Who wants to be a millionaire?
Is that your final question?
I like this poem because it deals with the theme of money and the theme of questions. Perhaps needless to say, I have issues with money. And as far as questions go, I come from the camp that says you must choose between God and money. I love parodying popular culture, which seems like most the time to be quite inane. The word “surreal” has become an ever popular part of my lexicon. Probably because the gap between seeking God and seeking money has grown starker, or least my awareness of that has. It seems hard to get more crass than “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Nevertheless, our popular culture seems quite successful at reaching ever new heights of crassness. Of course, the parody of the final line, “Is that your final answer?” is actually a conceptual pun in the sense that rather than coming to some final closure that our scientific reductionist culture values so highly, it turns this value on its head, and perhaps heart, by answering the question with a question, which seems to resemble life much more closely than the vain desire to wrap things up in a nice little bow of security, that is, being a millionaire. Of course, the obvious answer to the question, “Who wants to be a millionaire?” seems to be “Me, duh!” And indeed that may be the answer for most, I merely submit the question, “Is that your final answer?” Any questions?
