But what did people do in the Olden Dayes, back before armchair technology guru Al Gore invented the Interwebs? How did people find out that their cats were, in fact, no different from everyone else's cats? Where did they go to find throngs of like-minded idiots with whom to commiserate regarding the alarming decline of their own particular brand of idiocy?
Well, my friends, I have stumbled upon the answer. A few weeks ago I ran across a box of yellowed booklets at an estate sale, most of them written by one Joseph McCabe. Maybe you know the name; I didn't. Apparently he was a well-known "freethinker" back in the day, which is what they used to call people who were free to think anything except that there might be a God of some sort. If you stumbled across that particular belief, you were kicked out of the club. It was a very open-minded sort of club in that way.In any case, this Joseph McCabe was what passed for a blogger in the 1930s-40s. He seems to have been a pretty smart guy, if a bit of a crank, and he wrote on EVERYTHING. The first booklet to catch my eye was something entitled "Our Wonderful Glands." It's about, well, our wonderful glands. Then there is "The Nature, History and Uses of Aphrodisiacs," "Television -- What It Is and How It Works" and "How the Talkies Talk." Despite his wide range of topics, Mr. McCabe did not, as far as I can tell, own a cat.
"Television and How it Works," penned in 1937, begins:
Thirteen years ago, I wrote a popular manual of physics in which I told my readers that when certain processes that were then in their crude infancy were perfected we should be able to sit an arm chair* at home and see what was at that moment happening in 42nd Street or at the baseball ground. A scientific weekly condescended to notice my book but warned me, on a note of high superiority, not to put such dreams before the public.Joe's prognostication was so uncannily accurate that he can be forgiven for using the term "baseball ground."
Mostly old Joe seemed to be concerned with spreading the gospel of atheism and exposing the evils of the Catholic Church. (Joe spent ten years in a monastery, but it evidently didn't take). For a while there was even a Joseph McCabe Magazine (later modestly renamed to Appeal to Reason Library), which seems to have been written almost entirely by old Joe himself. One volume of Appeal to Reason Library is made up of articles like "Catholics and Crime, or Why the Catholics Fill the Jails," "How the Roman Catholic Church Gets Wealth and Power," and "Celibacy, an Unscrupulous Policy." In 1937 old Joe wrote a nice 32 page pamphlet entitled "Vice in German Monasteries," in which he unfortunately bases much of his case on the rantings of Goebbels. Tough luck, Joe.Another issue of The Joseph McCabe Magazine promises In This Issue that "Science Conducts God to Its Frontier -- Atheism Advances Despite Absurd Cavortings of a Few Scientists Who Speak Up For God." Come on, Joe, tell us how you really feel. (By the way, is it just me, or does absurd cavorting sound like a pretty good time?)
Joe's disgust with the clerical bias of the editors of the Encyclopedia Brittanica prompted him to write "The Lies and Fallacies of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- How Powerful and Shameless Clerical Forces Castrated a Famous Work of Reference." (Castration being a particularly tragic fate once one has been schooled in the mysteries of Our Wonderful Glands.) Joe got so mad, in fact, that he beat Wikipedia by 60 years in writing his own alternative to the esteemed encyclopedia. That's right, I have in my hands Volume 2 of Joseph McCabe's The Encyclopedia of Essential Knowledge. Evidently there was a lot less to know in 1948, because all of Volume 2 (D to H) is slightly larger than the instruction booklet for the George Foreman grill.In fact, it's significantly shorter than my book, Antisocial Commentary, which is currently on sale for the absurdly cavorting price of $9.95 with free shipping. To be fair, my book does not contain a section on Thomas Edison which reads, in its entirety:
Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1941). The famous inventor read Gibbon and Hume before he was 10 and was an outspoken Agnostic all his life. In his later years he, like Lembroso, dabbled in spiritualism but does not seem to have gone beyond inquiry.Sadly there are no illustrations, but I'm hopeful that a revised edition will soon be released with Thomas Edison thinking Great Agnostic Thoughts. If only there were some universally recognized symbol that could be used to indicate that Edison was thinking brilliant thoughts. Maybe a thought bubble with an oil lamp in it.
The Encyclopedia of Essential Knowledge also surprisingly omits Novelty Testicles and The Incredible Hulk -- mistakes I was careful not to repeat in my own book.
Some of you, I suspect, are still agnostic regarding my thesis that the cranky pamphleteers of the mid-20th century were the bloggers of their time. To you, I submit the fact that the final pages of the Josesph McCabe Magazine are filled with letters -- which is to say comments -- by readers on previous essays, and ads for other booklets (cough, cough, blogroll) that the reader might enjoy. Finally, there are the somewhat questionable ads for various products filling out the remainder of the pamphlets.
In case you can't read it, there are ads for pamphlets titled "The Treatment of Impotence in Man and Woman," "The Latest So-Called Miracle Cures for Gonorrhea" and (my personal favorite): "When are Girls Promiscuous? Love's Physiology for the Virgin and Her Sister." (Original Title: "Frank Talk About Sex for the Virgin and Her Sister, the Filthy, Filthy Whore.")
It is a tragedy that these valuable writings have virtually disappeared, surviving only in a few dog-eared and yellowing copies ignominiously offered for sale for a few pennies at an estate sale. I am proud to have done my part to immortalize these works by blogging about them. At least this very small fraction of Joseph McCabe's works will be accessible for eternity to all of humanity via the miracle of the internet. Along with 800 million posts about cats.
*I swear I didn't know the "arm chair" reference was in there when I started writing this post.
The virgin and her sister hang out at humor-blogs.com.
Labels: Books, Christianity
]]>