The Ghost in the White House Part 17

Perhaps Mr. Burleson is not the only one of us in America who is loco-minded or spotty-minded in business, who is running his business into the ground by noticing only one kind of people.

XX

FLAT-THINKING

THINKING IN ME-FLAT

What nature seems to have really intended, is that human beings should do their thinking in four dimensions.

The thickness is what I think.

The breadth is what other people think.

The length is what G.o.d thinks.

Then when a man has taken these three and put them together and sees them as a whole, that is to say when I have taken what I think, and what I think other people think, and what I think G.o.d thinks, and put them together as well as I can, the result is--who I am and what I amount to.

Most people tend most of the time, unless very careful, to think in the first or "I think" dimension, stop on the way to G.o.d in the "I think"

thickness, and get lost in it, or they get lost in the "They Think"

breadth, lost in what other people think and never get to G.o.d at all.

The trouble with the Post Office has been that Mr. Burleson likes to think in the first or "I think" dimension, does not care what other people think and skips right past them straight to G.o.d.

Probably it would be unfair to say that the Post Office is egotistical, self-centered, sitting and looking at its own navel full of the bliss and self-glorification of Mr. Burleson's being the Hero of economy and winning his boast of saving the money of the people, but it does seem as if it would cool off the Post Office some in its present second-rate business idea--its idea of freeing the letter-making business from doing anything more for the people than can be helped--if Mr. Burleson would stop and sit down and have a long serious think about what fifty thousand Post Offices think.

There have been days--with my half-past two letters when if I had Roger Babson's gift for being graphic I would have charted Mr. Burleson's Post Office like this:

[Ill.u.s.tration: |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| | | | | | | | | | | | | |-----| |-----| |-----| U.S. ME The P.O. People]

XXI

LOST-MINDEDNESS

OR LOSING THE END IN THE MEANS

I have wanted, before dropping the causes of people's being fooled about themselves, to dwell for a moment on lost-mindedness, or losing the end in the means.

To avoid evaporated thinking or generalizing I am ill.u.s.trating my idea once more from Mr. Burleson as the great common experience of all of us which we daily have together, Mr. Burleson makes us see so many things together.

I wish something could be done to get our Postmaster General to sit down seriously with a two-cent stamp and look at it and study it.

It does not seem to me that Mr. Burleson has ever thought very much about the two-cent stamp, that he quite understands what, in a country like this, a two-cent stamp means.

Every now and then when I take one up and hold it in my hand, I look at it before putting my tongue to it and think what a two-cent stamp believes. It has come to be for me like a little modest seal for my country--like a flag or a symbol. A two-cent stamp is the signature of the nation, the tiny stupendous Magna Charta of the rights of the people.

As an elevator makes forty stories in a sky-sc.r.a.per as good as the first one, the two-cent stamp represents the right of one town in this country, so far as the United States is concerned, to be as convenient and as well located as another. Three miles or three thousand miles for two cents.

In physical things it is true that America because it cannot help it has to put a penalty on a man in Seattle for being three thousand miles from New York, but so far as the truth is concerned, so far as thinking is concerned, it costs a man no more to think three thousand miles than to think three. The country pays for it for him.

America tells people millions of times a day on every postage stamp that it is the thought, the prayer, the desire of this country to have every man, no matter where his body is held down in it or how far his freight for his body has to be sent to him, as near in his soul to Washington as Rock Creek Park and as near to New York as Yonkers.

The two-cent stamp is the Magna Charta of the spiritual rights, the patriotic forces and the intellectual liberties of the people and when Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, by establishing a zone system for ideas, for conveying the ideas of the great central newspapers and magazines in which a whole nation thinks together--with one huge national thoughtless provincial swish of his own provincial mind coolly takes ten thousand cities that like to do their thinking when they like, in New York or in Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, jams them down into their own neighborhoods, glues them to their own papers, tells all these thousand of cities that they have got to be, no matter how big they are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the people will never forget.

Why in a desperate crisis of the world when of all times this nation has got to be pulled together, should people who are accustomed to taking a bird's-eye view of the nation like the _Literary Digest_ be fined for it?

Why fine the readers of the _Review of Reviews_ or _Collier's_ or _Scribner's_ for living in one place rather than another? I like to think of it Sat.u.r.day night, half the boys of a nation three thousand miles reading over each other's shoulders the same pages together in the _Youth's Companion_.

Every man is ent.i.tled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that is to life, to the liberty to live where he wants to and to the happiness of not being fined for it.

A man's body by reason of being a body has to put up with the inconvenience of not being everywhere, but his soul--what he knows and feels and believes and sees in common with others, has a right not to be told it cannot see things the rest of us are seeing all together, has a right not to be told he will have to read something published within a rim of five hundred miles of his own doorbell--that his soul has got to live with a Seattle lid on, or a Boston lid on.

As a symbol of the liberty and unity of the people in this country, the flag is pleasant of course to look at, and it flourishes a good deal, but it does not do anything and do it all day, every day, the way the little humble pink postage stamp does, millions of it a minute, to make people feel close to one another, make people act in America as if we were in the one same big room together, in the one great living-room of the nation.

There is not anything it would not be worth this people's while to pay for making men of all cla.s.ses and of all regions in this country think and hope and pray together in the one great living-room of the nation--some place where three million people act as one.

It is what we are for in this country to prove to a world that this thing can be done, and that we are doing it, to have some place like a great national magazine where three million people can show they are doing it.

And now Mr. Albert Sidney Burleson, of Austin, Texas, steps up to a great national magazine, a great hall where a nation thinks the same thought, holds a meeting once a week together like the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_, like _Collier's_--dismisses two or three million people from everywhere who get together there every Sat.u.r.day night, and tells them to go home and read the _Hampshire County Gazette_.

It is not a worse case perhaps of lost-mindedness or of losing the end in the means than the rest of us are guilty of, but with such an inspiring example of what not to do, and of how it works to do it--to lose the end in the means, I have to mention it--not in behalf of Mr. Burleson, but in behalf of all of us.

XXII

I had not intended to ill.u.s.trate my idea of amateur technique in self-criticism quite so much with Mr. Burleson, especially as I stand for a bi-partisan point of view. I wish there were some way of dealing with Mr. Burleson as a Republican for fifteen minutes and then as a Democrat for fifteen minutes, and in dealing as I am, in what might be called a nationally personal subject, a technique for self-criticism in all of us, I only hope my Democratic friends will give me credit for making use of Mr. Burleson not as a Democrat (it is just their luck that he's a Democrat), but as a specimen human being I am trying to get hundreds of thousands of Republicans that are just like him, not to be like any longer. I have only used our Postmaster General in this rather personal fashion because he is so close and personal to us, because in a time when we are all in peculiar danger of being fooled by ourselves he const.i.tutes, in plain sight a kind of national Common Denominator of the sins of all of us.

We are all concerned. We all want to know.

It is easy enough to say pleasantly as if it settled something that the reason Mr. Burleson keeps doing things and keeps picking at most people so through fifty-three thousand Post Offices day after day, all day, and night after night, all night, is that he is fooled about himself.

But why? What are the causes and the remedies people in general can look up and have the benefit of? When we are being fooled about ourselves, when we believe what we want to believe, and are not willing to change our minds about ourselves, what is there we can do?

XXIII

SELF-DISCIPLINE BY PROXY