﻿OIL 
 
The Teapot Dome affair seems to be giving general satisfaction to the general public. Citizens are going around chuckling to themselves — hugging themselves. But the sober minded “revolutionists” are not so happy . . . 

The members of the I. W. W. appear to be the only ones that register sorrow at the turn of affairs regarding Tea Pot Dome—many of us have been blushing furiously for the past weeks and now our mental state has reached “inconsolable sorrow”—”inconsolable solo,” my friend Lo Chin would say. 

Our author has suddenly lost all sense of humor, direction—and all sense of taste, touch, hearing and smell — in the fog arising over the Teapot Dome. His old reliable means of conact have been brought to naught, for has not a revolution occured in the sacred precincts of Washington, D. C.? 
Something entirely new has occured in that law-making villiage and now nothing remains but to arrest the American people, including its government, congress and cabinet and keep them under lock and key until such a time as it is safe for the honest people to once again tread the sacred soil of the land of the brave and free. 

As I was saying— we blush with shame at the elephantine antics of the amateur grafters who have been performing in connection with the oil scandal—let us pray. 
Only in prayer can we find peace militant enough to conquer our humiliation — our guilty consciousness, that of permitting cumbersome gentlemen to bring our institutions into disrepute. I say, let’s have done with “shyster” lawyers—if we’re going to have crooks in the high places, let us have good ones. Let us pick out men who understand the profession; men who at least can keep out of their own way. . . 
You put men in office who don’t know the first thing about stealing, with the result that our fair name has become besmirched with an “irremovable” tarnish—tarnish that cannot be removed without destroying the tarnish. Let us pray. 

Every man who has a drop of red blood in his veins get down on your knees and pray: 

O Lord, if there ever was a time that we need your help it is now (when the court puts on its gloves to try the oil case). Lord help us and help our servants—especially our servants—of late, so woefully deficient in the art of lying. Gift them with the loquaciousness of an Aaron so that we may emerge out of this sorry mess with a semblance of respectability, O Lord. 
Let your spirit descend on these bunglers so that they may coordinate the frayed ends of their yarns into an air-tight fabric of artificial truth. Make their tales colorful and their testimony consistent. O Lord, give them strength to bear up under cross examination and muddle the heads of the prosecution. Give them good lawyers, O Lord, to defend them— it’s the only way. 
Spare us, O Lord, this disgrace— for what good is it to show the world what a lot of jackasses we have been —we pray thee in the name of Capitalism. Amen. 

Now that the Lord is on our side we may safely glance sideways to discover what the citizen is chuckling about. The press says someone has been robbing the country and that the robbery has been discovered. Does that tickle him? 
The press says the robber will be put in the can. Ha Ha Haa! Does that please the citizen? Not one inch of the country does he own, yet he is pleased when the robber of “his” country is apprehended—how’s that for loyalty? 
He hasn’t lost a cent— in this deal — and will not gain a cent— in the next deal —yet he shows unmistagable signs of exhiliration. 
A few men own practically all the wealth in this country and when they start squabbling among themselves for the privilege of putting the “cleaner” on us (and our country) our boob friend imagines he has gained a point; tosses his hat in the air and yodles yankee doodle do— he doesn’t know that already long ago he has doodled himself out of a house and home—Wall Street owns his country. 
And I would have you know Wall Street owns our country legally by the strength of the laws politicians have made and will own our country by the strength of the laws now in the process of making—may I be pardoned for saying laws can only be judged by their result —and when the snake of this latest scheduled scandal sinks in the valleys of Wyoming it will be found Wall Street divides lower Manhattan Island and owns America and Mexico, as before. 
We may as well keep our hats on our empty heads and proceed to organize for the purpose of taking over our industries. We have nothing to lose. The courts will take care of the oil scandal and it will develop $100,000 is a very conservative amount to pay men of legal mind for “valuable” services rendered. No crime was committed that is not permitted by law . . . Sinclair and Dohney are business men, strictly within their rights in purchasing public domain —and no doubt their profits will be declared reasonable in the extreme and modest to boot— I don’t know what the holler is about—nothing new had happened, so why get excited? 
But the holler itself is a revelation—if not the revolution before stated. And we must in the future select officials more carefully— men who will stand up well under questioning. We cannot afford (as the Humboldt Times says in regards another matter) “the trampling of our most cherished traditions and institutions and our Flag in the dirt.” 
We must have men who can lie consistently year in and year out—our traditions, institutions and Flag must not be soiled for all the oil in the world—I. U. 230 please note—get in on this drive for “traditions.” The Lord is with us!