Judge — February 6, 1932 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUDGE Morons—Our One Hope By Don Herold I pon’? understand the prejudice that has grown up in America inst morons. It now amounts almost to a national superstition. I don't know who started it Mencken, } Even more aybe unior. be some s now knock morons. Personally, 1 am wondering if our salvation does not perhaps rest in their hands. Intelligent people have not brought us very far, Our mental classes have led us up a blind alley. ent difficulties are the result, not of the machinations of morons, but of the best thinking of our best brains As a race, we have let our intel lectual leaders devise for us a gargan tuan contrivance of civilized living so complex that, now that it is jammed, nobody among our foremost thinkers has the slightest idea where to look for the trouble. The best that is of- fered us in the way of re i blind, experimental tinker Hoover calls conferences, All our pres- ingland drops the gold standard. tariffs are jiggled this way and that, Mr. Hearst rushes up breathlessly with a plan, senators stick monkey-wrenches into the machinery, Wall Street bans short “But what's for dessert?” 14 selling for a couple of days, the dis armament battle rages across a wide front, Federal Reserve Bank reforms are discussed, oil production is limited. the five-day week is tried, prohibition revocation is advocated, Al Capone is jailed for income-tax evasion, Aimce McPherson evangelizes, but the real source of the trouble is hidden under complexity within were smart cnough to build this mar complexity; we velous Goldbergian apparatus, but no: hody can make it work. And yet we knock morons. Charles G. Shaw, a New York uni versity professor, has recently offered “Only morons whistle.” Only morons have sense enough to whistle. ed our lives up far beyond the whistling point. There isn't any overwhelming evi that college done the world any more The rest of us have me dence professors have good than whistlers, everything considered. In fact, the net accomplishment, if any. of the human race to date is the residual work of its creative artists. . music, and writing ndish and un-enlight- ening n-controversial) in’ the world are doing nothing to add to our comicbooks.com