Will was right
We’ve run this column before – in 2005 as I recall. But Will Rogers’ comments on national and international affairs made decades ago are so timely today that it seems to be a reasonable way to wind up this sometimes chaotic, confusing and choleric year of 2009 and hopefully create a more reasonable 2010. Admittedly, prospects are challenging as 2010 is an election year!
As you read some of Will Rogers’ comments, wit and wisdom, keep in mind that he died in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935. His comments below are printed as he gave them – complete with deliberate misspelling and grammatical flaws:
“Our problem is not what is the dollar worth in London, Rome or Paris, or what even it is worth at home. It’s how to get hold of it, whatever it’s worth.”
“Last year we said ‘Things can’t go on like this,’ and they didn’t; they got worse.”
“Common sense is not an issue in politics, it’s an affliction. Neither is honesty an issue in politics, it’s a miracle.”
“Wouldn’t it be great if other countries started electing by the ballot instead of by the bullet and us electing by the ballot instead of by the bullion?”
“Political elections are a good deal like marriages; there’s no accounting for anyone’s taste.”
“You take diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”
“One way to solve the traffic problem would be to keep all the cars that are not paid for off the streets. Children could use the streets for playgrounds then.”
“I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this: No nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.”
“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
“I represent a new class of people in this country, the newly poor.”
“As we look back on it now, somebody ought to have taken each one of us and soaked our fat heads. We bought everything under the sun, but where was our payments going to be if we lost our jobs? Why, that had never entered our heads. Why should we lose our jobs? Wasn’t all our big men telling us things was even going to get better? Was our prominent men warning us? If we had had a ‘prominent’ man he would have, but we just didn’t have any.”
“You know, there was a time when we couldn’t spell a ‘billion’ dollars, much less realize it, count it, or anything. But now, as a nation, we learn pretty fast, till it won’t be long now, and we’ll be working on the word ‘trillion.’ You’ll read in the papers, ‘Congress has just been asked to appropriate two trillion dollars to relieve the descendants of a race of people called ‘Wall Streeters.’ The paper will go on to say, ‘This is a worthy cause, and no doubt this small appropriation will be made, as they are the wards of the government.’”
Enuf said?