©"Don't Let Your Emotions Rule!" by Jack Ragsdale

Nothing has so galled the American public as the bailout. It was put into effect by President Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson under
emergency circumstances. Mr. Paulson perceived an “about to happen credit shutdown” that would have sent our economy into a collapse difficult to revive. The new Obama administration embraced the same policy and billions were doled out to those who had brought our economy to the brink. They received our money as anyone of our billionaire financial elite would have—with a gigantic yawn. “It’s a great bother but we’ll do you the favor.”

Assets in the billions allow our wealthiest to wait out any depression of any length as was indicated by their survival of the 1929-1939 debacle: entirely without inconvenience. As thousands of businesses went bankrupt, millions of citizens—without work or income, suffered privation, hunger and cold. Fifteen years old then , I personally experienced those times that scarred my youth.

Be informed, the decision to risk lending that money, was an alternative—followed up by the government’s threat not to allow the economy’s shut-down. And a firm decision to force money on lenders, with marching orders to LEND under threat that the government would take over and run the banks. It was a dire alternative for everyone that drew screams of SOCIALISM from those who had so recently abused the nation’s economy.

Without the money, banks would have sat on their money, waiting for assurance that it was safe to lend—for whatever time it might take for that to happen: one year, perhaps, or ten. Meantime, all business would have slowed to a halt. That was the scenario of the Depression of 1929 which lasted until the beginning of World War Two—in 1939 when American business began to thrive on orders of the British government. Britain still had money—barely enough to start the process. Later our fear of a Hitler, in control of world-wide resources and all of Europe, who might then overrun us “across the pond”, stiffened our resolve to aid Britain and France.

Perceiving an America engaged in Europe, arrogant Japan thought to damage us permanently by their attack on our poorly guarded fleet. This successful, bold act seemed to duplicate Admiral Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in 1898. But Spain was not a modern industrialized nation already in a situation of near collapse. Instead of fear and indecision, we resolved to resist.


THE DEPRESSION of 1929

President Hoover was in the seventh month of his administration when the Stock Market crashed in October. Ferociously conservative with a reputation for the solving problems of whatever magnitude, he took a firm position to keep the government out of this economic occurrence that he claimed would resolve itself automatically—that forces within the system would solve its problems. With statements to that effect restored prosperity was “just around the corner”; that “the nation was economically sound,” this dour man went on with the routine matters of government.

But Capitalism runs on credit—lending institutions with money sat on it in fear that borrowers might not or could not repay. The attitude was—“Let’s just wait and see.” Some folks sought to assure their own security by withdrawing their savings and that weakened banks and lead to more failures. With the slowdown, people were laid off and businesses failed. In full confidence that prosperity was “just around the corner,” the president made statements to that effect and THAT WAS THAT? The problem would solve itself and the president did nothing. People were suffering, but the president was firm in his resolve not to spoil their spirit by coddling a resolute people who were accustomed to self-reliance. Hoover refused to act even in the face of hunger when there was a glut of wheat on the market at cents per bushel.

Mr. Hoover lost his parents at an early age but he worked to study and graduate from Stanford University. An early connection sent him to England for the Bewick Moreing Company and through it he was sent to China to find and evaluate mines. It was in the time of the so-called Boxer Rebellion and in the violence he lost some property for which he put in a claim. Here I am working on my memory so you can check out my evidence. As I recall, Mr. Hoover filed a claim for $40,000 or $50,000 in actual losses. The American commission authorized to review and confirm claims, reduced Hoover’s to $20,000. Mr. Hoover has always been presented to the public as impeccably honorable. Here for me at least, he seems to have been walking on feet of clay.

At the time China was prostrate under control of voracious foreigners: Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and The United States. The “Boxer Rebellion” was not a rebellion at all. It was a protest by patriotic natives against the robbery of their helpless country. Natives were incensed against rapacious foreigners—get-rich-businessmen, well-off missionaries living luxuriously in fine houses—hucksters of every low kind abusing every Christian doctrine of honor and decency. It may also interest you that Henry Luce’s parents were amongenry the endangered. They escaped to Korea.




Mr. Hoover also worked as mine manager in Australia. The miners had gone on strike against low pay and cruel conditions and it became Mr. Hoover’s task to break the strike. He did so with the aid of the Australian government by importing workers from the Balkans—a tactic used by American mines and smelters—a pattern of unabashed contempt for the rights of working people.

