The Charlotte News

Friday, April 17, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: To those who think that absurd sanctions have been set up to limit cigarette smoking in public places these days, you had best, woman or man, wax serious and read the little piece on today’s front page re the unfortunate who practiced his piquant profligacy before a tough air raid warden in Newark. When, at the start of a practice blackout, the gent refused to snuff his agent of cancerous respiratory infiltration, the air raid warden struck him roundly with her rawhide whip. Rawhide, no less.

Then, when the lights were flicked back on again, as if the lash had not been quite sufficient punishment administered for the miscue at the hand of this forerunner to Natasha Fatale, he was arrested for disorderly conduct; not she, he.

And when he was then keel-hauled before the court, he was sentenced to a year in jail—for smoking during a practice blackout.

Such times, misguided nostalgically inclined aficionados of the forties oft proclaim as the "good ole days", the times that were when life was far less complex and governed by far fewer officious rules. To those again, take note--unless, that is, your actual proclivities tend toward nostalgie de la boue instead of mere nostalgia.

We don’t smoke cigarettes, nor do we countenance with approval same, and advocate that you not take up the loathsome habit. But, we also do not advocate putting out someone’s blue-curling, lung-furling Incubus-conjurer with either bullwhip, chainsaw, or jail sentence. That is a bit extreme, even retributively for passive resistance to an order provided during a practice blackout. For we cannot quite imagine the gunner in a Stuka, flying high enough over Newark to avoid anti-aircraft batteries, able to see the collaborative flicker of even a thousand cigarette smokers, each inhaling in unison, let alone a solitary death-defier, perhaps barely puffing, to escape his nerves of the moment. A polite, curt caution, it seems, would quite have sufficed.

Besides, taking up the example provided by the Nazis the year before during the RAF bombing of Bremen, as well the tactic used by the British during the London Blitz, bright searchlights would have been employed to obliterate targets via blinding light, in which case blackout drills would have been rendered fairly superfluous anyway.

The nation had indeed gone a little mad; there is little doubt of it.

But then, we reflect back to the months following September 11, 2001. We also then reflect on those concerts back there in the early seventies where large numbers of people lit matches at one time and held them aloft, lighting in the process whole sections of an otherwise darkened arena (betraying in the process other items of interest also being lit). So, after all, maybe the lady with the bullwhip had her point. Still, the year in jail, on top of the bullwhip, seems a little extreme. Either save the lash or the jail time, but certainly don’t impose both.

It is especially Draconian when one considers that the chief bootlegger in Charlotte had just had his sentence of one year and a day to the roads suspended on probationary conditions.

In any event, when you’re in Newark and there is an air raid, be careful. A lady with that much bull in her may still be carrying that whip around.

Whether, incidentally, the Stuka pilot, marking down his ground target while smoking his ersatz tobacco--the "soggy hay" as Cash once described it--, might have aimed with even more assiduity at a fellow able to afford the luxury of real tobacco, or would have so felt the bond subtly engendered by empathetic envy, that of a comrade likewise seeking an early grave, that he would have, with some level of conscious aforethought, aimed high or low, will forever remain within the purple canyon of the unknown impercipient, at least within the boundaries of the United States.

From both the piece referencing Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s remarks re the gearing up of the American forces to an offensive action, and the news that the continuing RAF raids with increasing frequency and fierceness on German positions in France and on military targets in Germany were displacing fully half the available air strength with which otherwise the Luftwaffe could have been pounding Russian positions on the eastern front, we glean that the combined notions may have been intended to obfuscate what was about to happen the following day, the Doolittle raid on Tokyo—a return in kind for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the brightly lined difference between the contexts of each of the two operations being that the United States was not at war with Japan prior to December 7.

And lest anyone think that Nazi spies were confined to the New York-New Jersey corridor, there is a report of a conviction of a couple in Federal court in Louisville for being unregistered Nazi agents, the husband being the brother of a German army general.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson writes of the low morale in Germany, of the problem Hitler faced at this time, having allowed the Japanese to take the plums of Dutch and French empire interests in the Pacific, respectively the East Indies and Indochina, leaving within the Nazi sphere of control only the European mother countries, overcrowded, under-supplied, the reasons for the establishment of their empire interests in the first place. Hitler, the genius, had done little militarily in the previous year which would not befit not only a madman, as would his whole apparent raison d’être, but also a madman gone completely berzerk and irrevocably departed from reality in the process.

Paul Mallon tosses to the bins of mere conjecture the rumor circulating through Britain that Churchill, knowing the futility of the mission to India to try to effect rapprochement among the disparate religious and secular interests there and to reconcile each and the sum of them vis à vis Britain and its governing interests, had vouchsafed it to Sir Stafford Cripps for the reason of pushing him out of the field of Labor competition for Prime Minister.

Such was a similar rumor to that which attributed a like motivation to FDR for making Joe Kennedy Ambassador to Great Britain in spring, 1938, at that particularly volatile juncture of history, with Anschluss having been just effected by Hitler in March of that year and the situation regarding the claims of right to annexation by Germany of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia beginning to suggest a storm on the Big Lie horizon.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Such fodder for the daily grind of kibitzers is still a traditional pastime among a particularly light-headed crowd, gossiping their way to Canterbury. Every step taken by a leader for peace and prosperity must have hidden within it some darker political implication. We suppose, were the rumors to the contrary, imputing uniformly honorable motives, the earth itself might suddenly stop dead in its tracks and cease anymore, out of pure pout, to revolve on its axis.