WITH THE TIDE

The Drifter, author of acid comments published weekly in the Nation, has made out a ledger sheet for the sings and saving graces of these United States. He lists forty six assets and sixty four liabilities and hints that had he not been hampered by limitations of space be could have gone on with the latter indefinitely; the credit column is, he regrets, practically complete. Among the assets are found such peculiarly. American contributions to world contentment as bathrooms, the New York theatre, bobbed hair, rebellious undergraduates, one piece bathing suits, Beacon Bill on Christmas Eve, and the Marx brothers. And examination of the liabilities reveals the national crimes as including the movies, the radio, various initialed abominations--S. E. P., K. K., K. Y. M. C. A., Frank Crane, bridge, the Stock Exchange and the Stock Yards. Mr. Herbert Hoover is apparently both a credit and a liability and is therefore cancelled.

Ingenious is the Drifter and if his statistical reflections were not so trile he might be considered as a keep and searching accountant. But four years of intense self-psychoanalysis has rendered the less emotional public rather weary of denunciations. Critics, capable and scornful, have taught the nation that its mentality and its aesthetics are less than dust, that everything worthwhile in this country is an importation, and that God loves the Irish, English, Russians, Germans, French, Spanish and Swedish--but not the Americans. Consequently the citizens of the much maligned and over advertised United States have assumed a rather nonchalant attitude; if there is no hope for extra European peoples then why worry. Life under the present bourgeois regime--and granted that it is bourgeois sometimes to the point of inanity--is sweet; and life under any regime is short--so why not make merry in one's own uncouth way? The intelligentsia phantom group, will shriek the truth of the Drifter's remarks and will seize upon them as further ammunition against the genus Babbitt. The intelligent will likewise see the justice of his criticisms--only they will not entirely damn the country to everlasting dreariness, but will reserve hope for the future and patience for the present.