For the balance of Mr. Hoover’s administration of three years and four months it can be said without fear of contradiction that he did nothing to relieve the intense pain and privation of the suffering masses, the millions who could find no work at any wage. Only too often I have told you of the hundred lost souls who gathered daily in the AB&C RR yards where I worked for two summers cleaning cars to haul watermelons, to steal a ride south in the open box cars. They were of the hundreds of thousands in the nation who sought any work that way.

Mr. Hoover was not unique in turning a blind eye to reality, “he set himself firmly against all proposals for federal relief. A federal dole would involve huge appropriations which would unbalance the budget, and thus jeopardize the national credit, he thought. It would invite reckless spending on ‘pork barrel’ projects. Most important, federal relief projects, Hoover argued, would destroy the character of the recipients….” In the midst of this planned inactivity, it was discovered that J. P. Morgan and nineteen of his partners had paid no income taxes for 1931 and 1932.

“Businessmen, especially, bankers, demanded a ruthless deflation” “The depression revived an emphasis on Puritan virtues which the 1920s had rejected and bankers linked their insistence on deflation to Calvinist Morality. President John E. Edgerton told the National Association of Manufacturers, in the autumn of 1930 that it was important to make people understand that the suffering of the unemployed was not the product of an economic breakdown but was the direct result of their moral infirmity.”

“The financial community purported to see the depression as a blessed occurrence which would improve the national character by chastening the spirit. The crash, announced the leading banking periodical, ‘should be highly beneficial.’” p250
Quotations taken from “The Perils of Prosperity” W. E. Leuchtenburg

Kenya II ©by Jack Ragsdale

Back in September I told you how, in 1895, Britain’s Liberal Prime Minister Lord Rosebery decided to develop both Kenya and Uganda’s potential as substantial sources of products both vegetative and mineral for British commerce. Here is an extension of that tale.

At the time, 1895, Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency with the Marquess of Queensberry’s youngest son was in progress. The marquess also accused Lord Rosebery of carrying on just such an illicit affair with his elder son. He swore to “horsewhip” both men. With publicity of sexual impropriety at a point of saturation, mere mention of the government’s incompetence (they called the Liberals “shambolic”) was sufficient to collapse their government.
The Tories took over the great Mombasa to Lake Victoria railway project, and construction of the 600 mile “Lunatic Line,” was started in 1896.

Through a process euphemistically called pacification, the natives were quieted and moved about so railway building and white settlement on the most desirable land could go forward. The narrow strait separating Mombasa Island from the mainland was bridged and Nairobi, a tiny village three hundred miles inland, became the seat of repair shops, marshalling yards and management offices of the new line.

Anticipating difficulties with a labor force of native Africans, 35,000 Indian coolies and skilled workers were imported to live in tents, hauling up stakes weekly as the juggernaut of railway building advanced at £10,000 per mile. Both the terrain and climate presented engineering difficulties of greatest magnitude, together with debilitating heat, disease and huge physical obstructions. Many rivers had to be bridged and the Great Rift Valley negotiated. In places it falls away into a gully three thousand feet deep. Wild animals which preyed upon ungulates and humans abounded in the land to be crossed. Bold lions soon found tasty humans easier to catch than fleeing antelope. Once a lion’s head lifted up the tent, he was able to snatch a coolie. The victim’s bones were to be found nearby the next morning. A white supervisor fared no better in the supposed safety of his railway car. A lion found his way in and carried away a screaming official. Once, when several men were being eaten each night, all work came to a standstill until some of the predaceous beasts could be killed. More than one hundred men died as victims of lions.

The little river town of Tsavo was the center of this human predation. A professional hunter was brought in and killed the guilty lions—two of which were stuffed and taken to a museum in Chicago. I understand they are still on exhibition there.

The £10,000 per mile cost once threatened to halt the project but the new Conservative Government continued the work and completed the project in five years.

