The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 4, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: From another publication comes yet another article, reprinted on today's page, in defense of the Tom Jimison series on the insane asylum at Morganton. It stresses: "The real disgrace and sin is that 17 cents per day. It is that $20.00 per month for women nurses and $40.00 per month for men. The management is to be congratulated on securing even a few who rate above the moron class." Given the letter to the editor from Mrs. Nurse in yesterday's News, finding no fault in the hair-fly-laden soup, finding Jimison seeking special favor by lunching with doctors, finding insult rather than depredation to patients in the truth of his declaration that some of the nurses were unable even to read, we would have to assume that the letter's author was not among the proud and the few.

"Whar's the smellin' salts?" Mrs. Nurse? We can think of whar they might have gone. But then you'd need a greasy set of sockets to find them and that likely would have become a complex puzzler of decision for those not of the proud and the few.

Of course the real fault was as the article relates: too little pay allocated by the State to attract qualified personnel. There was little excuse for it after 1938 as the economy burgeoned and any form of creative thinking in the governor's mansion and the legislature could have, if state funds were insufficient, garnered help in the form of matching grants from Washington, turned the asylum into a WPA project. But since three-fourths of the patients were "charity patients", obviously no one much cared enough to think creatively about their care. Insane charity patients were not a constituency about whom the average pol had to be too much concerned.

Just as the homeless today are forgotten in the morass of red tape to rush to get out a trillion dollars in charity payments to a bunch of corporate crooks who had a big Party on the rest of us. We reiterate: give them a choice: 20 years of jail or pay the bail, 90% of the Party's little dividend. Then us it without fail to aid those who were their victims. That is Change, with a big "C".

Paul Mallon writes of the wily fox, Erwin Rommel, and his wily chieftain, Hitler. As the British had diverted planes to protect Malta against air attack from Sicily and Crete, Hitler diverted transports to Tripoli to deliver troops and 100,000 tons of fresh supplies to Rommel to enable his new northern initiative. In turn, Rommel feinted around the right, while sending his main column to the north and left to Bengasi, which the British had left unprotected to meet Rommel in the desert. Just as he had done to take Tobruk in spring, 1941. Hence, his moniker in the history books.

Mr. Mallon concludes his piece by pointing to the central crank driving the engine of surprise for the Axis, that being the very notion of the literal axis, with its radiating spokes of approach at will, leaving the Allies to fight it on a thusly Axis-scribed outer arc. In other words, blitzkrieg. To counteract it, Mallon suggests, the Allies will need take the offensive and adopt the same tactic in reverse.

Such would they ultimately do, at Normandy, finally at Hiroshima and Nagasaki--the final blitzkrieg.

An author named Struthers Burt, from Southern Pines, underscores the signal aspect of a democracy, the ability to think freely and the duty to exercise that right reasonably. Either limiting free thought or unduly lapsing into lazy, irrational modes of free thinking, exclusively emoting from sentiment, as Hitler and his minions "thought", would spell the death knell for democracy. Democracy, to be contrasted with that of which Hitler had spoken at the Sportspalast on the previous Friday in his annual diatribe against democracy to the German volksbund, proclaiming themselves by fiat the true democracy:

In another portion of the speech, he stated:

Wonder why Roosevelt and Churchill hadn't thought of that one. Take any recalcitrant labor organizer, such as John L. Lewis, out to the factory wall, stand him up before the workers, and shoot him: Democracy, Hitler-style.

Ray Clapper tells of the former automobile manufacturer now manufacturing guns, formerly made at the expenditure of 400 man-hours, at the rate of one every 15 minutes, by adopting the automobile formula devised by Henry Ford at the turn of the century, interchangeable parts and an assembly line. No need for desperate resort to impromptu firing squads as in Germany. (Indeed, under practical threat of one, Ferdie Porsche had ingeniously designed his third-cylinder weakness for the rear engine Thing presently transporting the troops and staff of the columns around in the desert under the command of the Fox. All way and good until the hot air, improperly baffled, exploded it in their face.)

But assembly lines, at least those outside Emden and Wembley, could not manufacture mules, and mules the Army now needed again, says "$500 a Pair"--even if an anxious Patton pushing to be the first to put a bullet into the paper-hanger in Berlin by 1944 allegedly shot a couple once blocking his column's advance path across a bridge in France.

The sum of which leads to the daily Bible quote, from which we might suggest comes the admonition, "Don't look back."

A few verses earlier, Rommel might have noted, it says: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head."

We would then ask you to ask yourself: Where doth the Son goeth at night? Where doth the moon when the stars are shining bright? Where doth the starry plough when the clouds meet the quarry's bough in the howling woods chock full of the lowing beast made frough, the trailing warrior then slipping his shrapnel package to its case to beset the pace of the quailing treed foul?