Holocaust Punchcards
Sunday, March 29, 2009
American in the 1930sa perverse empire
the dream of individualism
and capitalism collapsed,
but the nasty secret
intact
Europe, stagnant void
at the center
metastasizing Nazis
world-domineering
world-war brewing
To the east, Russia
the vast frontier of the Bolsheviks
untouched by the Depression -
Stalin and
Ford together.
I can picture those men meeting
in 1929, to agree the world's
largest industrial plant,
then or since -
cars, hundreds of thousands
of them, produced every year
under Stalin's portrait.
And then there's IBM, covertly
making punchcards
and computers
for the Nazis'
gas-chambers.
World in the 1930s -
a flushing toilet.