The Charlotte News

Friday, October 2, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: On the Russian front, says the front page, the German news bureau admitted trouble in taking Stalingrad, that the defenders had put up an unexpectedly strong and continuing fight, holding the aggressors in the northern sector of the city. As winter fast approached, the bloody siege obviously was taking its toll on German morale with the memory all too fresh of the bloody ground won the previous year all the way to the suburbs of Moscow, only to be driven some 200 miles in retreat from it during the fierce winter counter-offensive. And no longer in support were trained troops. The cannon fodder for the Nazi were little more than boys barely with whiskers by this juncture.

If you think that school violence caused by gun-wielding youths is a phenomenon only of the last couple of decades, think again. The report from Brooklyn, hardly making a ripple amid the war news, tells the story in brief of the junior high school teacher who was shot to death, apparently by two young boys, strangers to the school, after he sought their ouster from the grounds.

Liquor distilling was completely halted by the government for the duration of the war, albeit with a three and a half year supply on hand. The alcohol was needed for making explosives and synthetic rubber.

Perhaps, some industrious units in the Pacific might have saved some intermediate manufacturing steps and need for shipment of ammunition over long distances by simply focusing their attention on some of the suicide-proned, Nirvana-seeking Japanese prisoners, plying them with the raw alcohol, lighting a match in their general vicinity as they were rolled down the various hillsides toward enemy encampments and allowed their wish fulfillment to become thereby human torpedoes. Call it Operation Flambéed Distilled Chilled Wills via Bibacity. But, we suppose, the Geneva Convention would have frowned on that.

The coffee muggers of Charlotte who apparently were buying up all the coffee to which they could lay siege, causing a shortage in Mecklenburg, were obviously at work in Ohio as well.

Maybe to supplant lost trade, the Carl Lippard bootlegging gang, on trial finally, notwithstanding Solictor Carpenter’s apparent tenderness toward them in the past, cunningly were moving in on the coffee monopoly as a new piratical pursuit.

Gas, we are informed, was being bootlegged in all the major cities on the eastern seaboard, enabling those with the "A" ration cards, limiting usage to four gallons per week, to drive far more than their allotted distance. Likewise, there was no reason to suspect that coffee as a commodity would be immune to the bootleggers’ endeavors.

Governor Broughton summarily ordered all North Carolina speed limits to accord with the newly announced recommendations of the Federal government. And so the hotrodders would have to cool their jets to emit less carbon monoxide and burn less rubber at 35 mph. Whether the Carl Lippard gang had a special exemption, only time will tell.

On the editorial page, in addition to reports on Mr. Lippard and his part in a 3.5 million dollar annual trade, "High-Low" remarks on the comments of Navy flyer, Lieutenant Commander John Thrach, who told the brass in Washington that attempted horizontal bombing of ships was a bootless exercise in futility, that only dive bombers and fighter planes were effective against such targets.

Obliquely, he also appeared to delimit the heroic status of Captain Colin Kelly, the war’s first American hero, who died December 10 after saving his Flying Fortress crew and, apparently, according to contemporaneous reports, delivering a fatal blow to the Japanese destroyer Haruna near the Philippines. Commander Thrach, however, implied that Captain Kelly had not hit any target after all, even if his heroics in staying with the subsequently stricken aircraft until all of the crew had bailed out remained beyond question.

In fact, Haruna was not in the area and continued in the Japanese fighting force until being struck in its home port at Kure in the latter days of the war, July 28, 1945. It is unresolved whether Captain Kelly and his crew struck some other ship, a light cruiser or large transport.

Haruna, as well as another of the ships believed to have been hit in the first days after Pearl Harbor, Kongo, would on October 13 jointly launch salvos into Henderson Field from off Lunga Point to the north of Guadalcanal, destroying 48 Allied aircraft and nearly crippling the airfield. Kongo would be sunk November 21, 1944 in the Formosa Strait, off the coast of China.

And lest any such bright idea as compulsory work, explored in "Tired Manpower", should grip the limited imagination of any contemporary official as it did to the U. S. Employment Service in Robeson County, the locus of the recent problems between the local ministers and the Catholic-run USO hut, go here and read it carefully. It does not work, constitutionally. Tyrants, however, and those wishing for a renewal of the slave trade, may proceed at will. But beware the consequences.

