﻿Comments on an Irritated Age By T-Bone Slim 
By T-BONE SLIM

If we follow leaders we will land in several widely seperated places. Some of us will land in Omaha (could a worse place be to land in when you are going to Skowhegan or to Kalamazoo?) —some will land in Hebron, some in Gilead, some in Sleep Eye, Pipestone, etc.; and the marine workers will be dam glad if they land in Joppa, instead of Mojave or Death Valley, for there are many leaders and many places to go to.
The Bowery is full of potential leaders but, as a rule, they lead only to Hester street. In this the Bowery leaders are superior to other leaders; they know where they are going. The average leader, in thousand league boots and six barrel voice, hasn’t the slightest conception of where he is going; he only knows where he isn’t going (any port in a storm).
Moses did NOT know where he was going; he only knew he wasn’t going to Egypt. But how did it pan out?
The I.W.W. knows where it is going. They held a meeting and found out.
The secret to this lies in the fact that the I.W.W. found out that the man who knows will not lead. The only way to get his sentiments is to hold a meeting and the only way to get anywhere is to get together and plan the means, route, destination, and the finished realization — emancipation.
Activity of the individual should not be confused with leadership; it is merely the putting into effect the thoughts or ideas that irk his consciousness.
It all seems so obfuscating, “confuserating” and enervating—these proposals of leadership. “Take it on the chin while alive and you’ll get a cushion under you after you are dead.” Business of saving.
Other appointed leaders assure us that salvation lies in going backward to autocratic control; that a dictator may save us with his tyranies; just give up our liberties, freedom, and jack-knives and we’ll be all right. But they forget that Fellow Worker Nero tried that— do they consider themselves better than Nero?
Note: Nero had the world’s wisest Senaca to advise him—yet he failed.
Leadership has no ability of thoroughgoing constructive thought and eventually its cranium crystalizes into solid ivory, and it is then that the scheme seems wild and woolly and the road is strewn with brambles and broken beer bottles— a man might cut his shoes or tear his pants.

In that Hollywood cocktail party where much great eclat was going on and visiting firemen and film drummers got the idea they were in a paradise or free-for-all harem, “the language of the men was such as you would hear around the docks at San Pedro, or wherever filth is used in conversation,” sayeth Oscar Buddin, waiter at the “filth party.”
Oscar evidently isn’t quite recovered from the Scotch, for his testimony doesn’t make sense. Filth and San Pedro language are two widely separated quantities and the sounds he heard could not have happened anywhere outside of Hollywood; for there the type is carefully selected, assembled, and organized to give forth sounds that startle the nation.
Left to themselves they pull off performances that would seem to indicate sex, and things pertaining, are alpha and omega of Hollywood’s civilization—and that champaign and Scotch, instead of being means to an end are but a retarding influence upon the successful culmination of their program.
The remedy: Cease supporting them and go down to San Petdro docks and hear decent, circumspect language.

These observations take the form of verdicts, so as to save space.
We do not emancipate by destroying opposition, we destroy opposition by emancipating.
We emancipate by building, not by tearing down. (It’s fun to crack j them over the knuckles—but nevertheless it’s taking time out from important work—Organize.)
We build a new society within the shell of the old—old society not old egg. We want a new egg.
That’s that, as far as the economic angle is concerned—and maybe farther. Now the political angle. Warning: 
We are living in an irritated age and if it’s war you want, you’ll get it so fast that your heads will swim and submarines sink. And it will not be according to blueprints. German and Italian papers please copy.
Wheat is being exported. Shortage? Hooey!
