The Charlotte News

Friday, October 30, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page adds insult to the injury of the incessantly bleak war news with a story of a tornado hitting Arkansas, killing 27 and injuring 200 more. Natural disasters refused to relent for the duration despite the daily manmade ones taking center stage.

Speaking of Watergate, a congressional colloquy is set forth on the editorial page between Wright Patman and three other congressmen regarding the appropriateness of the speech by Wendell Willkie earlier in the week. Exactly thirty years hence, Representative Patman, as chair of the House Banking Committee would be leading the first and only pre-election investigation into the Watergate break-in, following the money trail--that is, until White House pressure on the committee shut down the investigation.

Raymond Clapper bemoans the lack of leadership of FDR relative to his first two terms in office, providing to Wendell Willkie, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and Vice-President Henry Wallace leave to set the stage for the post-war world. Perhaps, the President was subtly aware that he likely wouldn't be around to instruct the post-war arrangements anyway and that it had better therefore be left to those with greater likelihood of longevity. His part, as Mr. Clapper recognized, was to lead the war effort, leaving little time for thought on such wistfully distant matters as the form which a post-war peace might take in the hands of the Allies. That any Allied-favored model might ever come to fruition indeed took a good deal of optimism to believe within the world as it stood at this juncture of history, with the war on all fronts in grave doubt.

Answering Mr. Willkie's complaint that not enough aid was provided China and Russia in fulfillment of the Allied promises, Paul Mallon defines reasons other than insufficient production for the inadequate supply: shipping problems, especially at heavily bombed Murmansk, largely the fault of the Russians for not properly protecting the vital northern port, and the long and treacherous air route necessary to supply China since the Burma Road had fallen in the spring to the Japanese, necessitating flying both equipment and its fuel over the Himalayas.

And had Montaigne ever obtained for his head one of the excelsior wigs which Coster/Musica had imported from Europe to swindle investors, then surely he would have had the itch.

Look with thine ears.

There is no quality so universal in this image of things, as diversity and variety. Both the Greeks and the Latins, and we, for the most express example of similitude, employ that of eggs: and yet there have been men, particularly one at Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference among eggs so well, that he never mistook one for another; and, having many hens, could tell which had laid it. Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet, nor any other cardmarker, can so carefully polish and blanch the backs of his cards, that some gamesters will not distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance does not so much make one, as difference makes another. Nature has obliged herself to make nothing other, that was not unlike. --from "Of Experience" by Michel de Montaigne

See how they fly.

Framed Edition

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