Dorothy Thompson explores, in contrast to the substantive, society’s ephemera resultant of salesmanship, and suggests a confrontation with the truth thus conveyed in the contrast to result in change for the better, before the bunting-pennoned civilization thus constructed by the salesmen of the world during the previous half century or so should vanquish all meaning, leaving only behind itself a comic book caricature of a Superman’s myth, the reductio ad absurdum of which left only nihilism in its wake—as made starkly evident upon the steppes of Russia in the mounds of rotting corpses laid down for naught but Der Fuehrer’s conception of Aryan supremacy, thus to send young boys to do his bidding of plundering his rightful Aryan prize, the oilfields of the Caucasus.

But for the nonce, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche had led the patently insane to take literally everything he said, including that which he meant only figuratively and by interposition of literary device to stimulate philosophical argument, and to use it, by the force of will and technology, the deus ex machina, harnessed to pursuits deemed beyond good and evil, to pilot the world to the brink of the abyss.

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. To recognise untruth as a condition of life; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

–Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1885.

If you try to interpret that literally, you are quite likely as insane as Adolf Hitler.

As we interpret the paragraph within a logical framework, Mr. Nietzsche violated basic epistemological rules by assigning the qualitative value judgment of "falseness", as a thing cannot be true or false if it is truly beyond moral judgment, that is beyond good and evil, in a philosophical sense, that is. Thus, his statement is ultimately at best a mistaken contradiction in terms, at worst, a nihilistic absurdity. For, if there is no "falseness" in the philosophy which is "beyond good and evil", as perforce by definition there cannot be, then there is no recognition of the contrasting qualities between that which is the objectively existent world in nature and that which man imagines as a counterfeit to superimpose on its reality, via various symbolic modes--language, numbers, pictures, musical tones, etc.--, so as to provide contrasting ideas to discern more closely the objective reality of the world from an otherwise inherently unreliable interface with subjective human perception, childishly unbounded, except by logic and reason, by its imaginings and emotional reactions coloring judgments. Thus, one could not properly and logically state, as does Mr. Nietzsche, that to recognize untruth as a condition of life in order to provide such contrasting notions to better discern reality and its constraints morally and practically in the abstract, trial and error so to speak, both in thought and action, means thereby to be beyond good and evil.

Logically, it is quite to the contrary, for the very recognition of the notion of "untruth" as a quality, as a form of "evil" by its normative attributes--that is to be false is to be, by definition, not good--places the entire gestalt within conceptual subjection to good and evil, qualitative valuation.

To be beyond good and evil presupposes no quality in any ascription. There can be no truth and consequently no falseness--in short, the Nazi credo, the cult of personality ruling all with pure emotion, not thought. A Nazi world is not one even so facile as to be black and white, good and evil. There is no contrast at all, no color, no quality. All judgment is relinquished to the superego-conscience of the one supreme personality of the cult, the chieftain of the tribe whose perceptions and judgments are presumed to have directly obtained from some ephemeral higher power, denominated "god" or "superman", and thus beyond mortal recognition in terms of judgment, beyond the subtle colorations of good and evil, truth and untruth--entirely relegated to the realm of emotion. Call the condition hyperbilious paroxysmic bombacity--hyperbiloxybomb, for short.

If you do not understand what we mean by those last paragraphs, then do us all a favor and, until you understand it, neither vote nor seek public office yourself. Should you already be in public office and cannot understand it, by all means do not run again until you do. In short, sit down and listen for a change.

In any event, the "synthetic judgments" and their necessity as a sine qua non for sustenance of the human gestalt by mode of comparison and contrast between its opposing qualities, as conceived by Nietzsche, have little or nothing to do, we assume, with the a priori ban made extant this date on distillate spirituous inebriant production for the duration so that rubber substitutes and explosives might thrive in a world gone completely, perhaps irretrievably, mad, in large part thanks to completely erroneous assumptions gleaned from Mr. Nietzsche--among others, such as Machiavelli.

Kryptonite. Where is the kryptonite?

Probably somewhere under Bikini Atoll.

Incidentally, we read today in The New York Times that in Icy Cape, Alaska 131 walrus pups were stampeded to death, a stampede of unknown immediate cause, but ultimately attributed to the dramatic glacial meltdown in recent years, reducing the available ice floes on which the adult walruses floated with their young while fishing at sea--as fishermen seeking oysters or crabs from a ship. Now, they must congregate on the beaches to do their fishing, for want of these ships which have melted away because of man's speed-demon ways and inherent profligacy. In so congregating, stampedes of the type reported are more likely to occur, though not unique in recent times to the history of the walrus over the longer term of the past century--nevertheless chronicled only within the industrial age. If we eat all of their oysters and don't share a few with them, they are going to get mad at us, and, ultimately, we foresee that we shall be stampeded, too.

Have you your cardigan to maintain your thermostat during the winter at 65? And you, you thought 68 wasn't such a hot idea in '77.

Framed Edition

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