The years go marching by in ordered processional. A great war bursts and
for a space endures. In our own land prohibition is nationally enacted and
women's suffrage comes to be, and Irving Berlin, reading the signs of the
times, decides to write The Blue Laws Blues. Fashions of thought change;
other fashions, also. A girl who was born without hips or eyebrows and who
in childhood was regarded as a freak, now finds herself, at the age of
eighteen, exactly in the mode, thus proving that all things come to those
who wait. Czecho-Slovakia is discovered. The American forces spent three
days taking Château-Thierry and three years trying to learn to pronounce
it. Ireland undertakes to settle her ancient problem on the basis of
self-extermination. Several rich retail profiteers die, the approval being
hearty and general, and on arriving at heaven experience great difficulty
in passing through the Needle's Eye, or tradesmen's entrance. Somebody
tells Henry Ford about what some high priests did in Jerusalem nearly two
thousand years ago and in the first flush of his startled indignation he
becomes violently anti-Semitic. General Pershing returns from the
battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military
efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip
Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into
the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase--"Lafayette, he
ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled
few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of
but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. Harding wins,
Scattering second; Cox also ran: slogan: "He Kept Us Out of McAdoo."
Manhattan Island, from whence the rest of the country derives its panics,
its jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation
in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains
at the juncture of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to
start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld
builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints.
North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned
thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that
for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the
sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are
undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the
selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people
and much too good for many of the others. The word "intrigued" creeps into
our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it
first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost
exclusively of politicians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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