Things started off wrong in the beginning when Adam had to give up one
of his ribs for Eve, but in spite of this, he, like a game sport, tipped
his fig leaf to her upon their first introduction. All ran smoothly until
Eve raised Cain, and thus our ancestors (after the monkeys) kept up a
constant increase until Noah got inside dope about the flood, whereupon
he built the Ark.
Our troubles might have been relegated to the word finis, but Noah stuck
up a good old boat and saved his wife, his animals, and their wives.
Then Nero played havoc with Rome and made the fiddle famous as the city
burned. We’ve been fiddling ever since.
Job next started showing his rights with the off shoots of the chosen
people and they said they would stone him to death if he didn’t stop. He
came right back by saying, “If you do I’ll turn my bears loose and they
will eat you.” The people did, Job did and the bears did. Then Job was
King.
I’d like to take some of your time and present the argument between
Anthony and Cleopatra, but there was so little between them that it is
hardly worth while.
In the days when Cleopatra and Anthony were such good friends, Anthony
had just won a big battle and he sent his runners to Cleopatra to tell
her to doll up in her glad rags and they would go out stepping. On the
way to her flat he met his runners returning. They announced, “Oh, Kind
Sir: Cleopatra is down with Tonsilitis.”
“Darn those Greeks,” said Anthony, “I shall declare war on Athens
tomorrow.”
Henry Ford started one thing that he played wrong (his cars play good
tunes though), when he decided to end the World’s War by taking a lot
of men and old maids to France and Germany. If he’d taken some of
Ziegfield’s chorus girls the war would have been over and President
Wilson would still have been a great man. Just march those girls up No
Man’s land, and there would have been so many soldiers following them
that a Burroughs adding machine couldn’t count them in the time it takes
light to travel from the Sun to Jupiter. Army recruiting stations would
have been as popular as senators’ cellars, and the sentiment between
the two would have been much stronger than the antagonism between the
Bolshevists and the anti-saloon league. But here we are presenting this
valuable dope several years too late. Tell your children about it, and
they can stop the next war though (if the pretty girls aren’t all dead).
Then a bunch of senators, with big cellars and stills in their attics,
passed a law that the combination of wine, women and song must be reduced
to women and song. Suppose we substitute nut-sundays, women and song.
Substitute your eye, we’ll just play the two undeceased members of the
combination a little stronger, unless we get into some senator’s cellar.
Don’t cry, little children, the war is over, and so is a lot of your
money, but Uncle Sam will make a lot more, and the Brigadier Generals and
the movie actors will get it.
At present we can assume that this is the Movie Age and Out-rage. We walk
right past a speech made by the President or some other vote-made man,
and several miles to see “Doug” Fairbanks skin his shins by walking up
the side of a seven-story building on his hands or to see Charlie Chaplin
swing a broom at the villain and hit the Queen of Russia, who is dressed
in sackcloth and ashes because of the murder of her last thirty-three
husbands.
Movie actors are all right, though. Why, they make more money than we
ever hear about. Figures compiled by the Secretary of the Treasury show
that a man and wife and family of seventeen children and pets, could
live on what Mary Pickford spends for silk stockings, but that is the
reason we go to the movies, says the henpecked man as his wife drags
him home to their little boiler factory where rolling pins are used as
sledgehammers.
If prices keep increasing and clothes decreasing, we will be restricted
as to the number of leaves we can wear, and they will be fastened to our
shivering yet magnanimous anatomy with paper fasteners of the Henry Ford
type. Shimmying will then be automatically abandoned, while courting will
only take place over the telephone. When we think of Theda Bara it will
be as a heavily clad woman.
Just one thing further, and that is, if this world keeps increasing its
speed as it has in the past, our heads will be going so fast that they
will look like fish bowls. Everything will just work backwards, our nose
will run and our feet smell. Just now we’re traveling so fast that our
hip pockets dip sand as we go around corners, and our feet come up so
often that people will think we are laying down. Put on your brakes, dear
old United Statesers, and let’s slow down to 100 per, or we’ll skid into
Mexico.
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