are questioning "the ideal of unfettered capitalism," you wouldn't expect someone to bother attacking their former nemesis Vladimir Lenin.

But Lenin got his ass blown off yesterday at St. Petersburg's Finland Station. The famed statue marks his return to Russia in 1917 for the start of the October Revolution.

Was this a counterattack by capitalists? No, it was probably just vandals or anti-commie activists who stuck 300 grams of TNT up the ass of Soviet Communism's creator. At least reports say his ass was blown up. The blast did happen, after all, on April Fools' Day — as did the aforementioned WSJ story in which capitalist thinkers were quoted as questioning their own ideology.

Everything reported to have happened on any April 1 has to be held suspect, but the WSJ story was no hoax, and there's not only video of the damaged statute but also a detailed story in Russia Today and other outlets.

No matter. You could use the reported ass-chewing of Lenin as an excuse to read (or re-read) Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station (1940), which has a good hook to the current financial angst: Wilson got the idea for the book during the Great Depression. Lenin wound up being the book's hero. We know how that turned out.

A graceful writer, Wilson handled his youthful misapprehension of Soviet Communism with equal grace, writing late in his life in an introduction for a new edition of the book: