﻿Bright Boys Kid Themselves But The World Acts 
By T-BONE SLIM

Election day is here again and Oh, those candidates are Oh so good, regular saints; but must tell you I’ve got all I can do voting a job for myself instead of voting someone else a job— you see I believe that charity commences at home. And I’m afraid if the candidates wait for me, there’ll be many politicians jobless. No I don’t expect to land a job before 1948.

Just as soon as a man ceases to act foolish he is hailed a wise man, garlanded with the flowers of virtue, honored throughout the land, like as not, elevated to the supreme bench with an eighteen-inch cushion under him —that’s how badly we hate half-wits.
Half blinded by a ray of intelligence, right away they think the world cannot stand without them. Graves are full of former great, grinning hideously, yet the world has stood in sorrow at their funerals.
There is no reason to think the world will not continue to stand, with or without them. If they are trying to lift the world onto its feet, they’ve got ahold of something there—it’s a big lift. If they’re trying to trip the world they may be crushed. Insignificance of their wisdom should teach them a healthy humbleness of spirit so they may learn the world is not ruled from above, from the bench, or from the sidelines. The world is the most unruly, obstreperous establishment in the universe, “Peck’s Bad Boy” of the planets, and in the end it is always discovered—The world it was that laid down the rules and religions and the bright boys it was that were kidding themselves.
The world doesn’t say much —it acts. The bright boys talk plenty.

Freedom is what makes life worth fighting for—otherwise life is ten cents a gross; fill your own sack. (Cheap stuff! if they won’t wrap it up for you.)
The working class, if and when it joins the IWiW, is going to be mighty valuable potatoes; rich in vitamins and fairly oozing calories—society will never again have to fall back on cod liver oil and aspirins.
T-Bone Slim expects every worker to do his duty. And r’r’rembah! The rank and file is never invited to break pie with the boss. Not that they do not like pie but the bosses do not like rank and file—the feeling is mutual. It’s getting so the rank and file wouldn’t marry the boss’s daughter even to win a bet. And I don’t blame them. You’ve seen their pictures in the palladiums of public opinion. You wouldn’t want one of those around the shack?

These recognitions obtained from the boss are glorious achievement of the workers—only trouble was the achievement was empty; a sort of empty victory Bosses’ recognitions are that way; a hollow look.” Those one, two, and three year agreements, now that the boys could get more, are agreements to support one-third off the working class in perfect idleness—now don’t renig. Think you can afford it on the strength of the agreement you have made? And after the three years is up there won’t be enough “prosperity” left to enable the workers to get any kind of agreement and they will be told kindly but firmly precisely what they will get, where to get off at; and double-crossing of the unemployed isn’t going to make the unions any stronger in that DAY when the boss undertakes to give them the runaround, less than three years from today. Mark that down or I won’t eat my words.
Guess that’s helping the boss over the bad spots and to keep his barrels full—tie yourself for the duration of “prosperity” and recession setting in already. It’s not too late again to join the I.W.W.—we’ve got to get some biscuits for the unemployed and hang the cost on the boss who made them that way.

If we slam the door on Mme. Magda de Fontages on the strength of moral turpitude we may as well have the WPA or the IWW build Devils Islands fur our social register (not counting Hollywood). What did madam do? I ask you, fellow workers, what did Miss de Fontages do?
Ah, she shot an old meddlesome fossil over in Europe—good marksmanship too; winged him with just one bullet and that is why immigration started looking up precedents—and to think La Belle France was on the verge of handing bar a Croix De Guerre, what ever that means, and send her into the Foreign Legion. (I believe she did go over to Spain and win a few battles). But she says, “No, sires and fellow franz, I will go to ze French Casino in New York City,” It’s a good thing D. C. Murray, lawyer de luxe, is alive and in good voice—he could see without squinting that shooting a Frenchman and moral turpitude doesn’t come under the sae head.
Welcome, Miss Fontages, but don’t shoot any of our leading citizens (they ain’t bright) and stay away from Washington (they tell me temptation there is great). Come up and see me some time (I’m on a coal barge), but leave the gun in the Casino on account of the Sullivan law which forbids beautiful women the wearing of firearms on their garters—not that I’m afraid.
	
I’d be ashamed to be anything other than radical. A person that claims that he is not a radical affirms thereby that he has not all his marbles. No other evidence is required.
