While driving home, Greg and Jimmie work out a new world order, only to have a little horn blast their pet theories
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, August 23, 1941.
“Machinery,” explained Jimmie Frise, is the curse of humanity.”
“Oh, oh, Jim,” I protested, “if it weren’t for machinery, like radio and electric machinery and steam engines, we wouldn’t know there was a war on yet.”
“We’d have had a couple of extra happy years,” stated Jimmie. “Do you know what really put the curse on mankind? It wasn’t Adam eating an apple. It was Adam stepping on a round stone and finding he skidded. That was what planted the seeds of evil in him. The next time he had a heavy load to lift, he remembered his foot sliding on the round pebble, so he went and got a big, round stone. On this he placed his heavy load and rolled it. It was no trick at all to get two round stones and rig up an axle. And so machinery was born.”
“You figure the wheel was the first machine?” I asked.
“Perhaps not,” agreed Jim. “Probably a stick was the first machine. A stick with which our ancient ancestors hit their first rabbit, or the stick with which they first dug a root out of the ground to eat. Or the stick with which the first weak man felled a strong man and so created the vision of human justice.”
“So weapons were our first machines?” I demanded.
“Yes, and today, our deadliest weapons are machines,” declared Jimmie, triumphantly. We invented machines and now they have got out of our control. Machines will be the end of us.”
“Why, Jim” I protested, “our lives would be miserable without machines. Everything we live by today is a machine. The bricks of our houses are made by machines; the clothes we wear, most of the food we eat, all our employment is provided by machines.”
“By serving machines, you mean,” said Jim darkly. “I draw a cartoon. You and I and two or three other guys can see it. We can put it in the window of The Star Office and some hundreds of passers-by can see it. But we give that cartoon into a machine that traces it on to zinc. And we put that zinc tracing into another machine called a press. About half a million people can see it.”
“Is that serving a machine?” I scoffed.
“It certainly is,” Jim informed me, “because it cost $2,000,000 to create those machines for multiplying my cartoon by half a million. Naturally, those machines have got to pay for themselves, so they demand a cartoon from me every week. Now, a cartoonist hasn’t always got a cartoon a week in him. Cartoonists are a sort of by-product of creation. With some bits left over, the Creator said, ‘I’ll make a cartoonist. I’ll make a dopey, whimsical, slightly daft individual who will have a yearning to draw pictures to make his fellow men smile.’ But those terrible machines, costing millions of dollars, and required to be paid for, dollar for dollar, demand a cartoon every week. I am a slave of that machine.”
A Sorry Spectacle
“Would you rather draw a cartoon to put in a window, for the passers-by to look at?” I snorted.
“The best cartoons I ever drew,” sighed Jimmie, “were drawn in the dust on the window panes of the post-office in Birdseye Center.”
“When you were a kid?” I smiled.
“Ah,” sighed Jimmie.
“Well, sir,” I said, “I would like to share your sentimental skunner1 against machines. All over the world today, it is machines that are destroying us, it’s true. But I can’t agree with you. There once was a rather superior monkey who discovered he could pick up sticks and stones with his fingers. That was the dawn of man. It is our use of implements and later of machines that makes us men, not monkeys.”
“If you want my opinion,” declared Jimmie, “the monkeys all over the world are laughing at us today.”
“We are a sorry spectacle,” I confessed. “How all the microbes and germs must be laughing at us. How typhus and cholera and smallpox and tuberculosis and all those bugs we have conquered must be chuckling amongst themselves. For we are doing what they failed to do. Having mastered all our enemies save man, we are now devoted to destroying each other.”
“With machines,” insisted Jim.
“Okay,” I declared, “let’s suppose this war continues to its logical conclusion. All cities are wiped out. All factories are bombed to ashes. All the universities are razed and the libraries burned. All the plans and specifications lost and all the men who might remember the sciences and arts, either killed in action or butchered in concentration camps. And, in the end, just a few people survive who go and hide in the hills and the caves. Thus will we be back in the caveman age once more? How would you like it?”
“We could start fresh,” submitted Jim. “And we could hang anybody that tried to invent anything.”
“No wheels,” I warned him, “no wagons.”
“We could use stone boats,” proposed Jim.
“Harness is machinery,” I countered. “You couldn’t use harness. All you could use domestic animals for would be meat and milk. No plows, no reapers, no seed drills. No pumps. No shovels.”
“Aw,” said Jim, “you want to carry the thing too far.”
“Now you’ve hit it,” I explained. “The question is – how far should we carry this thing called machinery?”
“Who’s going to say?” asked Jim.
“The government,” I informed him. “The government will own all machines. Every machine in the country will belong not to individuals, but to all the people. And anybody that wants to use a machine will come before a commission of the government – or the people – and state what he wants the machine for. If the use he wishes to make of it is for the general good, not just for his own good – if nobody is to be killed, nobody enslaved, nobody cheated or in any way injured, the commission will grant the use of the machinery.”
When a Horn Goes Wrong
“That’ll put an end to the invention of machinery,” smiled Jim. “Because the only reason machines have been invented is because somebody thought they could beat somebody else by creating a better machine.”
“Part of the commission’s job,” I explained, “would be to listen to people with new ideas for new machines. If a man wants a machine that doesn’t exist, he can ask the commission for it. And if it is good, he’ll get it a darn sight quicker than he could get it now. I bet there are thousands of wonderful inventions that have never seen the light of day because the inventor had nobody to help him finance it. But with the people themselves back of him, an inventor could go places. I bet we would step a thousand years forward in a hundred years, if we would only trust all the people, instead of just a few of them, the way we do now.”
“Isn’t that socialistic stuff you’re talking?” demanded Jimmie sternly.
“Anybody who ever talked about humanity has been called a Socialist or a Communist,” I explained, “or whatever the nasty epithet of the time happened to be. I’m just a believer in humanity, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s a dangerous thing to be, these days,” warned Jimmie. “How about going home?”
It was my turn to drive. Jim and I take turn about, week by week, to run our cars. We pick up whoever we can at the foot of Bay street to complete our load and make the gas do the maximum job per quart. So we got our hats and wended our way to the parking lot back of the office.
The parking lot man hailed us as we drove out.
“Something the matter with your wiring,” he said. “I heard a buzzing sound under your hood and I wiggled the wires around and it stopped. But you’d better have it looked at, eh?”
I thanked him in that snooty way you thank people for telling you you’ve got a flat tire or something, and we drove out. As we dropped down over the kerbstone of the parking lot, my horn emitted a brief toot.
“H’m,” I said. “Sooner or later, an old car gets something wrong with its horn.”
As we drove along Adelaide street, in the thick 5 o’clock traffic, every little joggle we did on the car tracks caused the horn to toot briefly.
“Sorry,” I called out to the tired and indignant looking gentleman ahead of me, who leaned out his car window to glare at me. “Something wrong with my horn.”
He drew his head back in doubtfully, and as the traffic snailed along, my horn gave sundry small toots which caused other cars to act impatiently and pedestrians to glare at me.
“I’ll have to get that fixed,” I said.
We turned down Bay for the waterfront, and all the way down that busy, home-going street, my horn continued to issue its senseless little hoots and toots at every joggle or bump, however tiny, in the pavement. One small toot can disturb traffic more than a traffic policeman, even. Cars swerved and leaped away and pedestrians halted and started and halted again while Jim and I sat there helpless to stop the silly thing.
“Those Boys Looked Sore”
“Okay, okay,” I called to the motorists, who turned and stared back, and to the pedestrians, who halted and looked questioningly at me to see what I meant by the signal. Jimmie was very amiable. He gestured and signalled to explain that it was a little trouble we were having with the horn rather than any signal we were giving.
“Ah, thank goodness,” I said, as we reached the Lake Shore road and the smooth, free ride homeward along the lake, without a crossing or a red light for miles.
But the horn continued its tooting at every joggle all the way along. And most of the cars that got in front thought I was gently suggesting to them that they put on a little more speed. Each one, after its driver had taken an indignant glance in his mirror, would speed up. Then a stranger would pass me and take his place. Then the ridiculous business would begin all over again as soon as we hit the slightest unevenness in the pavement.
“Pull into a service station,” suggested Jim, “and let the boys unscramble the wiring.”
“No, thanks,” I declared. “I don’t want any gas-jerkers fiddling with my ignition. I take her up to my own repair man after supper.”
So we tooted and joggled along in a steady series of misunderstandings, until, along about half-way home, a car came alongside which was driven by a pretty girl with another girl beside her in the front seat, and in the back, two soldiers slumped down very cosy and comfortable.
“Toot, toot,” went my horn very pertly.
The girls looked smilingly at us, expecting to see somebody they knew. But it was only us – two old barnacles.
“Toot, toot-toot,” went my horn again.
Jim was gesticulating amiably to explain that it was a little horn trouble. But the young ladies, were giving us a decidedly frosty eye and the elevated chin. And, in the back seat, the two young soldiers sat up slowly and purposefully. And though I merely glanced under my eyebrows, I could see trouble brewing.
Toot, toot-toot, toot,” said the horn, with the nastiest leer.
The car with the young ladies fell back. I speeded up.
“Good heavens,” I said, “you don’t suppose they thought we were trying to be fresh?
“Toot,” said the horn.
“Those boys looked sore,” said Jim.
“Why, surely, they could tell a couple of old guys like us…” I protested.
But even as I spoke, I knew that the car drawing up on the outside of me was an enemy raider. It snaked alongside. I heard a voice, low and menacing, say:
“Pull over to the curb, Barrymore!2“
I glanced to the left. The girls had changed places with the soldiers. One of the soldiers was now driving, and the other sat beside him and did the talking. He was a very bronzed, sinewy looking youth. I drew out of the traffic to the right.
“To Heck With Machines”
The other car ran ahead and then slowed down, forcing me to stop beside the curb. The two soldiers got out and walked slowly and thoughtfully back to us. One on each side. The one on my right rested his elbows quite close to me and said:
“So you’re the old sports who pester a soldier’s girl while he’s away at the wars, huh?”
“I have horn trouble,” I declared.
“So we notice,” he said, through his teeth. “But you didn’t happen to see us sitting in the back seat, did you?”
“I didn’t see anything,” I stated indignantly and with elderly calm. “I tell you, my boy, my car horn is out of order and has been tooting all the way along.”
“Is that so?” said the soldier. I don’t hear it.”
“It only toots when we strike a little bump in the pavement,” I explained. “If you care to drive a short distance with us and see…?”
“I don’t think I would,” said the soldier, drawing back a little.
“Step on the gas,” said Jim. “Maybe it’ll do it.”
“Look,” I said, “listen.”
I stepped on the gas. The engine raced. The car started to tremble. I stepped farther. It began to shake. And suddenly, “toot, toot, toot,” said the horn faintly.
“See?” I cried triumphantly.
And as I stepped full down on the accelerator to let the engine really roar in the hope of bringing the toots out clear I held my hands up off the steering wheel to show there was no deception.
And suddenly, whatever was slightly wrong with the horn went really wrong and the horn burst into a full-throated and violent roar. Even the soldiers were startled. And both young ladies turned and stared out the back window of their car.
“Turn off the engine,” yelled Jim.
“Switch off the key,” shouted the soldier on my side.
“Twiddle the horn button,” advised the soldier on Jim’s side.
But the horn kept up its endless bellow with a sharpness and quality of tone I had never been able to get out of it by legitimate means. I jumped out and lifted the hood.
“Wires shorted,” I told the soldiers, who came and stared under the hood with me.
“This is the horn wire, isn’t it?” yelled the first soldier, jerking a wire loose. But it didn’t stop the horn.
“No, I think it’s this one, Bill,” cried the other soldier, yanking another wire loose. So they jerked all the wires we could see until finally the horn stopped abruptly. Then they waved very friendly and went and got back in the rear seat of the car. But our car wouldn’t even start. And we had to walk about half a mile and finally get a gas-jerker to come and re-wire the car.
“To heck with machines,” I said, as we at last got started again about 6.35 p.m.
Editor’s Notes:
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