The incredibly strange referrers who stopped living and became mixed-up zombie-blogs.
So I’ve been getting these weird pings over at City of Roses. A blog of nothing but airplane news. A blog of LA news. Technical something-or-other blogging. —They’re each of them nothing but simple links with a brief summary scraped off a newsfeed, each laid out differently, each with a not-entirely-random, vaguely evocative name. Each of them linking, under “Referrers” or “Incoming links,” www.thecityofroses.com, along with a bunch of other sites, with almost nothing in common except—like City of Roses—they don’t actually have a link to the blog in question.
And each of them has, at the bottom of the page, the following code:
“Zombieblog.com,” of course, being the URL of the blog in question.
Sebbo did the detective work. —Me, I’m puzzled, too. I’m not seeing how this is driving traffic to “adult-webcam”; certainly not enough to justify the effort that went into setting up these templates and newsfeeds.
Anyone?
I have no response to that.
What’s Happening on Sunday, November 16, 2003?
First Lady Laura Bush is in Dallas, TX where she will tour the Nasher Sculpture Center. Following the tour, Mrs. Bush will participate in a media availability at the museum.
A media availability?
A media availability?
She will participate in a media availability?
...I got nothin.’ Let’s just note it without comment and move on, shall we?
The word of the day.
We never had to stand in line or bribe a bouncer to get in; we just went for drinks one night after somebody quit a job somewhere, and I had a birthday dinner there once—good enough food, good infused vodkas (I won’t back down on the whole ice-cold gin and a whisper of vermouth thing, but I will allow that cucumber-infused vodka-based martini-like drinks leave this world a better place than the one they come into), good music, great people-watching, for those into the vanity-thy-name-is-unintentional-comedy school of human nature. —And I love the logo: the melting ice cube. Genius. But I never knew that “saucebox” was a slang term meaning “one who is obnoxiously self-assertive and arrogant.”
My night is made. Early morning? Whatever.
It keeps getting vaster every time I see it—
Via The Minor Fall, the Major Lift: Hal Boedekker offers up 25 helpful hints to get you through those four hours a day (on average). —Oh, go on. You might learn something.
Dennis Miller: Tax and spend liberal!
In a surprise move guaranteed to confound those who’d counted on Dennis Miller’s acerbic wit to lend a certain cultural legitimacy to the Bush administration and its lack of a popular mandate, the former SNL anchorman recently spoke in favor of not just rolling back the Bush tax cuts, but raising taxes—across the board.
In the course of a broader discussion of his politics, Miller said “he’d like to keep a dollar out of every two he makes.”
This would, of course, translate to a tax rate of 50%. The highest federal tax rate at the moment is 35%. American families near the median of income distribution currently pay one dollar in taxes for every four dollars they make.
Though it would mean an increase in taxes for almost every single American, the Miller Tax of 50% could easily raise enough money to eradicate budget deficits currently plaguing state governments, as well as address the structural deficits built into future federal budgets. It would also go a long way towards fully funding such underperforming Bush administration programs as No Child Left Behind, Americorps, the Department of Homeland Security, and the War on Terror, as well as help assuage fears of looming crises in Social Security and Medicare—yet it would be a far cry from the 1950s top tax rate of 94%.
But a tax increase of this magnitude would work against the avowed goals of many of Miller’s newfound allies on the right, such as Grover “Drown it in a Bathtub” Norquist, who has compared progressive taxation to the Holocaust. Still, the Miller Tax is a flat tax, and so would presumably avoid that particular criticism.
As of this writing, Mallard Fillmore could not be reached for comment.
So we finally got around to seeing Gladiator.
