this video over the distribution of wealth in America does a great job of illustrating to the audience exactly where America is today by using the graphs. these graphs are shocking and honestly upsetting slightly to the middle class American. why should it be fair that the top 1% own 40% of the nation’s wealth? its not fair, but then again almost nothing in life is. and this unequal distribution of wealth is not new to America, it has just simply steepened. in both American novels, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, we can see the unequal distribution of wealth.

In The Great Gatsby the reader can see the wealthy, the middle class, and the lower middle class portrayed throughout the novel. The Buchanans and Gatsby and both wealthy; they have more money than they know what to do with. these people don’t have to work everyday to make it by, they have enough money to live out their lives comfortably. whereas characters like nick caraway must work in order to survive. nick is in the middle/working class, he owns a house in a nice neighborhood but isn’t rolling in heaps of money like his neighbor Jay Gatsby. nick is, however, better off than George Wilson who owns a garage. George has been working all his life and will be working for the rest of it, he occupies the lower middle class. the difference between George and nick and their lifestyle and income is slight, being that they both occupy one side of the middle class. the buchanans, however, differ from these men completely. they are filthy rich and it is evident by their life style and actions. Fitzgerald shows the reader the extreme difference in the classes in order to comment on the economy and the distribution of wealth.

though the reader does not follow any poor characters in the Great Gatsby, the reader can still sense the inequality. whereas in The Grapes of Wrath the plot follows the Joad family and their struggles with poverty after being pushed off their land. in this novel the distribution of wealth is very evident when the reader sees the rich California farmers controlling all of the land and only paying their workers 25 cents. these land owners do no physical labor and control almost half of the nation’s wealth whereas the people working their land work day and night for just 25 cents. nowadays we can see similar situations arising across America as the top 1% controls now 40% of the wealth in America.

this video makes it argument by using pathos and logos. pathos is used when speaking of the poor Americans who work and still suffer. pathos is again used when explaining that the bottom 10% is just relying on pocket cash when the top 1% has ridiculous amounts of money. logos is used to structure the argument through the use of graphs and numbers.

I found this video very interesting and informative. I knew the top 1% controlled a lot but getting to see the realistic graph showed me just how bad it has gotten.

I would just like to start off this blog post by letting you know that my laptop is dying and I cant see the left half of my screen right now… I really hope I am posting a blog and I apologize in advance for any mistakes that I cannot see.

the poem, “hollow men” by T.S. Eliot is an amazing piece of literature and though it may have few words it has so much meaning. Eliot utilizes imagery throughout this work in order to comment on the society in which he lives. the piece of imagery that stands out to me the most is when he says:

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw”

the “hollow men” or the “we” in these verses represent the people of the time. they are hollow as in not being fulfilled or being empty, because their lifestyles could not fulfill them entirely, they are stuffed as in being fake, and their head pieces filled with straw represents their stupidity and ignorance. Eliot can see everything that is wrong with the way people are living and the people they are becoming, they are becoming hollow men. the men he describes remind me of tom Buchanan. for example, being a hollow man, he cheats on his wife, loves his money, and views himself very highly. after reading both this poem and the Great Gatsby it can easily be seen that Fitzgerald and Eliot agreed on many things. both authors saw past the romanticism of the era and saw something truly terrible. they saw the death of the American dream, the birth of hypocrisy, greed, and the worship of material possessions. both pieces of literature have a cynical tone. in both pieces we see terrible, fake, void human beings; people who are selfish, greedy, and fake. the authors similar tones argue even more that the two pieces are very similar.