The People, Yes Page 15
“Broadway is a street,” typed the colyumist, “where people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”
“You ask me what is my theory of the universe,” the physicist replied, “when I haven’t even a theory of magnetism.”
“The great events of the world,” submitted a historian, “take place in the brain.”
“In the last analysis,” propounded a California wheat novelist, “the people are always right—a literature which cannot be vulgarized is not literature at all and will perish.”
“The durable culture of any nation,” ventured another historian, “rests on the mind and genius of its common folk, the masses of the people.”
In a hot house room where sunlight never came
hundreds of monster plants winding and twisting
and by light and volume turned on and off
you could make them grow fast or slow—
you could see them trail in snake-vines,
explode into mammoth elephant ears.
They crept and reeled in processions
Of obedient giant clowns and dwarfs, grotesques,
Symbols of an underworld not yet organized by man,
Tokens of plenty and hunger in the controls of man
And the master of these dumb clumsy growths,
A dwarf and a hunchback, a deep believer
In the spirit of man mastering material environment,
Out of Schenectady a wizard loving mankind in peak and abyss,
Saying science and invention are the enemies of human want
And the world is organized to abolish poverty
Whenever the people of the world so will.
Mild and modest were the delegates meeting in
Basle in 1912 and resolving:
“Let the governments remember . . . they cannot
unleash a war without danger to themselves.”
Mild and modest were the delegates meeting in
Geneva in 1934 and resolving:
“Man is still, of all baggage, the most difficult to
transport, and so long as the occupational and
geographical mobility of labor and the efficiency
of its distribution among different avenues
and places of employment are not improved
at a rate corresponding to accelerated
technical change, there is reason to expect the
persistence of a higher volume of technological
unemployment.”
“Listen to me,
brother.
They’ll hand yuh anything.
Look for the dirty work.
Listen.
Never see nothin’.
Never know nothin’.
Never tell nothin’.
Then yuh’ll get along.
If they want to frame on yuh,
they will.”
68
“The drama of politics doesn’t interest me,” said a news rewrite man between beers. “It’s only the people running around trying to change one gang of bandits for another gang of bandits.”
“I’ve written thousands of words about nothing,” said rewrite number two, “and I can do it again.”
“I don’t know anything,” chimed number three, “and come to think about it what I do know ain’t so.”
“What was it the doughboy wrote home?” a Sunday feature writer chipped in. “Pershing stood at the tomb of Napoleon and said, ‘LaFollette, we are here!’”
“Next,” burbled a city editor, “you’ll be telling about the cub who wired from the town on fire, ‘All is confusion can send nothing.’”
“Either that,” he went on, “or the lad whose assignment was to interview God and be sure to get a picture.”
“Or,” not yet being interrupted, “the utilities chief who brushed by Saint Peter at the gate of heaven saying, ‘I can’t bother with you, where’s God?’”
“I want money,” said the editorial writer who knew where he got it, “in order to buy the time to get the things that money will not buy.”
“If the utilities,” the Sunday feature writer kicked in again, “could meter the moonlight the lovers would have to pay, pay, and pay.”
“I love a few individuals,” came a droll desk man, “but I’ve got a grudge in general against the human race.”
“Me,” came another desk man, “I hate a few individuals and outside of that I love the whole damn human family.”
“Hell’s bitches,” a street man cut in, “are poverty, crime, ignorance and idleness. Disease and insanity are final breakdowns ending long periods of anxiety, fear, worry, and unrest.”
“He’s reading books, the sonofagun,” interrupted the city editor. “He’s going literary on us. And how are we going to get out a paper without poverty and crime?”
“I found out it takes a smart man to be a crook,” said a new lad on the police run. “And then I got to asking why should a smart man want to be a crook? He doesn’t have to.”
“The way to be a big shot is don’t know too much,” a desk man offered. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
“Man,” said a hitherto silent Sunday feature writer, “is infinitely more important than the property he creates. We cannot separate the individual from the work it produces. Property does not exist outside and above the men who jointly produce it.”
“He’ll be joining the guild soon if he hasn’t already got a card,” the editorial writer editorialized. “Bend thy neck, proud Sicambrian. Adore what thou hast burned. Burn what thou hast adored.”
“May,” a rewrite ended the session, “may the fair goddess, Fortune, fall deep in love with thee and prosperity be thy page.”
“If you have nothing to do please don’t do it here,” said one of the rewrites opening the next day’s session with a tall tankard.
“Nevertheless,” rejoined a rewrite, “I can tell you I met a discouraged undertaker today saying his business was to bury the dead and it looked to him as though the dead have stopped dying.”
“And I,” put in a member of the art department, “met an intellectual who says to me why don’t you draw the pelican and all I could hand him was why do I want to draw the pelican since it’s all there when you look at it and any of the camera boys can do it quicker.”
One camera boy saying, “I have found woman to be the same as man, with slight alterations,” another burbled, “Thank God for those alterations.”
“I don’t see,” put in the new college lad on the police run, “why any man wants to kill another. If he’ll just wait the other man is going to die sometime anyhow.”
“It’s like men chasing after women,” said a rewrite. “If they didn’t the women would chase after them.”
“We ought to have a series of interviews,” offered a desk man, “on whether the man chases the woman or whether it’s the woman that chases the man, columns and columns with pictures and snappy captions.”
“They put on the wires today,” said a unit from the telegraph desk, “an Irish poet saying when he’s going to write a poem he has the same feeling a hen has when she’s going to lay an egg.”
“That’s news,” believed the city editor. “News is anything we think ought to be printed to gladden our readers’ hearts or throw the fear of God into them.”
“We describe the revels of the rich,” interposed a slightly illuminated assistant Sunday editor, “so the poor may enjoy in imagination the pleasures their purses will not permit them in reality.”