Pretty much only because Bill Mudron dummied up a fun little soundtrack for his forthcoming Pan, stringing together orchestral cues from a couple of big-budget extravaganzæ and apropos pop songs as a way of sketching out the structure of the thing, and Jenn and I were pretty sure the lion’s share came from Pirates of the Caribbean, only it turns out most of them came from Gladiator, and thereby might hang a fun little essay comparing the rigid adherence to genre conventions of big-budget soundtracks with that of, say, superhero comic books, but instead I’ll just remind you of the ad campaign for the movie—that tag line, remember? Floating in oh-so-Roman Trajan allcaps with dignified slow dissolves over shots of Russell Crowe almost getting mauled by a matted tiger? That got parodied for a few weeks by everybody and his brother for a couple of weeks there at the end of 2000? “The general… who became a slave… the slave… who became a gladiator… the gladiator… who defied an emperor…” —That tag line, right?
I had no idea the lazy ad-copy hacks were quoting the frickin’ script.
Oh, wait: one more comment, and then I’m outta here: it’s a profound mark of something-or-other that snarky comparisons of our 43rd president to Joaquin Phoenix’s truculent Caliguloid, Commodus, did not become common satirical currency. —What happened, you mooks?
Stable’s gettin’ kinda full, ain’t it?
As Horsemen go, it’s a small one, but a tinny echo of the Last Trump blatted through my bus this morning. —I’m sitting there puzzling out a bit of dialogue when some strap-hanger clinging behind me gets into it with an underling on his cell phone. I missed the particulars, but then he got agitated: “Yeah, well,” he says, “hurry it up! You’re late as it is.” And then he’s listening to whatever the underling is saying about how my car won’t start or the bus blew me off or the idiot at Kinko’s used the wrong foam-core or what am I supposed to do about how IT misunderstood the email and rebuilt the database for Lotus and I can’t get anybody to tell me where the backup tapes are or maybe my cat that’s been the family companion for fourteen happy years is walking funny and leaking something and I can’t put off taking her to the vet it would kill my kids, I’ve just got to fix this one little thing, that’s all, and then I can, and in the middle of it all this guy snaps with no hint whatsoever of self-consciousness: “There is no I in team.” And then he slaps his phone shut and shoves it in a pocket.
Ah, well. At least I got to snicker to myself at how his utter lack of irony made the whole thing rather ironic.
(Confidential to, oh, just about everyone: yes, there’s been a dearth of posts and less back-and-forth than usual and missed emails and I’m really sorry I didn’t get around to installing MT-Blacklist until last night, Barry, but I’m glad it’s going gangbusters for you now. —There’s been stuff. In the interests of reducing my workload, then, I’ll mention that I want to do something with the stuff dredged up by Jeremy’s meanderings, prompted by the infamous Messr. du Toit: the short answer, Mr. Pinkham, is you’re wrong, but. The problem being I’m finding it really hard to pontificate breezily on pop culture without access to what passes for it on the cable channels, and I’m not about to let that beast back into my house for nothing more than a blog entry, and yeah, world’s smallest violin, cry me a fuckin’ river, suck it up, close your eyes and think of the children, what would your mother say, and anyway, you see an I in this team, shithead?
(In the meanwhile, a non sequitur: Mark Lakeman!)
Our new interviewing technique is unstoppable.
Ever wanted to ask David Rees a question? You know, the guy who does Get Your War On? (Among other things.) Comixpedia’s giving you the chance. Get in there and make it a good’un.
Balls out.
Most of what passes for conventional wisdom on gender roles in this day and age, whether it’s differently feministed essentialism (“Dragging our scrotums through the underbrush,” says Utah, and I giggle every time. “We’d swing in the trees, and steal sheep”) or prim and proper Puritans, who insist gender is as immutable as sex—which is why we must raise our children well, guarding against the depredations of preverts (sic! sic!) who can derail the purity of God’s plan with a chance remark, or an eyebrow wiggle (wait: whether? or?), well, it all makes me think of an old skit from Mad TV from back in as we like to call it the day: Debra Wilson, doing an infomercial parody for Men Are From Mars, Women Are Also From Mars—Just a Different Part, turns to the camera and very earnestly says, “I’ve learned that when my husband says he’d like me to make him a sandwich, what he’s really trying to say is, ‘I’m hungry.’”