Economically it was essential to have a white population along the rail line to support it. Attempts at recruitment resulted in few settlers and stopped while Britain fought World War I. More serious efforts after the war resulted in some thousands of new settlers. Many of those were former military personnel who came in response to offers of free or very cheap land–always land taken from the natives.
Settlers fell into three classes: Boers, ex-military people and a fairly well-financed, hard partying, vocally assertive elite, most of whom were there previous to the first World War. The war was followed by a short period of high prices and a severe shipping shortage. While the settlers did not become wealthy in this period of hard work and optimism, they got by and looked on their prospects as bright. After 1929, the disastrous drop in prices brought most of the debt-ridden settlers to the brink of ruin. Newly introduced cattle and sheep fell to disease and coffee, sisal and other crops sold at cost or below. It was in these circumstances that my ship, the Chincha arrived in Kenya in October, 1935.

My favorite books of life there were those of two women who experienced and wrote about those hard times. Elspeth Huxley’s “The Flame Trees of Thika” and Karen von Blixen’s “Out of Africa” were two of the best. Huxley’s coffee growing-parents settled there in 1912. Soon swept-up into military action in German-owned Tanganyika, the next colony to the south, her mother is her heroine for her efforts to keep the family afloat, in her kitchen and with the animals she raised in those lean pioneering-times. Once a giant snake invaded their farm and they regularly had nighttime visits from lions after their cattle. Elspeth returned to England for her education and once shared a class with Jomo Kenyatta at the London School of Economics. She married Thomas Huxley’s son and enjoyed a long career as a writer and radio commentator.

Baroness Karen von Blixen, better known as Isak Dinesen, wrote “Out of Africa,” Africa,” the story of her life as manager of a Kenya coffee plantation from 1914 to 1931. In my recollection and understanding, the farm was acquired with capital collected from her friends and relatives in Denmark. Luxuriously, she “roughed it” as might have been expected of someone raised in lavish circumstance—with fine dinners eaten off precious china and epicurean wines drunk from delicate glassware. She married her cousin, a Swedish playboy who infected her with syphilis. Later, she fell in love with a flyer who was killed in an accident. Whether she was ever successful at farming, I do not know but she eventually failed.

For servants, she preferred Somalis and tells the story of one very young kitchen helper who was beaten on her order.
***
Now, at 95, recalling a wasted life, Africa, which I do not know, stands out in vivid memory. I continued in that life for twelve years, but never with the exhilaration I had for that ship and those people: Ed Foley, Blackie Fortier, Oberg, Captain Arthur Lee—even the nervous, hateful Lettish third mate. I can’t forget them.

Kenya, the Colony

You may disagree, but I think myself a poster boy for the Great Depression. I was fifteen when the collapse came—about to be sixteen in a few weeks. I had my first job in January 1930. The American economy and mine continued in an unhappy state until I—we—were rescued by British war orders in the billions of dollars in 1939. I endured the whole damn thing—‘29 to ‘39.

To put a little zing into my life, in September, 1935, I boarded the SS Chincha for two trips—seven months—New York to Mombasa, steering that sturdy freighter seven days, 8 AM to 5:30 PM. When the Bo’sun looked at Ed Foley’s body and then at my skinny frame, he said: “Jack, you go to the bridge.” (We were the two cadets.) For that they paid me a munificent $30 a month. We made every port on the south and east coasts of Africa to Kenya. Whew! What a change! Low on the totem pole as that job was, it changed my life. I hated its limitations but loved the ship.

We visited four ports in the Union of South Africa, then a British Dominion; two in Mozambique, Portuguese since 1500 when Vasco da Gama ousted the Islamo-African trading civilization he found there; Zanzibar, an Omani Sultanate—replete with British advisor in control; Tanganyika, former German colony, British-ruled under a League of Nations mandate and lastly, Kenya, also British.

Africa still fascinates me. As we approached Beira, Captain Arthur Lee asked two Quaker missionary doctors on board to examine my infected foot. They warned that I required an operation immediately. Sans penicillin, I faced blood poisoning and a gangrenous future such as took the lives of sons of President Coolidge and Maine Governor Brewster. I was in the hospital for two days.

The Beira government hospital was a dappled sanctuary of cool. Shaded by tall trees, it was further protected all around from the wicked rays of the tropical sun by a covered and screened veranda. Accompanied by the steamship agent, I hobbled in on the arms of two sixteen year old black boys who met me at the door. They sat me down, undressing me to balls-ass naked, then attired me in hospital-issue pajamas amid a chatter of critical comments I was sure, but could not understand. That afternoon, via chloroform, I was put to sleep by a white Portuguese doctor and half dozen black aides in an operating room no bigger than a modern American apartment’s clothes closet. Next day I was reexamined and went back to the ship. After a couple of day’s rest, I was back at the wheel to the next port.