“Yet I notice,” he went on, “my associates have considerable difficulty on various occasions in brightening and rendering readable the dull antics of the wives of the big advertisers.”
“And,” he continued, “if the big advertiser himself gets into difficulties so notorious that something must be printed we soften the blow to the fullest extent and this is as it should be for advertising is the life blood of a newspaper and who are we that
we should bite the hand that feeds us?”
“You’re a dirty radical bothered with a streak of the blessed Rotarian,” put in a rewrite.
“In Moscow,” interpersed one just back from Russia, “an English liberal tells me a bugler every morning steps out in front of the Kremlin and blows a long powerful blast and they ask him what for and he says, ‘I am sounding the call for the international revolution of the united workers of the world who have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to gain,’ and they ask him what he gets paid for this daily bugle call and he says, ‘Not much—but it’s a permanent job.’”
“For my part,” an editorial writer ended his silence, “I begin each bright morning with praying: Lord, give me this day my daily opinion and forgive me the one I had yesterday.”
“And I,” rejoined the slightly illuminated one, “never quit dreaming of a time when every man is his own policeman, priest and editorial writer.”
“You would wish yourself,” the editorial writer had it, “out of your own job and me out of mine.”
“Yes,” as some of them prepared for the suburban trains, “one of these days science and invention will have rendered each one of us humble servants of the public a superfluous and unnecessary unit of labor and all we’ll have to worry about is how to occupy our very valuable minds when there is nothing to do but nothing.”
The city editor managed to have the final words.
“I’ll take vanilla! horsefeathers!”
69
“A lawyer,” hiccuped a disbarred member of the bar, “is a man who gets two other men to take off their clothes and then he runs away with them.”
“If the law is against you, talk about the evidence,” said a battered barrister. “If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, since you ask me, if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell.”
“The law,” said the Acme Sucker Rod manufacturer who was an early Christian mayor of Toledo, Ohio, “The law is what the people will back up.”
“You haven’t climbed very high,” said a Wall Street operator who was quoted in the press, “unless you own a judge or two.”
Lawyer: What was the distance between the two towns?
Witness: Two miles as the cry flows.
Lawyer: You mean as the crow flies.
Judge: No, he means as the fly crows.
Between the Whig sheriff and the Democratic judge in Boone County, Missouri, was a breach wide enough to erect gallows.
A visiting lawyer handed the judge a brief spattered with large goose-quill penmanship.
The judge turned the document crossways
and upside down scrutinizing it.
“Can’t that judge of yours read writin’?”
whispered the lawyer to the sheriff.
“No,” whispered the sheriff. “He can’t
read readin’, let alone writin’.”
Who was the twentieth century lawyer who said of another lawyer, “He has one of the most enlightened minds of the eighteenth century”? and why did fate later put both of them on the Supreme Court bench?
The surgeon held his profession the oldest in
the world through the operation whereby
Eve was made of rib from Adam.
The engineer held the world was once chaos
and its reorganization a matchless
engineering feat.
The politician put in, “Who made that chaos?”
And the laugh comes in there, a half a
laugh, and come to think about it, less
than half a laugh.
70
The tumblers of the rapids go white, go green,
go changing over the gray, the brown, the rocks.
The fight of the water, the stones,
the fight makes a foam laughter
before the last look over the long slide
down the spread of a sheen in the straight fall.
Then the growl, the chutter,
down under the boom and the muffle,
the hoo hoi deep,
the hoo hoi down,
this is Niagara.
The human race in misery snarls.
The writhing becomes a mob.
The mob is the beginning of something,
Perhaps the mournful beginning
Of a march out of darkness
Into a lesser darkness
And so on until
The domes of smooth shadows
Space themselves in tall triangles
And nations exchange oleanders
Instead of gas, loot and hot cargo.
The mob is a beginning, man lacking concert.
The hanging mob hangs more than its victim.
These seethings are a recoil and a downdrag.
Each debauch costs.
Fevers and rots run a course before growth.
The mob is a beginning, man lacking concert.
What is an army with banners and guns
Other than a mob given form and orders to kill?
And when will the nations exchange oleanders
Instead of gas, loot and hot cargo?
A train of soldiers passes.
The khaki lads cheer, laugh, sing, and the flag goes by.
They are young and the young time is the time to be gay, to sing, laugh, cheer, even out of car windows on the way to mine strike duty.
Some of these boys will be laid out stiff and flags will drape their coffins.
Some of the mine strikers will be laid out stiff and flags drape their coffins.
Faraway owners of the mines will read about it in morning papers alongside breakfast.
71
Who was that antique Chinese crook who put over his revolution and let out a rooster crow: “Burn all the books! history must begin with us!”
What burned so inside of him that he must burn all the books? and why do we all want to read those books just because he hated them so?
Yet we hand him this: He singled out no special lot of books for burning: he hated books as such and wanted them all up in smoke.
“Let history begin with us,” was his cry and maybe it began and what were its chapters and what was his name as its beginner?
What is history but a few Big Names plus
People?
What is a Big Name unless the people
love it or hate it
For what it did to them or for them while it
was in the going?
And this Big Name means pretense and plunder,
ashes and dung,
While another is armfuls of roses, enshrined
beyond speech.
You may call spirits from the vasty deep,
Aye, you may—but will they come
When you call them?
You may sell an idea to the people
And sit back satisfied you have them your way
But will they stay sold on the idea?
Will they be easy to hold in line
Unless the idea has a promise of roots
Twisted deep in the heart of man
Being brought into play
As though justice between man and man
May yet breeze across the world with sea-smells
And a very old, a very plain homemade cry,
“Why didn’t we think of this before?”
In the intimate circles of the dictator,
At the desk at the end of a long room
where the imitation of God Almighty
sits running the works,