﻿Said A Thief To Catch A Thief: Hire A Lawyer 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
Short Cuts 
Legalism possibly is the worst training for a public servant. 
A lawyer goes by precedent. 
A lawyer always looks backward.  
Lot’s wife looked backward and lookit happened to her. 
She turned into a pillar of salt. 
Lawyers are Lot’s wife. 
Lawyers are the modern pillar of salt. 
Salt in public office serves about as well as a lamppost of ivory statue. 

Legalism is an un-American establishment, a relic of the workless wonders of the past, a form of humor, a public tumor and self-hypnotism to the point of dignity.  
Some labor unions are so intent looking forward, they hire a lawyer to ride the tailboard and do all the looking backward––alright in its conception were it not for the fact the lawyers are a worthless quantity. 
They keep us out of jail? Yes, after they and their kind put us in jeopardy. 
Unions reason that it takes a lawyer to point out the traps lawyers have built. 

When we hear the press beating the tom-toms of modern barbarism and crying at the top of its lungs that a merit system must prevail in the choosing of a supreme judge, that lesser jurists be promoted. Under such a presumption a few false notes appear in the symphony of tom- toms of the press in favor of merit system––for the merit not present. 

Well, Slim, fer cripes sake how would you choose a Supreme judge? 
Blindfold the President and turn him loose in a strange town. First man or woman he grabe is IT. If he grabs a horse, give him another chance. (A horse wouldn’t be so bad at that as long as they put the whole of him there.) Then if he grabs a telephone pole or a mailbox, give him a third term. Keep him grabbing until he brings in one that has two legs in under him, wood, cork or flesh. 

Another man shortened by a head in Germany, Theophil Dzierzawa, for peddling military secrets (excuse given). 
Naive, aren’t they, thinking there are military secrets? 
Any munition manufacturer can recite military secrets by the hours and you can name the country. (So long as industry is in private hands there are no military secrets.) 

Amile of Wisconsin is supposed to have said, “Capitalistic system cannot be saved and is not worth saving nohow.” 
All he can be accused of is “telling the truth too frankly––and bluntly, too.” 
Still and all it amounts to “practical” disloyalty to the economic royalists, when all they want is “breathe a spell, a place in the sun and hand in our pocket.” 
Never catch me so brutally truthful as Rep. Amilie––even if a locomotive commits suicide from a high trestle and is smashed to smithereens, its boiler busted and its bassoon bent, its very lifeblood sinking into the sands of time. I put on my “four bit” specs, hitch my trousers, patches and all, and say: 
“Good as new, Chief. Just jack up the smokestack and run a new engine under it––and be sure to rescue the oil can.” 

But to come right out and say, “the parasite system isn’t working, never has worked and by all the laws of common sense should not be permitted to work, now or ever, is altogether a frankness that may well mean. “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,” to quote Homerists of the past. 
Never is a herring so rotten it cannot be saved––’twill make good fertilizer. 

It is a grave error to say “parasite system never did work.” It worked so long as there was anything in our pocket. Its theme song is “Empty the worker’s pocket.” To the tune of “Give and take.”––It will work again as soon as we get something in our pocket. 
The question is then, have we got the get up to git the financial fodder for our announced economic rulers? If not, pull the pockets inside out or abolish the trousers. 

“Italy violates pact of peace,55 British claim. 
Hm! Send some more unemployed, dressed as soldiers, to Lybia––I wonder? 
Resourceful Benito! Here in this country we send them in rags to WPA, pray for the best and mourn the Pope.