﻿Heroes, Pick Your Boneyard Before You Go 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
The great trouble with college education is it takes four or five years to matriculate (to graduate)—the goatskin should be gotten in four or five days. Work Peoples College, Duluth, Minn., agrees to make a man of you in three months. 
IWW 
Industrial Worker lost its temper last week and used very violent language: “alMUaZemfweytao etas tao taoi aoi.” 
Was it Halifax or Goebbels? 

There can be no peace so long as the neighbor has our lawnmower, even if we swiped the lawnmower in the first place. 

The working class and the employing class have nothing coming. 
They must step out and fetch it. 

All war news is cleaned and pressed. When the censer is on, it is everything but the unvarnished truth. Believe, but knock on wood and keep the tongue in the cheek. 
Believe no admiral under any circumstances. Seafaring usage demands that sailors be able-bodied liars. 
When censorship is on, news has no value whatsoever. 
War will not settle any economic question to the satisfaction of anybody, including diplomats and politicians. The trouble is internal, not external. 
Hero’s Horoscope 
The employing class “over there” is no less adept at skinning the working class than are our own scalpers. During the period when business here was being “oppressed” by Roosevelt administration, billion dollar corporations doubled their number. This while people were joyously marching to the poorhouse, social security board, home relief, unemployment relief, and municipal stew pots. 
Mistake ye not, then, exploiters of labor have plenty of shekels to start and carry on war and to liquidate our chances for old-age pensions. A more polite way’ to put it is: 
We get nothing from them except by our own power, regardless of the state of the almanac or age. But without One Big Union we are merely a social security number, a ward of a benign government. (Mostly millionaires, they get theirs by being a “workers’ friend” and helper.) 
I understand social security statistics will be used as a pattern for draft purposes but that doesn’t mean that the old-age pension on its own account was a bait. It means that if you are drafted and dressed up, you stand a good chance of not being Present to answer the roll-call when the aged stretch out their hands to accept of the munificence of a grateful country—weighted down with metals enough to inaugurate a first class junk yard. 
But when you come back home packed in a wooden box like Gorton’s codfish, your beloved sister will gaze down at you, tears streaming down her brasserie, she will forgive you all your past sins, blow her nose, and march off to get a bucket of suds. 
Where do you want to be buried? In Arlington or a less orthodox boneyard? Tell me now before you start. 
I myself expect to be drafted as an oracle for the broken-down WPA’s. 
Delayed by the Censor 
The SS Bremen was given an extra double inspection in New York harbor, no doubt to allay our national jitters or to give vent to our yen for the histrionic; but dock wallopers, who are well versed in such matters, aver that “it was believed by responsible authority that Herr Hitler was hiding in the bilge or scuppers.” 
Anyhow it’s a laugh and should help the World Fair attendance and the United Slates Government will not have to pony up the difference between a sizzle and a fizzle. 
Economic Foresight 
New York Telephone Co. (Bell) has not seen fit to install a telephone pay-booth on 96th St., East River “Light Stakes.’ It is a busy terminal and these shekels are lost to the Bell Telephone forever. 
There are those who say that the “profits of the Bell Telephone are so great that they dare not add additional income.” 
I am glad! I thought all along that it was lack of enterprise. 
Bless their hearts! I know just how it feels when the money rolls in too fast. People have gone mad over it. 
Also for the lack of it. 
Hitlerism Wins 
Dictatorship for England was ordered by Parliament for one year—it may be a long year—and thus democracy is effectively muzzled and hog-tied. 
Recently it was given out that “Britain conscripts wealth,” that the employing class lost their minds and are going to conscript their “own” money. 
They expect us to believe it. It also relieves the mind of those whose life has been conscripted. 
Imperialism 
Forty million Englishmen rule 400 million subjects with the aid of gun, sword, and soft soap. By the same token 60 million Frenchmen rule 200 million subjects, the agent here again is gun, sword, and soft soap—force. 
Some empires, hey? 
Twenty years ago we went over there to help them maintain their clutch on those empires—and they haven’t paid us yet. We’d be ashamed to take the money. We did it in the name of God, Country, and Democracy—for theree was no civilization then, or now. 
Non-existing civilisation cannot be hurt. 
“Go and play just as much as you please, but stay in your own back yard.” 
If they will not protect democracy at home, there isn’t much chance that they will go and fight for it in other lands. 
Poland is a competitor nation and the fundamental rule of business is to put the other business out of business. Still they swear by competition.  
What is happening in Europe is not a class struggle. It is one business man against another—purely a commercial undertaking. 
Even so as an employer is a competitor for the profit in workers’ production, and even as he tries to put labor out of commission by installing improved machinery, just so´competitor nations try to eliminate other competitors by installing bigger and better guns, better gas and better airplanes. It is not more vicious than the simple employer habit of shooting down workers at a factory gate. It is competition, capitalism in full flower. 
If they will not organize industrially in their own lands, how can you expect them to be class conscious internationally?