The Charlotte News

Saturday, February 21, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Chimera" suggests the rectitude of the position adopted by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on protection of the coasts against submarine attack, that military personnel and equipment should not be utilized to protect against such spurious and sporadic attack as occasioned by the stealthy U-boats off the East coast or the Japanese off the West, at the expense of sending men and materiel to Europe and the Far East, that the distant front was of greater strategic significance to determine victory than by curling inward, falling for Hitler's bait, funneling off from the major war fronts vital resources for an intermittent and remote danger at its worst.

Meanwhile, Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, a former isolationist, Senator Hiram Johnson of California, never an interventionist, and Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, a fiscal conservative, each was plumping, to varying degrees, for coastal defense.

You can't win them all.

Dorothy Thompson echoes a plaint which author Pearl Buck had made in a reprinted Time letter to the editor, appearing on the page of January 15, that it was unwise with respect to the Chinese allies to refer to the Japanese as the "little yellow _________" or the "little yellow ___-__-_______", for they were all yellow, the Chinese and Japanese.

Cash, of course, had solved this problem admirably from 1937 onward by simply distinguishing the Japanese as the "little brown brother". But that was a long while back and, nowadays, all our brothers are one in whiteness.

Ms. Thompson and Ms. Buck, all lightness aside, did make their serious point in this regard.

Ms. Thompson also wonders why the Ford plant was not torched by the British evacuating Singapore before it fell and afforded the publicity to the Japanese of obtaining its surrender within the automobile factory. No matter; the Japanese were never able to make any Fords. Nor, to our knowledge, did the taking of Singapore enable them to sing any better. Whether the factory could be converted to armament manufacture with the skill and aplomb with which the Willow Run Ford plant was being converted, turning out those invaluable Flying Fortresses, we cannot say. We shall check up on it in due course.

Paul Mallon indicates accurately that India would not be the casual plum for the picking which Burma, Malaya, and Thailand had proved for the Japanese, that the 700,000 troops capable of being mustered in India were fifteen times that of the Japanese in Burma, that Chiang Kai-Shek had visited India to persuade the government to rid the country of Fifth Columnists and had done so successfully, with purges following. Moreover, Mr. Mallon warns that the mountain ranges separating Burma and India were a natural barrier through which there were no roads of significance by which to make passage.

Indeed, India, along with Australia, which he also mentions as being difficult with its vast northern outback before reaching Melbourne and Sydney where most of the population lay, would be the final stands for the British and Americans in the Near and Far East once the Philippines and N.E.I. fell.

The letter to the editor on the page refers back to the editorial appearing on February 18, "One Against", and its tagline warning Governor Broughton to hidy-hole the state's unemployment surplus against potential looting by "damnyankees" purportedly threatening to take the surplus from the efficiently managed North Carolina fund for pooling with Federal resources to assist the newly laid-off auto workers displaced by the defense workers in their former plants.

The letter writer, a supercilious damnyankee, takes grave offense and becomes downright defensive at the offensively defensive reference and finds it right damned insulting, coming as it does from a bunch of ignorant, uncouth, unmannered hillbilly, redneck, white-trash Southerners, who she regards as beneath her for having not gotten beyond the Civil War but who she also, by experience, relates would not receive the least bit of condescension or mistreatment in damnyankeedom, either by her or anyone else--that is so long as they didn't refer to anyone up there as "damnyankees".

The editorial note perhaps explains best the understanding to be gleaned from the reference. But the damnyankee lady does make a mistake, which only a censorious damnyankee would probably make, or at least a Southern cracker who thought she grew up on a plantation but for the damnyankees having taken it after the Civil War, and that is referring to the phrase as "damyankee", a definite social faux pas.

That, of course, nevertheless, was a long time ago, also, and nowadays we just refer to them as our brothers and sisters of the Ultima Thule. Nevertheless, many of them still do not know what grits are, which is a shock to us, for when in the South, we encounter them most every day. They are made from corn which grows in trees, usually found on sugar cane plantations by the inland seas which abound down here where it is always hot and humid, even along the strands, and most everyone goes barefoot most of the time and lounge otherwise languorously in the well-mossed shade of the weeping willow cast while the whippoorwills chirp by the eventide's purple in cross-shadowed light sneaking, striated, through the barn window at sunset interspersed by bursts of strange coincidence of clouds breaking suddenly in clangorous exultation of God's merciless yoke encumbering the furrowed toil which punctuates the Sensorium's strikes of harvest rendering the cates ripe for seasoning in the catchpenny pot-boilers sitting by the brick-fired hearth of the main house.

And as to that stuff in the lower right corner regarding the latter being the former to be the latter and all that, you'll have to figure out what they meant; it took us a minute. And we're still not entirely sure. We thought for a bit they were suggesting that the Navy should be manned by women in order to be properly rigged, but we don't gather that is what it was. Perhaps instead something about the curling bowlin to manipulate the mainsail?

And whether Jesus wound up in the jailhouse now for hoarding sugar with his best friend Bob for saying what he said there in the quoted Biblical passage of the day, we shall let you discern for yourself, musically that is.

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