Thomas Cave's Tattoo: "For Duty and Humanity!"

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo"

I've started a blog that discusses what I call the New Great Depression - the idea that the next few years will constitute a Depression era, and not simple recession. I believe that to understand it in that way will enrich it, and encourage everyone in this country to make this era a creative period, a positive time, an act of construction, and not a cause for panic, chaos and fear. This is a chance for renaissance.

If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, film, community, and a discovery of human value, as the first one did, who wouldn't want to be a part of it.

I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, make fun, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone. The dead weight of spoils has been lifted.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"About Thomas Cave"

Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

"For Duty and Humanity!"

In what parallel universe would thinking about a Depression be more comforting than thinking about a recession?

The universe in which we now live now, I would propose. Six of one, half dozen of the other, as they say. The "recession" - also a term to which the pundits and their public were dragged kicking and screaming, struggling like puppies in a bag on its way to the river - just keeps bleeding away. It's recession, it's deepening recession, it's deep recession.

It's deep everybody-knows-what, is what it is. And no one is blaming the puppy.

Next up for admitting, now that the "recession" is about as deep as it can get (well, it could get deeper, until you're eating Chinese, if your self-denial is shoveling really hard ... ) is that it might - might - be wading, falling, lurching, stumbling, wandering, backing, sliding, tumbling, skidding, limping into Depression territory. The New Land. Not the bottom of the barrel, but the heavenly afterworld of recession. You are no longer sick, and struggling. You are in A Whole New Place, ready to prospect and stake a claim.

Doesn't that feel better than bleeding to death? Especially in a roomful of doctors? (How much anesthesia will you need to keep you knocked out for the next two years, while they pass the knives back and forth across your chest?)

For an excellent view of the semantics of "Depression" vs. "Recession," visit Jeffrey Hill's satisfyingly literate blog and watch the CNN video. Mr. Hill is an English teacher living in Le Havre, France.

FYI, the Three Stooges production still above is taken from "Men in Black," a 1934 short film in which the Stooges play med students on their first day of work at a hospital. (Their med school credentials: they have the highest temperatures in their class.) "For Duty and Humanity!" is the Stooges' repeated line in the short. "Men in Black" is the only Stooges film to be nominated for an Academy Award, as best Short Subject (Comedy). It was intended as a spoof on "Men in White," a Clark Gable and Myrna Loy film released the same year.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo