Thomas Cave's Tattoo: Yes! We Have No Bananas

"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.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Yes! We Have No Bananas

Breaking news on the head-in-the-sand front. The New York Times, in a small editorial piece by Eduardo Porter in Tuesday's paper, discussed the D-word head-on, and posed the question, "Are we in a Depression?"

Well, God bless the New York Times. We are or we aren't, it decided, kinda, or we aren't, but we are, sorta, woulda. It's all a question of what you call what we're in.

It's semantics "Dance With The Stars." This quick left-to-right, right-to-left tango after Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain dropped the D-word inadvertently (so matter of factly, in fact, that you'd swear there's a Depression on) in a talk about fiscal stimulus. Aides called it a 'slip of the tongue,' as though he'd stepped on a banana peel with his mouth. Then there's the International Monetary Fund's Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who said the first-world was already in a Depression. What'does she know? And on and on. It's entertaining, depressing - as in the other well-known sense of the word - and here at "Thomas Cave's Tattoo," we believe, validating.

It's a Depression. Let's get on with it; call some friends over; smoke some bananas, get out the sewing kits and patch some jeans. Look good walking past the restaurants you used to go into.

The best bit in Mr. Porter's piece is President Jimmy Carter heavy-hoodooing his inflation expert, Albert Kahn, about using the word "depression" in speeches in 1978 on soaring inflation. Mr. Kahn routinely replaced it with "banana," which no one blinked at.

Yes! We Have No Bananas. We Have No Bananas Today.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

FYI, "Yes! We Have No Bananas" is a song by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn from the 1922 Broadway revue, "Make It Snappy." It was sung by Eddie Cantor. Benny Goodman and Spike Jones also covered the song.

For a recorded excerpt, click here for The Authentic History Center's clip.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo