Don’t cry, little children, the war is over, and so is a lot of your money, but Uncle Sam will make a lot more, and the Brigadier Generals and the movie actors will get it.
At present we can assume that this is the Movie Age and Out-rage. We walk right past a speech made by the President or some other vote-made man, and several miles to see “Doug” Fairbanks skin his shins by walking up the side of a seven-story building on his hands or to see Charlie Chaplin swing a broom at the villain and hit the Queen of Russia, who is dressed in sackcloth and ashes because of the murder of her last thirty-three husbands.
Movie actors are all right, though. Why, they make more money than we ever hear about. Figures compiled by the Secretary of the Treasury show that a man and wife and family of seventeen children and pets, could live on what Mary Pickford spends for silk stockings, but that is the reason we go to the movies, says the henpecked man as his wife drags him home to their little boiler factory where rolling pins are used as sledgehammers.
If prices keep increasing and clothes decreasing, we will be restricted as to the number of leaves we can wear, and they will be fastened to our shivering yet magnanimous anatomy with paper fasteners of the Henry Ford type. Shimmying will then be automatically abandoned, while courting will only take place over the telephone. When we think of Theda Bara it will be as a heavily clad woman.
Just one thing further, and that is, if this world keeps increasing its speed as it has in the past, our heads will be going so fast that they will look like fish bowls. Everything will just work backwards, our nose will run and our feet smell. Just now we’re traveling so fast that our hip pockets dip sand as we go around corners, and our feet come up so often that people will think we are laying down. Put on your brakes, dear old United Statesers, and let’s slow down to 100 per, or we’ll skid into Mexico.
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You Win Rubber Pajamas
Lecturer (in a loud voice)—I venture to assert there isn’t a man in this audience who has ever done anything to prevent the destruction of our vast forests.
Man in the audience (timidly)—I’ve shot woodpeckers.