Thursday, April 1, 2010

Meaning of the Monster

The Monster is the corporations, the machines, the inhuman controller of America. The text says that the Monster is sick, it's not getting enough money to consume and eventually expel and throw away. (Does this mean that if the monster doesn't get it's food, it dies? Why don't people try to kill it?) The Monster has no morals, it has no love of life, but only of itself. It enjoys destruction. It rewards those who destroy for it, who kill for it. It is taking land away from those who have lived on it for years. Legally, it does belong to the Monster, but the farmers have lived on the land for generations, worked it with their sweat, stained it with their blood, watered it with their own tears (actually that would be bad, tears are salty... but you get the idea), died on it. In their mind, no one has more right to the land than they do. The Monster doesn't even know what the land looks like. It gets others, minions, to do its business. Willy Freeley, the man on the tractor, is one of these blind followers. He plows the land, land that won't be able to take much more plowing anyway, and has essentially become a part of the tractor itself, the machine, the Monster. He is destroying the lives of thousands of people, just so that his own family can live off three dollars a day. This is in contrast to when Muley Graves shares his only food with Tom and Jim just because they're people who need it as much as he does. The Monster doesn't care about people, it controls them. It forces them to bend until they conform to its will, and those who don't, die. The Monster, the corporations, the banks, takes away what its pawns need the most, like an unruly king. We are less a nation of capitalism, and more a nation of a dictatorship, a dictator that isn't human, and yet is living, living for the sole purpose of itself, a ruler we once said we would never live under again.