Mombasa. This beautiful old island town, smallish, fought over for centuries by the Portuguese and Arabs, was owned then by the English. All of the East African coast had experienced Arab trade, incursion and culture since pre-historic times. The language spoken there is Swahili—meaning “of the coast.” Apparently the Arabs never mustered armies great enough to penetrate the continent. Instead they ruled narrow areas of the seacoast and easily protected coastal islands. Zanzibar is such an island, as is Mombasa.

In 1935 the town had a population mix of black Swahili in Arab dress, brown and black Indians clothed in the style of their homeland and white British in theirs. That mix made the place the epitome of exotica for me. On Saturday I wandered the island from the docks at Kilindini where the mainland can be seen across the harbor, to the palm studded beaches and the basin for that most enduring servant of the Indian Ocean, the dhow.

Lolling around there leaning against a stone pillar, I espied two turbaned Arabs of a most unusual complexion. Their skin was a shade of that of the white race—pink—but so burned as to be tinted with brown and burnished red, indicating many hours spent at sea unprotected from the sun’s blistering rays. Their rheumy, sun-damaged eyes seemed at ease in the brilliant light I could barely endure. As they talked, they took pinches of snuff. That midday they stood at leisure in the full sun, seemingly without a thought of shade for which I yearned, even under the thickness of my new pith helmet which I had purchased in Shankar Dass’s store in Dar es Salaam. I moved about only under the impetus of my intense curiosity and my fascination with the scene. The whitewashed red tile-roofed buildings, the sand and water all returned reflections painful to the eyes. Extravagantly beautiful flowers grew everywhere as though strewn about by a fairy's hand. Even the trees bloomed.

Half a dozen dhows were tied up to ancient docks, their cargoes little different from those they carried a thousand years before: dried fish, crudely finished ceramics, salt. At no great distance I watched two half-naked men load a few hundred pounds of cargo into an open vessel. Most of it I could not identify. They hefted heavy burlap bags on to their backs, walked the plank gangway and once positioned, let their burden fall into place on the dhow. Those bags contained some powdery material, as small white puffs of the contents escaped as each bag fell from their shoulders into its niche in the bowels of the vessel. There were also great amber-colored balls of hardened gum, which were dropped on board and rolled into position among the other cargo. This I found to be gum Arabic, which exudes from graceful acacia trees, those beautiful flowering thorn trees which grace African deserts and meadowlands.


That was my introduction to Kenya, British colony. In 1895, the Liberal cabinet of Lord Rosebery decided to maximize the value of Kenya and Uganda to the British Empire. They believed those colonies, particularly the latter, a potential gold mine capable of producing a cornucopia of minerals and agricultural products for British commerce. Since Uganda was six hundred miles from Mombasa, the nearest port, a railway would be necessary. So it was, that construction of “The Lunatic Line” railroad, was started in 1896.

And there, my children, with those thousand words allotted me, I must leave you, as my third grade teacher used to tell us, “my tale to resume one day, if you behave.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Senator Thomas E. Watson of Georgia was one of the strangest political characters that ever graced the American political landscape. In worshipful respect, my uncle Tom Peak had his huge framed picture hanging over his fireplace until the day he died. Watson was a populist who led poor farmers until he found them too backward and ignorant for political activity. He once supported the vote for blacks IN GEORGIA! His newspaper fanned the flames that led to the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. I was then not two years old.

Senator Watson died in 1922 and was succeeded by Rebecca Felton, the first United States woman senator. She served one day and was succeeded by Walter Franklin George. George became one of the great thorns in the side of Franklin Roosevelt for the twelve years they shared government power—Roosevelt progressive president, Senator George—insisting that the clock be stopped NOW, and FOREVER!

George, and Franklin Roosevelt were exact opposites. Roosevelt smiled easily; George, a stiff collared stuffed shirt, had smiled once upon a time but didn’t remember when. He was dignified and serious—never talked nigger-hate, just acted to preserve the status-crow.

Roosevelt had a plan. In its simplest illumination, it was to raise up the hardest corps of downtrodden poor whites and blacks one single notch on the economic scale. Senator George thought those folks were excellent at their social level of the time, scrounging the earth for enough to eat. In his view, all was well.

In 1938, after a dozen congress people had stymied Roosevelt’s efforts to raise the standard of living a single notch, FDR threw caution to the wind. He decided to purge those bastards from the Congress.

In August, after a confab with Mexico’s president, Roosevelt landed his transport, the USS Houston in Pensacola, took a train to his hideaway in Warm Springs for a short rest and moved on the Barnesville, Georgia. There Senator George waited for him to celebrate the opening of one of Roosevelt’s progressive rural electrification projects. On the platform also stood U. S. Attorney Lawrence Camp who had been recruited by the president to run against Senator George in the upcoming election
In his speech, Roosevelt said: “I trust and am confident that Senator George and I shall always be personal friends” well knowing that “the most intractable of white supremacists” had never been his friend and would never be. Unrattled, George took the challenge and predicted a good fight.

Later that same day Roosevelt spoke to the crowd who met the presidential train in Greenville SC which was the district of Congressman Cotton Ed Smith. In opposing FDR, Smith had stated that a man and his family could live on fifty cents a day. FDR used that occasion to tell SC voters what their representative thought of them.

The third of these deadwood congresspersons Roosevelt tried to dump, was from the North—New York State as I recall. All were reelected, remaining in those great meditative bodies to represent reaction and entrenched power—devil take the ignorant electorate.

Are things really all that different today?

END


P.S. I personally remember this presidential fiasco of the late 1930s. My source for the above was: Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black. Mr. Black, scion of a wealthy Canadian family and crackerjack writer, is presently serving a long sentence for financial fraud in United States Federal prison. "

©1929--2008 by Jack Ragsdale

Quotation: “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today [1949] is the real source of the evil.” Albert Einstein (1949)

Who is this cheeky feller who dares to speak so abusively of our socio-economic system? Anarchy indeed! More on that rapscallion later. In America we know that Socialism is a dirty word, but Where goeth Capitalism?

Over the years, predatory Republican-style capitalism has put the United States through the wringer. Cabot Lodge, a master obstructionist and his fellow Republicans in the Senate frustrated Woodrow Wilson in his struggle to advance the cause of world peace by having our country join the League of Nations. Their same obstructive tactics are now being used in an attempt to wreck President Obama’s forceful effort to shorten this depression. Their oft-repeated, insipid complaint, “it won’t work,” coming from men who caused this debacle, is a hollow response to mass unemployment and catastrophic need.

The supposed Magic of Republican capitalism is no longer. Indeed, the high ideals of the founders of the Republican Party barely survived the Lincoln administration. President Grant surrounded himself with crooked businessmen. Republican Presidents McKinley, Harding, Nixon and George W. Bush carried on that tradition of party sleaze and corruption.

Capitalism has a fastidious aversion to regulation. In our societal relationships, be they commercial or human, we adhere to a body of law. At the instance of American business, Congress removed the common sense rules put in place in the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. As a result, the unrestrained financial community became awash in un-saleable junk mortgages and guarantees of entities certain to fail. 2009 became 1929 “all over again.”

In the ‘29 meltdown, Republican President Herbert Hoover stood fast in his determination to do nothing. Capitalism “would cure itself.” In WWI, under President Wilson’s order, Herbert Hoover successfully rescued millions of starving Europeans from wartime famine. In his years as our president, he adamantly refused to act to relieve the distress of his fellow Americans. With the nation’s grain elevators full of wheat for which there were no buyers, Hoover said: “No one has yet starved” but that was not so: “…people in Arkansas rioted, demanding food for their children.” “A mob stormed a grocery store in Oklahoma City, after the mayor rejected their petition for food.” Hoover waited for “market forces” to restore our economy. With enough wheat on hand to feed America’s hungry, Hoover stood fast in his determination to let capitalism work. A year into his presidency, on March 3, 1930, he declared: “All evidences indicate that the worst effects of the crash on employment will have passed during the next sixty days.” That year 1350 banks failed and the next, 2294. Twelve million were unemployed. With silos full of wheat and outside them, an excess of harvested grain rotting on the ground, President Hoover procrastinated: “let the system cull out the losers,” he declared.

These quotations are all taken from Timothy Egan’s book The Worst Hard Time. “On the giddy ride up [to 1929]” he wrote, “there had been no cop, no regulator to enforce the basic rules of an American economy that had become the world’s biggest casino. Real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas…stocks on Wall Street—they all had their time when gravity was willed into oblivion.” Nor is this book without its black humor. We are told how The National Farmers Holiday Association urged folks to strike—not to buy or sell anything on a certain day. But the country was doing exactly that already —without money people were not buying and not selling.

In the election of 1936, the conservative Republican candidate was Alf Landon, governor of Kansas. Roosevelt took every state except Maine and Vermont. Turning again to Egan’s book: “Late in his life, Landon was asked about [Roosevelt’s] New Deal and its lasting effect on the country.” He replied simply: ‘it saved our society.’”

After 2001, those wild 1920s were the model for George W. Bush’s administration—no regulation of business. A compliant Republican Congress, with Democrats eagerly aiding, eliminated the regulators so foxy American finance could guard the henhouse. The result: Depression struck again in October, 2008.

***
Late in 1929, Papa and my three siblings were all working. Fifteen years old, I was in school, but our lives had been in turmoil that entire year: my Mother was gravely ill. When my brother arrived from Memphis, he greeted me angrily: “Why haven’t you shaved?” In his annoyance with an inferior being, he took me to Herndon’s barber shop to rid me of the ghastly teen-age fuzz on my face. Seven years older, we had never been friends. My Mother, knowing I was getting on badly with my Father, asked my brother to “take care” of me. Thus, it was that I spent the first six months of 1930 in hell.

When I returned to Atlanta in July, my father suggested to his boss, Mr. Bauknight, that he hire me and his own son to clean the company’s empty watermelon-hauling freight cars that returned daily from the north. The pay was a dollar a day—twelve cents an hour.

At lunch, Tom Bauknight and I—two sixteen year olds, sat with a young black worker, listening wild-eyed and slack-jawed to his erotic tales of Blue Heaven, a gathering place in Atlanta he and his friends patronized.

In the early afternoons up to one hundred people would appear in the Bellwood railroad yard to catch the freight train due to pull out at 3 o’clock. They were of the millions of Americans who traveled the freights seeking relief from the misery of poverty. Mostly men, among them were whole families—women with babies and small children. They stood by open freight cars, bolting to get on board on signs the juggernaut was about to move. The AB&C Railroad, a small line running from Atlanta to the Coast, was a minor property of the giant Illinois Central System,

Capitalistic economics have collapsed our financial system twice in eighty years of my lifetime. That may be just fine for billionaires but it has devastated the middle and lower classes. By actual experience the Republican Party prefers to leave healing to “market forces” which might require twenty or more years to bring about recovery. Since our government belongs to the people and not just the rich, a vigorous effort to restore prosperity is appropriate. Waiting for some ethereal force to come to our rescue is cruel. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Barak Obama chose the active route as the kinder and more likely road to succeed.

***
The mystery author is none other than the great Albert Einstein.


“Why Socialism,” by Albert Einstein, is taken from his book “Essays in Humanism” published in 1950 by The Philosophical Library.

***
Extract from the 3000 word, 8 page essay:
By Albert Einstein
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naïve, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

“The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

Sleepin' Under the Stars in Ole Bombay

©By Jack Ragsdale

Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Persia until the seventh century. At that time Mohammed’s armies swept over the country and converted its people to Islam. To continue the practice of their traditional religion many Persians fled to India where they settled in Bombay. There they continued to handle their dead in their own sacred way. So as not to offend the Gods of the Holy Earth or those of Fire, bodies of the dead were laid out on the roofs of temples for vultures to consume. The sun-bleached bones are eventually recovered and preserved as sacred. As they did millennia ago, those practices continued in Bombay in an impressive multi-storied temple.

In the early fall of 1941, I was offered a berth as third officer on the SS Exiria on a voyage to Burma and India via the Cape of Good Hope. The ship was a Hog Island type vessel, ungainly but practical—a Liberty Ship of the First World War.

Though we were not at war, the U. S. Government was doing a toe dance to keep its shipping safe. The Mediterranean and the Suez Canal were too dangerous for its ships. The Roosevelt government’s interest was not in some fatuous point; they wanted the Exiria’s cargo in Chiang kai Shek’s hands, not at the bottom of the sea. Thus it was that we went around the African continent at the cost of one whole month’s extra travel.

