108 years ago

108 years ago

The Ridbaz had already fled from Chicago.He was shot at.

There was a Sultan, a Tzar, and 2 Kaisers

The majority of countries today didn’t exist

The name Tel Aviv didn’t exist

Neither of the Poles had yet been reached by humans.

The Ben Ish Chai was alive

Rudyard Kipling had already written Chicago:

I HAVE struck a city–a real city–and they call it Chicago.

The other places do not count. San Francisco was a

pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a

phenomenon.

This place is the first American city I have encountered. It

holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and

stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I

urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by

savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is

dirt. Also it says that it is the “boss” town of America.

I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country.

They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded

and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble

crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about

everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno

with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted

at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for

him told me that this was “the finest hotel in the finest city on

God Almighty’s earth.” By the way, when an American wishes to

indicate the next country or state, he says, “God A’mighty’s

earth.” This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.

Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and

without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the

East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those

held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable

vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and

crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a

great horror.

Except in London–and I have forgotten what London was like–I

had never seen so many white people together, and never such a

collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and

no beauty–only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone

flagging under foot.

A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so

much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all

this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired,

that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one

atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.

…