The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 8, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page delivers a grim statistic for the first year of U.S. participation in the war, 58,307 killed, missing, and wounded. Because of incomplete records of those confined as prisoners of war, it was not possible to know how many of those missing were prisoners, especially those held by the Japanese in the Philippines and Dutch East Indies, those being slowly starved to death who had been able to survive the Death March out of Bataan in the spring. Those comprised the bulk of the 35,576 casualties of the war thus far from the Army.

The Allies continued their tenuous hold on lines in the heights of Tebourba and at Mateur and Djedeida. Under the command of Lt.-General K.A.N. Anderson, the forces were arrayed roughly in the shape of a horseshoe, the two ends aimed at Bizerte and Tunis.

From West Africa came the news that Dakar had been surrendered to the Allies for use as a crucial base in that region. Admiral Darlan, now in his last days of existence, had been instrumental in effecting the surrender which included French ships.

These ships would help to offset those twenty now announced by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to have survived the scuttling at Toulon of the 75-ship French Fleet. In addition to these twenty which remained afloat, at least three battleships, along with other vessels, were reported to be salvageable by the Nazis.

The launch of the U.S.S. New Jersey, the heaviest heavyweight battleship, weighing in at 52,000 tons, yet to be sent down the ways, had occurred the day before. The New Jersey was part of the Iowa class of battleships, and remained in service throughout the war. The stalwart ship saw sporadic service in Korea and even for a year at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968-69, and was again re-commissioned in late 1982 for service in the Middle East, until its final retirement in 1991.

And, as someone broke into the elephant house of the Detroit Zoo and stole 21 Capuchin monkeys, as opposed to Capuchin monks, though, the piece reports, the monkeys were particularly docile--as, we assume, so would have been the monks, provided they had their cappuccinos--, a soldier in a Chicago eatery sacrificed his cup of coffee for the road to a noisy woman demanding a second cup, beyond rationing quota. She drank it.

Whether the coffee was cappuccino and whether the soldier, by pacifying the woman’s obvious addiction, either to caffeine, sugar, or both, was simply trying to make a monkey out of her as he played the part of the chivalrous monk, the piece does not report.

But that which we fail to comprehend is what in hell the Capuchin monkeys were doing in the elephant house in the first place, and whether the hapless burglar, who, the piece says, was lucky not to latch onto the man-eating monkeys, sought initially to steal an elephant, for want of other Detroit wheels to drive, but had to settle instead for something more compact. And, whether, on the way out, with his monkey on his back, from whom he had nothing to hide but himself and his monk, he saw Elaine the Fair smiling a becoming grin at his obvious dilemma of choices--monkey or elephant.

Also, whether Old Kate was there, likewise, is not revealed. Nor whether Ben, today, or even in May, 1941, effecting his egress from the Kentucky Derby, actually would be arrested as a stalker.

The editorial page begins with a piece on the concentration by Hitler of Luftwaffe planes in defense of the crucial positions of Tunis and Bizerte, taking off from positions in Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia. Thus far, the editorial reports, Axis planes outnumbered those of the Allies, though the Allies maintained superior ground forces. But until the Allied air forces could match the Axis planes, there would be a long and desperate duel ahead for the remaining Axis footholds in the region.

"First Cousin" is not about the theft of the Capuchin Jockos. Rather it hurls some flak at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the agency created in spring, 1933 during the beginning of the end for the apogee of the Depression, to provide farm subsidies, especially for cotton farmers, as a hedge against high tariffs imposed by the government--the high tariffs, that is, imposed during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover dozen years of government. The editorial suggests that the agency ought undergo scrutiny at least, in light of the demise of WPA and the changes brought on by the war. The piece was not counseling the abolition of AAA, but only that it be reorganized in light of current conditions.

The farmers, recall, were very much ailing at the time, however, for lack of employees, those having fled to the cities for higher paying war industry jobs; and so were in need of the subsidies more than ever at this time, to continue to fulfill the necessary quota for food to satisfy the necessities of both military and civilian consumption. Thus, this particular space seemed to be stretching itself to fill otherwise empty volume of the day‘s column, talking largely through its hat, myopically forgetting to consider the present plight of the farmer while shifting to him the burden to prove his continuing need for subsidy.

Perhaps, the piece was prompted by the front page piece reporting a bumper cotton crop of thirteen million bales of cotton picked for market, setting a new record yield of 275 pounds per acre, even if considerably short by 350,000 bales of its predicted yield. Just where they got the cotton pickers to pick the cotton remains a mystery. Perhaps all across the country there were volunteers such as the socialite ladies depicted picking the ailing neighbor’s cotton, as presented in The News three months earlier.

Dorothy Thompson predicts that, with the pulling of the plug on WPA, the day of government welfare programs would likely not come again in the future. Yet, her prediction of the soliloquy, which she thought unlikely ever again to occur, would, by the 1960’s, frame a familiar ring to the country, much to the consternation of many, if not most, fiscal and social conservatives, mostly among Republicans, as the Democrats were largely untied by their constituencies, and thus united, on this particular issue--(ah, the mystical wonders of typos sometimes leading on to develop alliteratively conjunctive prose, if not to devolve unto chaotic absurdity)--the South tending toward understanding, if not uniformly, of the need for government aid in impoverished areas.

Raymond Clapper admits to having been an isolationist prior to the fall of France, but since, he says, had been solidly on the side of interventionism, that a solid defense must be maintained post-war to avoid the recurrence of that which was ongoing as a result, as he saw it, of isolationism in the country pervading in the twenties and thirties.

And, he was, sadly, correct, of course. As there are madmen in the United States, so, too, are there madmen abounding throughout the globe. Yet, pre-emption is precisely the way to aggravate, not ameliorate, the situation, we opine, often stimulating otherwise docile elements to act by bombing their neighborhoods into a submission which was never being contested actively in those neighborhoods in the first instance.

"Weaned!" suggests that Mecklenburg, with its moonshine trade to replace the availability of legal liquor, was in better straits than the 25 wet counties of the state with state-licensed A.B.C. stores controlling the trade, as rationing was now kicked in to boot, without reference to need as between different classes of customers, on all liquor sales.

Otis, it would appear by the piece, was going to have to get by on the same ration card with which Aunt Bee sufficed for pickling her holiday recipes and peppering her sauces. Perhaps, Aunt Bee could simply invite Otis from the jail to the hearth of home for a pleasant Christmas meal, where everyone, yes, even him, would get pleasantly smashed on the mash before the world’s horrible war news, while the Darlings played jugband music with the empties: "Shady Grove", right on over to "Lonesome Traveler".

Anyhow, The News also announces the coming of a new syndicated columnist to the page, beginning next day. Sam Grafton, it says, was both informed and witty. He would replace Paul Mallon who had been on the page for one year since Hugh Johnson was ousted shortly after Pearl Harbor, the General then passing away at age 59 on April 15.

Mr. Mallon had decidedly become conservative in his viewpoint of late. As to whether that led to reader complaint or whether some other reason lay in back of the decision to give him the boot, the piece remains silent.

Mr. Mallon would die in 1950 at age 49 of a heart ailment. He had lain aside his column already, in September, 1947, concluding with the question: "Don’t you think a lot more people ought to go fishing?"

A Hearst disciple, he was, after the war, as was made evident in his column during 1942, decidedly anti-Communist. Whether this bent led to his early retirement in a slowly encroaching Communist world bound for the fields of Megiddo, or whether it was simply health related, we don’t know.

Perhaps, he took the Darlings along with him to the fishing hole every morning though and had some good jugband music, especially when he was able, along with us, occasionally to play hooky from school, feigning a fever--stuck right in between Lucy and "The Real McCoys", and "Bonny Hielan' Laddie" tempered by "Guardo El Lobo"--all to good effect though. Every good boy or girl needs a rest from school occasionally.

And Herblock might have added:

You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life
That should be in a Roman you do want,
Or else you use not. You look pale and gaze
And put on fear and cast yourself in wonder,
To see the strange impatience of the heavens:
But if you would consider the true cause
Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts,
Why birds and beasts from quality and kind,
Why old men fool and children calculate,
Why all these things change from their ordinance
Their natures and preformed faculties
To monstrous quality,--why, you shall find
That heaven hath infused them with these spirits,
To make them instruments of fear and warning
Unto some monstrous state.
Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol,
A man no mightier than thyself or me
In personal action, yet prodigious grown
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

Here’s another film, from the Hit Parade, we had never seen until yesterday.

What Jett Rink, (whether on or off the oil rig), and all the sons of Benedicts, thought of it, we don’t know either.

We, ourselves, however, aren’t partial to it.

Whereof and wherefore, incidentally, the origin and significance from which the yellow rose arose, nobody seems really to know.

But, as they say, a rose is a rose, and by any other colour, still a rose.

Existential question of the day, from Elvis, downstream: "Can Snooky Lanson keep 's Pan on, in Amarillo?"

Mista Hagga might have the answa.

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