The Charlotte News
Wednesday, March 4, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of an RAF bombing raid on the Paris suburbs, killing between 600 and 1,500 persons, depending on whether the British estimate or the Vichy estimate was correct. The Renault Motor Works factory was a prime target. The raid was sent as a warning to Vichy to cease its collaboration or suffer more of the same; Vichy did not heed the sharp rebuke and admonition. Such raids, reported the RAF commander, would increase coincident with the Nazi offensive in Russia due to commence in the spring, to create havoc in French production for the German western front. Dover Strait, the British claimed, had also been virtually closed to German shipping by the bombing raids.
From the Caroline Islands, it was reported that an American naval task force had taken the offensive and shot down 16 of 18 heavy Japanese bombers attacking it from the Mandates there.
In the Philippines, a small band of American pilots attacked Japanese ships docked in Subic Bay to the north of Bataan and sunk two large ships, damaging several small ones.
Meanwhile, Japanese Zeroes attacked Darwin on the north coast of Australia and Broome 700 miles south, potential staging grounds for counter-offensive operations once Java finally fell.
Edward O'Hare of St. Louis, for whom Chicago's O'Hare Airport was named in 1949 (at the suggestion ironically of Tribune isolationist publisher Robert McCormick), was hailed this date as America's new flying ace of the war for his shooting down on February 20, near Rabaul above New Ireland off Papua New Guinea, six Japanese fighters. In April, O'Hare would receive the Congressional Medal of Honor at the White House. The young flyer would himself be shot down and killed on the night of November 26, 1943 while operating off the carrier Enterprise in the Gilbert Islands.
In Kansas City, a three-year old ordered a menacing copper stopping his mama to shut-up and leave her alone. At the second injunction, the copper thought better of himself, closed the lid to his citation registry and resumed his patrol for easier pickings.
As we said, with air raid sirens screaming by day and blackouts afoot by night, life was increasingly hard on the nation's three-year olds.
On the editorial page, Paul Mallon speculates on whether Rommel, amid periodic sandstorms hampering his way, could take advantage of the remaining six to eight weeks of available weather before the summer heat began in Libya to make further inroads on British lines, made sparser during the winter by the transfer of squadrons of airmen and contingents of troops to protect Malaya, Burma and India. Hitler, taking advantage of this temporary exiguity, had diverted troops to this theater from Russia during the winter, troops who would soon return north of the Black Sea by the end of April to undertake the spring offensive in the Ukraine. But, asks Mallon, had the Hitler strategy completely failed with the debacle running along his ever-meandering defensive lines in Russia? And could he bring adequate reinforcements from Germany to make up for the devastating losses inflicted during the previous eight months, estimated to be as high as two million? Could he risk leaving France and Norway without adequate protection against an expected invasion by the British? All questions soon to be answered.
Tom Jimison writes of the progress in the science of psychiatry, beckoning from the medieval approach that the mind suffered investiture by demons or, alternatively, "visitations from God". He cites, by example, jury instructions in insanity cases through which even then, in the 1940's, such notions as imprecations from God being cause and warder of the haunted non compos mentis took their seat inside even so usually arcane and captiously periphrastic verbiage as constitute criminal jury instructions, especially those seeking to articulate a definition of legal insanity--as often as not devolving to casuistry. If all else in understanding fails, blame either God, the Devil, or both at once at war over the soul of the hapless miscreant.
Mr. Jimison tells of the parable of Mark 5 wherein Jesus drove out the "unclean spirit" of the Legion, the man possessed by demons causing him to cut himself with stones and break the fetters which sought in futility to hold him fast from himself, the unclean spirits thus being driven by Jesus into 2,000 hogs of Gadarenes which then caused them to plunge over the cliff into the sea, thereupon causing much gnashing of teeth and wailing by the feeders of the hogs who no longer had the hogs to feed or on which to be fed.
Mr. Jimison draws a parallel between this Biblical story and Tar Heelia's Morganton, that the desire to keep producing the hogs deprived the insane from sufficient fruit of scientific advance to enable healing by means of modern medicine and psychiatry.
...And so Legion, rid of the infestation of unclean spirits which possessed him, went home to Decapolis and published the many great things which Jesus had done for him.
Somewhere in all of this reporting of the day's events, we see parallels: The three-year old commanding the copper to shut-up and leave his mama alone perhaps was only momentarily possessed by an unclean spirit, not unlike the one who had in Newark the previous week caused another three-year old to bash an infant to death for crying too much. Butch O'Hare gave his life for his country and got his name permanently on one of its largest commercial airports. It was there, on Halloween, 1960, that the unclean spirit of the ghost of Christmas past and future began haunting Vice-President Nixon. It was from there, too, on October 19 of the same year, that Senator Kennedy had called Coretta King to express his concern over the arrest, during a sit-in at Rich's Department Store, of her husband, held without bail in an Atlanta jail by some numb-skull judge (Kloying Klabble Kleaglet, ex officio) after the other demonstrators had already been released. The latter, too, responded to the Devil who made him dun it.
...And so Legion, rid of the infestation of unclean spirits which possessed him, went home to Decapolis and published the many great things which Jesus had done for him.
Legion, we take it, could be a lot of people. Or, perhaps, a whole society; indeed, the whole world. It all depends on perspective of the moment.
Moral: Don't follow the hogs over the cliff. Talk to your neighbor instead. It saves a lot of problems in the long run and is much cheaper than either health insurance or medication.
Ask any one of the three faces of Charles I, as depicted in the perspicable perspectograph of Van Dyck. Eventually, though not at Decapolis, he, too, would have his epiphany regarding the reckless exercise of earthly power and kingly divine domain.
We haven't yet mentioned, incidentally, that Morganton was also the hometown of Sam Ervin.
Framed Edition
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