﻿Workers Can Learn Art of Better Living 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
Some sarcastic sovereign citizens insinuate “we are Great Britain’s waterboy”––a regular “fetch and carry Harry.” 
We? Us bluebellied Yankees? By the horns of Admiral Evans and General Thomas––we who single-handed took possession of the canal in Southampton, we who saved the beachcombers with our delectable American soup and petrified boloney? 

It’s true the ruling class are gamblers but they will not risk all their weath, only the winnings. They will still be buying after the war, or after the escape. They are willing, however, to shoot the works for the hoe polloi. 

If Japan has not already secured its essential war materials from the United States in sufficient quantities to outlast a ten-year war, then I am stone blind. Why feed us that taffy of embargo and handle both ends of the conversation? 

I don’t believe there is necessity for a news censor. Editors have been very careful not to let any news get into the papers. 
Censor would be like gold-painting a gilded gladiolus––and we would look foolish to the neighbors, slapping whitewash on ivory towers. 
Would that censorship include our British owned mental-diet, or would it be just to curb the independent American press? Who knows? 
(Say, linotyper, you can let that hyphenated word go as “mental-dirt”; you had Sparrows Point “Sparrows Joint” in a late issue.) 

They tell us that if we don’t want to get into war, now is the time to vibrate our whiskers in protest. 
By the beard of Allah and Manitou’s soupstrainers! One thing I don’t like about war––the engaged powers lose all sense of dignity and reveal that the “last one we took on the chin was only a glancing blow and no teeth are missing.” That’s bad policy. Sorrowing people will enlarge upon the admission and say: “I see where Johnny Bull swallowed another mouthful of molars”; and so it goes for Adolf, too; and we read “Arson raid on Berlin made Heine camp in a snowdrift.” 
Admit nothing. People, of course, like to read about a good scrap and the attendant transfiguration––they should not be accommodated; they love to hear good lies––they should not be satisfied. Let them invent their own lies. 

“The trained chichanery of Europe and Eat.”––So that’s what it is, is it, a sort of chicanery in every pot?  
No nation has ever been destroyed until it had permitted special privliege to destroy it. Chicanery and bloodshed to rescue civilization? 
“We must have an aim for whose sake we are dear to one another.”––Nietzche. 
“Our children will be less ready to blow up the world if they have a bit of under their feet.”––Will Durant. 
Get some dirt under those kids’ feet; that is the question. 

Do you favor “love for Margie short of marriage,” Bill? 
Bill: Yes, I favor unloading all our sourpusses on Britain for fun, money, or marbles. 

Sending our capital into foreign lands, and admission of foreign capital into our land, landed our nation onto the horns of a dilemma. Purges are in operation in several lands, but we seem to enjoy our foreign task-masters. Our elected officials jump every time they crook a finger. 
I see before me a war for economic independence. Strange cooks spoil the stew. 
Concentration of foreign investments we are in progress in several lands and we may yet see the day when confiscation and repudiation is our only salvation. Our industrial life is sabotaged from top to bottom and extinction. The polite way would have been to import only labor, skin them, and bury the unpaid labor under a soul appletree. Unpaid labor, capital and savings are synonomous.  

“American women put $400,000,000 worth of cosmetics on their face in 1938.” (I was staggered. I didn’t know they were so homely.). “Fifty-two thousand tons of cleansing cream (five shiploads), 27,000 tons of skin lotion, 20,000 tons of complexion soap.” James, hand me the strychnine!  
March-song, “American the Beautiful,” has one good strain, the last––like pie after hash. The other strains probably refer to torn pavements, dilapidated dwellings and unemployed army––and pro-foreign loyalties. Our songs better be better! 

A dog can be trained to play with a rubber rat in the house and when he gets outside he plays with tin cans until he is bleeding at the mouth like a soldier returning from the defense of democracy, or whatever he happened to be defending. 
That is the power of education! 
Work Peoples College can even teach you to eat planked steaks and pork tenderloins. Of course, it is late to start for Duluth this semester, and I guess we will just have to keep on masticating hamburger and hot dogs this coming summer; but next winter, ah! we will take a post-graduate course in the art of devouring the better things of life.