East and west of the Cape of Good Hope south to the pole, there is a vast expanse of open water and ample opportunity for vagary to occur—that is: the unusual, the rare, the extraordinary. Vagary in this case did take place.

As Third Mate I had the 8 to 12 watch. On a moon-lit night, in clear weather with excellent visibility, far from land, approaching the passage east of Madagascar, about ten in the evening, I saw a particular swell to the east that gave me pause. It was at least a mile away and very different from all the others approaching us: as it advanced, it was combing into a huge white column. That way it would engage us broadside and put the ship in danger by dropping it into a deep trough, overwhelming us with the massive following wave.

I changed course fifteen or twenty degrees to the port so as to have the renegade wave meet us on the starboard after-quarter. Unfortunately my tactic proved insufficient. We ended up in the trough! As expected, the next wave inundated us over the tops of the hatches.

Usually when water comes on board it is quickly discharged by the ship’s buoyancy but in this case the trough was so deep and the amount of water so vast, the ship struggled mightily to rise in recovery. Entrances to cabins are raised about ten inches to obviate flooding but with the deck so deeply inundated, any open door allowed the crashing entry to seawater. The Chief Engineer’s screen door was torn asunder and his cabin flooded as were others including the officers’ saloon. As I looked down from my high perch on the bridge, I saw the entire ship below me under water. It was difficult to conceive how the ship could come back. At the same time, the vessel’s forward movement was halted as the little ship twisted as a man might, to free himself of chains. I changed our heading a bit more a-port and gradually we recovered and again began to make headway. It was only then that it registered in my mind that at the moment of the wave’s impact, I had heard the loud crashes of crockery and glassware. In my twelve years as a seaman, this was my most dangerous experience.

In time, we arrived at Rangoon, a port on the rapid-flowing tidal-affected Rangoon River. Our cargo was discharged into barges at our anchorage, later to travel on the new and historic seven hundred mile Burma Road into western China. Chiang kai Shek had fled there from the Japanese who controlled all of the eastern part of his country.

From Rangoon we moved across the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta for a pay load back to the States and then on to the great city of Bombay. At sea I had relief but in port, the debilitating heat left me ill from lost of sleep.

In Bombay I had a few days off so I splurged: I retired to a palatial hotel where I lived like a rajah for three days. My huge room had two ceiling fans that achieved a miracle of cool and a bed to match the story-book atmosphere. I bathed often in cool water and drank freely of the icy stuff on assurance that it had been boiled. The hotel had few guests but was possessed of an enormous staff. When I moved about, men in colorful attire bowed low in my honor. A week in that giddy environment would have debased me forever. That was what happened to the British—they began to think they were gods sent from the holy House of Windsor to rule over benighted brown people.

All too soon that solo honeymoon ended and I returned to duty on the ship. At night I lay down in my cabin but was sleep would not come. In desperation I took a heavy counterpane and pillow and sought relief on the monkey bridge under the stars. There, at last, I slept.

Let me tell you the rest of story as I wrote it in 2004 to a world traveler who was writing about my subject:—the Parsees of Bombay. “I was in Bombay in 1941” I wrote, “as Third Mate on the American ship “Exiria.” I spent several nights in a fancy hotel but went back to the ship when I had to work. The heat-absorbing steel vessel was unbearably hot. One night, unable to sleep, I took my counterpane and pillow, went up to the monkey bridge and lay down under the stars. In the early dawn, I was awakened by the rustle of feathers. There on the rail just outside of my arm’s reach, were several greedy-looking vultures that seemed to have breakfast on their minds. I hadn't given the least thought to the Parsee's burial practice before, but I quickly gathered up my bedclothes and never slept outside again. Later I was told that those birds go first for the eyes which for them may be a particularly tasty morsel. My encounter with those birds was brief. I beat a hasty retreat. I recall only that they are smaller than vultures I've seen in my country. I still don’t know the color of those birds but I respect them for the valuable function they perform. However, while I remain alive, I plan to keep them at a little more than arm’s length.

