I'm Dying Laughing Read Online Free PDF

can write for and against. It destroys your morals, also your ideas of truth and morality. But once I got started on this idea I had, I got quite hectic. I stayed up at night. It was an essay on Mark Twain and the American dilemma; I called it that.’
    ‘What is the American dilemma?’ he quizzed her.
    ‘Well, as I see it, it’s that you want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you’re a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder. You believe sincerely in Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; and also know you’ll get your nose bloodied if not worse, if you don’t believe in Rockefeller, Mellon, General Motors and Sears Roebuck. An earthquake in your own small brain. To believe, Send the homeless … I lift my lamp beside the golden door! and to know in your bones that; the door is gold. We’re Americans, we can’t fail, some sort of covered wagon will get us through; yet we see lean and tattered misery, the banks failed, businesses taken over, dust-storms which used to be farms bowling along the roads covering the corpses of crows and men; and we despair, despair. Where to turn? For people used to turn to us. There ought to be an answer. We came over in rowboats and founded the USA, we beat the old inhabitants into the dust, we won the West, and now we starve. It isn’t right. Despair, despair. There’s the rich man’s table firmly planted with its golden legs right in our corn and oil and steel highways; and all we get are musty crumbs.
    ‘We’re worried. France was voted Most Backward Country and they had a revolution; then Russia got the leather medal, Most Backward Country, and they had a revolution. But we were always Most Forward Country and look at us. It’s a hell of a dilemma. So maybe we are headed for a revolution; but who wants that? It’s sickening for Americans to be living on handouts, when we’re the world’s richest country and believe in the survival of the fittest. None of it makes sense; and that’s our dilemma. We won and we won and we’ve lost and there’s no reason for it. The American dilemma is the essence of America.’
    ‘Do you believe that?’ he said.
    ‘Oh, my, yes, one step inside the golden door and there’s a trap door, you fall right to the bottom of Deadman’s Gulch. But why? Why? We have two shovels in our hands, right for digging gold, left for digging graves. And it has always been so. We’re miserable people, leanfaced, dismal Uncle Sams. Isn’t our history all struggle, all terror, all bloodshed; and at the same time, all hooraying, all success? America the Golden. The dark and bloody ground, I think is our subtitle. A nation of brothers, Cain and Abel, the Fats and Thins, lined up against each other—civil war at the factory gates; and yet—we do believe in equality, fraternity. I guess we think we do. We welcomed with open hands the hungry foreigner, to join the sons of opportunity, and yet we meet the invader from the next county with guns at the county line. Move on, you Red!’ Then she began to laugh, ‘I’ve found out in my travels that when the small town bosses say, “Our workers are incited by foreigners”, they mean New Yorkers. That’s a united nation for you. Oh, well—fooey. Live and let live; if we only could.’
    ‘What a pessimist,’ he said laughing. ‘I’m a humorist: humorists are always pessimists. They’re reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining; so why get a stomach ulcer?’
    ‘And that’s the story of our time—you believe that?’ he said more seriously.
    ‘I believe in everything. Everything’s true. I don’t believe things and they turn out to be true. I believe things and it’s something put out by the chain-gang press. So now I believe in everything. I know I’m the sort that always falls; but better