All of which is by way of saying to Professor Reynolds and Kim Du Toit: if you can’t stick your balls to the wall with the panache of a Dave Sim, well, hell. Don’t bother getting out of bed.
(Why, yes. There is a surfeit of bitter irony dripping from the undercarriage of that sentence. —I’m piggybacking off Roy Edroso yet again; I had to add value somehow.)
Smoking guns at Sylvia Beach.
We’re at the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast. Yeah, if you’re ever here, you’re going to want to stay here; it’s cool. It’s great. Go read up on it if you like. That’s not what’s important here.
Up on the third floor, in the library, among all the other magazines and books lying about, was an old Time magazine with Colin Powell on the cover. “Where have you gone, Colin Powell?” it says, on the cover. “The Secretary of State isn’t the foreign policy general everyone thought he’d be. What’s holding him back?” Up in the corner: “Colleges of the year.” And you flip through this magazine, and it’s weird: it’s from another world. They’re talking about Aaliyah’s plane crash and Laura Bush’s book club and China’s pandas; they’re worried about that JC Penney ad where the mom tugs down her daughter’s midriff-baring jeans; and yes, they’re talking about whether Israel has the right to assassinate leaders of the Palestinian Intifadeh and the misrepresentations behind Bush’s hypocritical stem cell policy, but they’re also talking about that 14-year-old ringer who pitched in the Little League; they’re talking about Ritalin ads and the Queen of Sheba and Jonathan Franzen and South American 20th century abstractionists and Band of Brothers and how to stop pop-up ads.
What they aren’t talking about is Iraq. What they aren’t talking about is Afghanistan. What they aren’t talking about is the Taliban and Al Qaeda. What they aren’t talking about is terrorism.
The date on the cover is September 10, 2001.
Oh, but wait: they do mention Iraq. In the profile on Colin Powell, when Johanna McGeary is talking about how Powell got “‘blown off course’ by Bush’s basic principle of anything-but-Clinton,” just before they hare off into how Powell’s sensible plan for North Korea was scuttled by a Bush Administration petulant over the plan’s Clintonianness, above a Rogue’s Gallery of neocons, the “group of true believers in missile defense” who help keep Powell stuck in a box—Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle, with his house in Provence; Paul Wolfowitz; John Bolton; Lewis “Scooter” Libby—there’s a bit on how the relatively new Administration is dealing with Iraq. Allow me to quote at some little length:
When the Secretary jumped out front on Iraq, pushing to “toughen” crumbling UN sanctions against old nemesis Saddam Hussein by making them “smarter,” conservatives scoffed that meant weaker. But Powell persuaded the President—because, say aides and rivals alike, he’s very effective when he “marshalls his facts.” The Administration—and Powell—was embarrassed later, when Russia rebuffed the plan.
And as soon as Wolfowitz, a zealous advocate of “regime change” in Baghdad—backing dissidents to overthrow Saddam—settled into his office, he told European parliamentarians that Powell was not the last word on sanctions or Iraq policy. Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam unhorsed, says an official at State. “But you need a serious plan that’s doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk.” Powell’s unwillingness to fight any less-than-total war is legendary, and the particulars of launching a covert insurgency among the feuding Iraqi opposition factions would give any general pause. The proposition is still “hypothetical,” he told Time. But plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.
So right now I feel a little sick and I’m going to close this file and put it away and open it later when I have a hook-up and can drum up some links to flesh this out. But right now I don’t even feel angry, and I’m not even surprised. The day before the towers fell, and terrorism became job one and missile defense took a back burner, and it’s clear as day we’re going to be making more of Iraq before the next election. Nothing changed the day after this magazine came out, for all that it’s from another world. We just got an excuse. We got our motivation. We got a backstory we could mumble to ourselves before we got into character.
And it’s not like this is something I suddenly learned or anything, and I hardly imagine it’s news to you. They’ve been gunning for Iraq since the late ’90s, after all. Why else do you think Rumsfeld scribbled “Judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not” while the Pentagon still smoldered?
It’s just that it’s still startling to see it all laid out so neatly and cleanly: a story so blatantly in violation of what’s supposed to be true in the pages of a popular news magazine, where just about anyone could stumble over it. Except it’s from another world: one just over two years old, and already just about lost over the event horizon of the memory hole. —It’s fitting, I suppose, that the lies we continue to tell ourselves are this naked and this easily pierced, this easily ripped away. (These lies are shredded every day, after all. The mediascape is littered with so many smoking guns that we can’t make them out for the smog.) —What we’ve done and what we’re still doing is so awful, so misguided, so monumentally stupid, that the arrancy of the nonsense we choose to believe is a sign of the lengths to which we’ll go to avoid seeing the truth.
No, I’m Atrios!
I think Billmon has the best possible response to the most recent round of I’m-gonna-tell! crap foisted on us all by a right-wing loser. (Link to him? I’m not even going to dignify his name.)
Climbing up and climbing down.
Post in haste, repent in leisure; get blind drunk on righteous invective and climb up on the bar and spill your fury till the the dudgeon’s knee-high and rising, then wake up the next morning and wonder who the strange fellow is in your bed, and what foul taste is in your mouth. —Always check your fellow pitchforkers and torch-wielders: not because it’s unseemly to find yourself chanting slogans with the “wrong” crowd, but because it’ll help you get some perspective on the nature of the monster you’re gunning up against. When I read—
About a year-and-a-half ago, people in the intelligence community came and said-guys like Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian and other terrorists weren’t being touched because they’d been ordered not to investigate the cases, not to prosecute them, because there were being funded by the Saudis and a political decision was being made at the highest levels, don’t do anything that would embarrass the Saudi government.
—I immediately started thinking about stonewalling 9/11 investigations and flying Bin Ladens around the country and the Carlyle Group and I went off the deep end. What I should have been thinking about was Alamoudi and al-Arian and the USA PATRIOT Act, and what I’d be saying if it weren’t Grover “drown it in the bathtub” Norquist in the hot seat.
Yes, it’s an ugly mess. Neither Alamoudi nor al-Arian are sacrificial lambs to bigotry and religious intolerance—but neither can I chuck them as evil evil bad bad traitors and throw away the key. Claims of moral clarity are always suspect. Nothing is ever clearly cut. Alamoudi could be a callow opportunist, and al-Arian a naïve fool; treason is a serious charge, and what it’s said they’ve done is no more in the name of destroying America than it is in the name of justice and liberty or a fast buck or self-aggrandizement. Let’s face it: the American government such as it is currently has a certain tarnish about its credibility when it comes to making these claims. There is doubt, and Alamoudi and al-Arian deserve the benefit of it. —And Grover Norquist could as easily and as genuinely believe that government has no business condemning a person for their associations and affiliations, and he could as earnestly and honestly believe that supporting these men was (and perhaps still is) a good way to get to the better America and the better world he sees when he closes his eyes. “In any case,” says Joshua Micah Marshall of Norquist, “after 9/11 came along he probably realized that he might have gotten tied up with at least a few questionable characters. But he was too proud to admit he’d been naïve and then just dug himself deeper,” and Lord knows if you have to listen to him or me on something like this, please, please listen to him.
We are all hypocrites, we all do monumentally stupid things for reasons the angels could not assail. Treason is a serious charge. There’s doubt, and, God help me, much as I loathe and despise Grover Norquist and all things Norquististic, he deserves the benefit of it. I can’t in good conscience call him a traitor, not literally, not by the book of Article III, Section 3. (The devil on my shoulder whispers in my ear, “Not yet,” but we shall ignore it.) —And since naïvete and foolish pride isn’t illegal; since insisting on the moral equivalence of progressive taxation and genocide isn’t against the law; since it isn’t a crime to take cheap shots at people with more moral courage than you will ever know, well: I’m thinking maybe I should dial down the let-him-rot-in-jail rhetoric. (“For the moment,” sneers the devil. —It remains to be seen, after all. In the final analysis.)
(Do I still want the head of Grover Norquist? Geeze, I dunno. What the fuck would I do with it?)
But! I am not climbing down from the rooftops yet. His work as a tax “reformer” is morally hollow. What he’s wrought with his misguided, solipsistic, beast-starving rhetoric is a blight on our country and its political landscape; it’s a deadly threat to everything I hold dear. I’m still serious about the frogmarching and the pelting with garbage and the tar and the feathers and the riding him out of town on a rail.
Next Thursday good for you?
Shipbreaking.
The most recent edition of Granta has an arresting cover, one which takes some close examination before you’re convinced: no, that isn’t a false color trick, a Photoshop filter effect, an art director’s whim. (At least, not much.) Those are nickel tailings—waste material from the mining industry: “As ore bodies are extracted the valuable mineral is surrounded by gangue (uneconomic material) that needs to be separated in a concentrating process. Crushing and grinding methods are used to reduce the mined ore to sand and silt sizes, and then the concentrating process can begin. The most common technique used today is ‘flotation’ which has been used to separate minerals since the early 1920s. The process treats the ground ore in a bubbling mixture of water and chemical constituents which the sort metallic minerals stick to and rise to the surface of the flotation tank.” —The river really is that ghastly, gorgeous color. (Just about.)
The photo’s the work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian photographer who specializes in industrial landscapes—“the industrial sublime,” he says. The brief article by Noah Richler introducing his gallery inside opens like this:
In 2001, I travelled with Edward Burtynsky to the beaches of Chittagong, in Bangladesh, where many of the world’s old freighters go to die.
He’s talking about shipbreaking.
On his first trip, briefer than he would have liked, he had photographed the Bangladeshi workers cutting up the ships, some as large as 60,000 tons, with little more than hammers, and acetylene torches—remarkable, Lilliputian, work.
I didn’t know shipbreaking existed until I read this introduction. I know a little more, now: the appalling labor conditions, the sheet metal dorms scavenged from ship parts, the constant din, the fumes and chemicals, the waste, the miles of beach churned into sludge. That it will affect England perhaps not as much as it affects India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Viet Nam and China, but still: $17 million to scrap 13 US Navy ships, a bid that undercut American firms despite the expense of towing them across the Atlantic (and the legal battles to determine their seaworthiness). That the second-largest ship ever built, the Sea Giant, 10 storeys high, longer than an Eiffel Tower is tall, was just run aground on the shipbreaking “yards” of Gadani to be whittled by hand into scrap. That the ILO is doing what it can to promote guideines for responsible ship-dismantling, but.
I live in a working port city; there’s four very active terminals loading timber and grain and unloading cars and electronics even as I sit here typing. There’s been some industry up and down the river along the way, and ship construction and ship repair, but nothing so appallingly messy as whittling a disused oil tanker down to scrap by hand. Nonetheless, in December of 2000, the Willamette River was designated a Superfund site.
As he worked with his camera in Chittagong, a line of shipbreaking workers walked past us barefoot in the oily muck. Burtynsky pointed out that the beach was rife with toxic waste.
Just about every day bussing over this bridge or that I can look out and see one of these monster freighters, so big that the crew keeps bicycles to ride from stem to stern. From all over the word, and in every sort of condition. I might give them a second thought from time to time; they’re big, and there’s enough of the kid left in me to marvel at their size, and wonder what it’s like to drive one of those things across the ocean.
Now I know where they go to die, and how.
Isn’t the internet wonderful?
Bring me the head of Grover Norquist.
And I’m not too picky about whether the body’s attached.
We already knew he was a menace. This smirking, smooth-talking moral vacuum, this avaricious monster who masks his pathological greed as a pathological hatred of anything smacking of “gummint,” this peddler of shopworn lies who wants us all to believe that government is Something Else, some Other outside our control, that civic life and civic duty are beyond us, who wants us to think we are disempowered so that we will join him in smashing the very hallowed institutions that have empowered us all for centuries. This thug who hates anything and everything that looks like the America we know and love. This walking Enclosure Act, whose shit-smeared grin reeks with the tragedy of the commons. This parasite, whose glossy coat depends on the hatred he can churn up against people much better than himself. This nasty, hollow wretch who has forgotten if he ever knew what government is for, who actively works to prevent others from leaving this world a better place than they found it.
This traitor.
And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I don’t mean it in the sense that he stands against everything I want this country to be—though he does. I mean it quite literally. I mean it in a Section 3 of Article III of the United States Constitution kind of way. If what John Loftus alleges is true, Grover Norquist has levied war against us. He has adhered to our enemies. He has given them aid and comfort.
He is a traitor.
We know why the mindless school of piranhas currently passing for the right wing in this country plays the game they do. In pressing for impeachment of a Democratic president on laughably flimsy—on insultingly hypocritical grounds, they have made that tool much harder to use, raised the bar necessary to clear before we will undergo that grinding process. In heightening the contradictions of our public discourse, flinging “treason” and “traitor” around with appalling carelessness, they have weakened those words, cheapened them, removed the teeth and claws we need to rip this rot out of our lives. “Oh, it’s just more partisan bickering,” the chattering classes will chatter. “He said, he said. On the other hand. In the balance. It remains to be seen.” And we will push against this apathy, and maybe something will happen, eventually. Maybe he’ll stay where he is, muddied but unbowed. Maybe he’ll resign and take up a less-visible post in a think-tank. Maybe he’ll run away to fight another day, maybe he’ll take up running state-wide initiatives to weaken state governments, instead: faux-populist scams designed to siphon off contributions from gullible six-packs while pissing on the foundations of the civic pride he affects to love. Maybe he’ll write a book.
That isn’t good enough. Not for me. Not anymore.
I want Grover Norquist destroyed. I want him smashed like a bowl of eggs. I want his assets frozen as the IRS audits every penny he tried to squirrel away from the greater good. I want the rich clothing stripped from his back, and I want him frogmarched into the town square through a gauntlet of the people whose power he’s leached away, whose lives he’s made that much the worse in countlessly grey little ways, so that they may pelt him with the garbage of their choosing, and then I want him tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail so we can do it all over again. I want him buried up to his neck in the dirt, and I want passersby to be invited to saw at his neck with their W4 forms—their badges of honor as productive, hard-working members of a civil society. I want his face seared into the collective unconscious, so that infants weep at his approach and decent people cry out, “Dear God, what is that thing?” I want him reduced to begging on the street for his bread, so that I can walk up to him and spit in his face and sneer at him to get a job and then hand out twenties to the gutterpunks beside him. I want the name “Norquist” to be as anathematized as “Hitler.” I want his head.
That will do for a start. —After that, I want him in prison. I want him held accountable for his crimes. I want him ground through the soulless, privatized Satanic mills he’s helped make of our penitentiary system with his beast-starving. I want him declared an enemy combatant. I want him pumped full of sodium pentathol so that we can wrench the names of his co-conspirators from his lying tongue. God help me, I want him tortured. I want to know he’s felt one tiny sliver of the pain he’s happily fomented.
I will leave it to better people than I can ever be to forgive him.
Claims of moral clarity are suspect in this world, but here is, at last, a case that’s clearly cut. This—man—is an outlaw. He has no place in decent society. He should be given neither food, nor drink; he should be denied fire and salt. —If there’s evidence disputing these allegations, I’ll entertain it—but if it boils down to merely a rehearsal of extenuating circumstances, of ghastly cynicism masquerading as realpolitik, I will get up from the table and walk away. I will work with anyone who will work to bring him down, in whatever way I can. I will fight anyone who would cover this up or hide it away or ignore it or pretend it is more expedient to work with this putrid blight. We must—we will see the day when this country wakes up from its horrible dream and shudders and asks itself, blearily, over coffee—how could we ever have trusted the word of fools like that?
And God willing, we’ll live on, all of us, to see the day when Grover Norquist’s name is utterly forgotten. When we no longer need him as a bogeyman, as an example of a mean life poorly lived, as a cautionary tale.
But first: bring me his God-damned head. —After that, we can start the long hard work of undoing the damage his ilk has wrought.
Snarking at Lars Von Trier aside.
Maybe it’s my mood and maybe it’s the bourbon, but right here, right now, that particular song called “Unison,” being the last track of Björk’s Vespertine, is without a drunken doubt the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. —Oh, wait: now iTunes has started “Lift Yr. Skinny Fists, Like Antennas to Heaven…” Oh—oh, my—
Another letter to President Hoover.
[Also from Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, edited by Robert S. McElvaine.]
Contractor and Builder Real Estate Insurance Mortgages
Annapolis, Maryland
10 September 1931
My dear Mr. Hoover,
It is my purpose to write you a short letter and to cheer you along with your trying undertakings. During the war I had a brief interview with you when I was fuel administrator at Annapolis, and although I well remember you, yet it may be that I am not even a memory to you. However, I was so favorably impressed that I worked for you when you were elected President, although I appear to have been born a democrat.
In these days of unrest and general dissatisfaction it is absolutely impossible for a man in your position to get a clear and impartial view of the general conditions of things in America today. But, of this fact I am very positive, that there is not five per cent of the poverty, distress, and general unemployment that many of your enemies would have us believe. It is true, that there is much unrest, but this unrest is largely caused,—by the excessive prosperity and general debauchery through which the country has traveled since the period of the war. The result being that in three cases out of four, the unemployed is looking for a very light job at a very heavy pay, and with the privilege of being provided with an automobile if he is required to walk more than four or five blocks a day.
National Relief Director, Walter S. Gifford, and his committee are entirely unnecessary at this time, as it has a tendancy to cause communities to neglect any temporary relief to any of their people, with the thought of passing the burden on to the National Committee. I am also of the opinion that the suggested five billion dollar loan, that the Hearst papers have been agitating, is an impractical, foolish and unnecessary burden and obligation that they would place upon the shoulders of future posterity to pay off.
One of these days, when I am in Washington, I shall hope to greet you in person for two or three minutes, and during the interval believe me to be one of your well wishers in this ocean of conflict.
Yours Sincerely,
WHH
A letter to President Hoover.
A letter to President Hoover.
[From Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, edited by Robert S. McElvaine.]
Vinland, NJ
18 November 1930
. . . Could we not have employment and food to Eat. and this for our Children Why Should we hafto [illegible] now and Have foodless days and [illegible] days. and our children have Schoolless days and Shoeless days and the land full of plenty and Banks bursting with money. Why does Every Thing have Exceptional Value. Except the Human Being—why are we reduced to poverty and starving and anxiety and Sorrow So quickly under your administration as Chief Executor Can not you find a quicker way of Executing us than to Starve us to death. . . . Why not End the Depression have you not a Heart. . . . Yet we are served from the Source of Live by setch an unjust System. . . . Why Isnt there an limitation to you people planning to get It all and Starve the rest of use. . . . Yet you have cut us of with plenty before our eyes—for your Selves. Yet You Can not use It. The people are desperate and this I have written, only typical of the masses of your Subjects. how can we be Law abiding citizens and Educate out children and be Happy Content with nothing to do nothing to Eat. when your System has Every Thing under control and cant use It. nor will you give any thing a way. why take more than you need. why make Laws. and allow Industry to take It all. why Isnt the Law fixed so Its Just as Just for one or the others then Industry couldnt take it all. and make us all victims of your Special arrangement. of things. . . . I am an Ignorant man and you are Supposed to have great Brains yet I appeal to you In behalf of thousands In your dominion who would be good americans Citizins If you would make It Possible. . . .
—Anonymous