Cigarette Smoking Then and Now

I hated Boys High school. After seventy-six years, I still have extreme aversion toward some persons of that institution: H. O. Smith, Mr. Floyd and Shorty Doyle, my cowardly history teacher. Doyle never actually wielded the paddle, but he instigated and enjoyed its use in our home-room class. He merely assigned its use to members of teams he coached. I still remember his obscene croaking amusement at the humiliation and pain of the boy being paddled strictly for the enjoyment of the brutish teacher.
Our history class met immediately after recess and Doyle often arrived just in time to dismiss us—scolding us for our disarray: “Why weren’t you studying” he would say.
During recess some boys went beyond the farthest of a series of portable buildings to smoke. Mister Birdsong (I've forgotten his real name), a math teacher whose mission in life was to catch boys at their nefarious lunch-break pastime, tried to sneak up on them but was never successful. He occasionally chased a boy in the street but never caught anyone; he just made himself ridiculous. He was fiftyish, short, bald and paunchy. The smokers had many eyes and misbehaving boys were never for a moment in danger of being caught.
Those boys of 1930, like their opposites today, were given to dangerous conduct. They smoked cigarettes for the cool of it while designating them “coffin nails” in casual conversation. That would tend to indicate a sophisticated understanding of the result of long term use of tobacco. Still, just as do kids today, they indulged in that most stupid of all human exercises: smoking unless you include WAR. Thank God, I, a more perfect individual, never fell into that morass. Of course I lie. I smoked for over twenty years. Furthermore, my relationship with tobacco was a living horror—smoking made me sick. I was allergic to the filthy weed. When I became a seaman in 1935 I bought cigarettes from the ship’s slop chest for six or eight cents per pack. All of us bought cigarettes by the carton—still, I was always trying to stop. As the gnawing need to smoke grew in me, I became nervous and needed one more smoke in my struggle to quit. I bummed a cig for a last smoke. One by one, the crew turned on me like snakes. “Here,” they would say, “take the G. D. pack and go to blazes.” It hurt my pride, but I cadged another cig and my habit continued. Later, when my lingering vice made me miserable, I turned, like a sneak thief, to robbing ash trays or pleading for “a last draw.” It was not a pretty picture.
In 1956, I stopped cold turkey, but the temptation to play with fire remained in my veins. Rarely, I would stop in a bar with a friend, bum a cig and light up while bragging about how I had stopped. I never did anything so absurd and immature. A fool, they say, needs a leg up from the gods. I can only say the fates were kind to this fool. I’m still smoke free.

Part Two
Smoking Smoking; Fromm (Institute) Here To Cig Hell
The boy or girl who smokes, riling Mom and Dad, is saying: “I am flaunting my individuality. Accept it or get lost!! In rebellion against the parental restrictions of childhood, I hereby take revenge.—ON ME!” Wise parents acknowledge coming majority mildly, realizing that not to do so would bring on big trouble.
In my early days at Fromm I observed a contemptuous but silent response to an unwelcome lecture made to a USF student by an antediluvian Frommie.
The codger lectured a young male smoker near the entrance to McLaren Hall. That happened four years ago: On a Wednesday, I came to hear the medical lecture As I approached McLaren, there was a student, at his ease, leaning against the building. He was relaxed—exaggeratedly so—and smoking. In front of him at a distance of four or five feet there was an agitated gentleman of seventy or more years.
I became aware of that disparate duo because an edgy-voiced lecture was going on there;—someone giving out good advice in a public forum. The young recipient was unmoved and continued smoking.
“Take my advice,” the old gentleman said, “you’re ruining your health and wasting your money.” The message, although forceful and delivered with great strength and sincerity, elicited no response thus convincing the deliverer, since it had gone unheard and unheeded, it needed to be repeated. Raising the tone a notch, he continued.
My attention strayed to the lecturee who remained cool as the same message was redelivered, with more emotion, in identical words. As I passed nearer, I caught the boy’s eye and he shrugged ever so lightly in mild ennui.
I have tons of advice, but with that lesson in mind I plan to donate my wisdom with extreme caution. The question is: "Can I resist the temptation?"
I continue, My notes:
This from Comedy Central: “I just come from Alabama where it was 98 degrees at 3 o’clock in the mawning. Alabama must got their own sun.”
***
Now this gem: On her nuptial night, the bride took a bottle of catsup to bed with her. In the morning, the bridegroom inspected the bedsheet to assure himself of the purity of his wife when by unfortuitous accident, the bottle of catsup fell to the floor.
“What’s that dear” the recent lover uttered in surprise.”
“After sex, sweety, I knew you would want a snack, so I’m preparing frankfurters.”
Have a nice Day