Monday, March 7, 2011

Aston: "Greed beyond Avarice"

February's Monthly Review has a poem by H. Rae Aston, a sculptor, poet, and former journalist based near Montréal. It begins with the following premise:
What if a parade were called
and every person in North America
showed up
to be in this one-hour walk?
Let’s say marchers were assembled
according to accumulated wealth,
the poorest leading off.
Wealth would correlate with height.
If you can imagine (but why use your imagination when you can just open the link in a new tab?), things get bizarre from there. The poem is didactic, but also humorous-- and it distills a whole series of graphs on wealth and inequality into a few choice images.

No comments: