Impromptu: the Suckers

Take it out in vile whisky, take it out in lifting your skirts to show your silken crotches; it is this that is intended. You are it. Your pleas will always be denied. You too will always go up with the two guys, scapegoats to save the Republic and especially the State of Massachusetts. The Governor says so and you ain’t supposed to ask for details —— Your case has been reviewed by high—minded and unprejudiced observers (like hell they were!) the president of a great university, the president of a noteworthy technical school and a judge too old to sit on the bench, men already rewarded for their services to pedagogy and the enforcement of arbitrary statutes. In other words pimps to tradition —— Why in hell, didn’t they choose some other kind of ``unprejudiced adviser’ for their death council? instead of sticking to that autocratic strain of Boston backwahs, except that the council was far from unprejudiced but the product of a rejected, discredited class long since outgrown except for use in courts and schools, and that they wanted it so —— Why didn’t they choose at least one decent Jew or some fair—minded Negro or anybody but such a triumvirate of inversion, the New England aristocracy, bent on working off a grudge against you, Americans, you are the suckers, you are the one who will be going up on the eleventh to get the current shot into you, for the glory of the state and the perpetuation of abstract justice —— And all this in the face of the facts: that the man who swore, and deceived the jury willfully by so doing, that the bullets found in the bodies of the deceased could be identified as having been fired from the pistol of one of the accused ——later acknowledged that he could not so identify them; that the jurors now seven years after the crime do not remember the details and have wanted to forget them; that the prosecution has never succeeded in apprehending the accomplices nor in connecting the prisoners with any of the loot stolen —— The case is perfect against you, all the documents say so ——in spite of the fact that it is reasonably certain that you were not at the scene of the crime, shown, quite as convincingly as the accusing facts in the court evidence, by better reasoning to have been committed by someone else with whom the loot can be connected and among whom the accomplices can be found —— It’s no use, you are Americans, just the dregs. It’s all you deserve. You’ve got the cash, what the hell do you care? You’ve got nothing to lose. You are inheritors of a great tradition. My country right or wrong! You do what you’re told to do. You don’t answer back the way Tommy Jeff did or Ben Frank or Georgie Washing. I’ll say you don’t. You’re civilized. You let your betters tell you where you get off. Go ahead —— But after all, the thing that swung heaviest against you was that you were scared when they copped you. Explain that you nature’s nobleman! For you know that every American is innocent and at peace in his own heart. he hasn’t a damned thing to be afraid of. He knows the government is for him. Why, when a cop steps up and grabs you at night you just laugh and think it’s a hell of a good joke —— This is what was intended from the first. So take it our in your rotten whisky and silk underwear. That’s what you get out of it. But put it down in your memory that this is the kind of stuff they can’t get away with. It is there and it’s loaded. No one can understand what makes the present age what it is. They are mystified by certain instances.