The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 5, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Returning a moment to Saturday’s editorial, "Reverse Twist", or, as you like it, in Russian, "Tsiwt Esrever", we thought we would show you the whole pages for those two dates to which we referred you in hindsight, December 27, 1938 and January 23, 1940. You will note as to the December 27, 1938 page several interesting things, starting with those numbers in the Ripley’s. (Blow that up and print it out and look at it then in the mirror if you need to figure out what it says.) You will glean there that only one number is reversible such that it comes out as the same number either way about. It is, shall we say, curious.

It is made the more so by the fact that, believe it or not, we had never seen that whole page, at least for more than a couple of seconds, when, on December 31, 2005, we indited the note attached to it. All we had then was the editorial column and the column immediately next to it, in the form of a hard photocopy. We did not acquire the .pdf full page format until January, 2009 and only actually looked at the page night before last, here in the merry month of May.

Elsewhere on that page, Heywood Broun recommended against the use of pseudonyms for authors in general, and in particular for Il Duce, based on Broun’s own unique discordant experience with disharmony among his various alter-egoes after a reader wrote to his former publication praising one doppelgänger and thoroughly castigating that Heywood Broun fellow.

There is a quote of Sir Walter Scott from December 27, 1838 appearing in the Salisbury Watchman; the precise work from which the quote comes we have thus far failed in our scholarship to locate. As most of what he wrote is online, we have our suspicions as to the accuracy of the quote. But they didn’t have internet search engines in 1838 and so, if so, we may forgive their inaccuracy—this time. Heck, we don’t think they even had the internet then, did they? Maybe. We’ll have to look that up when we have more time.

There in "What’s the Rush?", from Fisher Plant Life--whether some General Motors Corporation Chevy Chase publication, (or perhaps one for which E. Howard Hunt was responsible)--, we don’t know. But there it is, and you may read it for yourself. We are much too pushed to explain it.

There is that little squib piece, too, over there, entitled "The Lady and a Fox", from the Sandhill Citizen, located somewhere, presumably, down in eastern North Carolina. You may read that one, too, and make of it what you will, remembering what we referenced one day obliquely to you about Madame Nhu’s daughter in those photographs from an issue of Life, dated November 8, 1963, wherein she was hitting clay pigeons at the rate of 60% with her first handling of a shotgun, on the ranch of rabid anti-Communist Dudley Dougherty in Beeville, Texas. Mr. Dougherty apparently was charmed by Madame Nhu's fascist, anti-American rhetoric issued biliously during her visit that darkly fateful October-November. The photos of daughter Le Thuy had been taken before the assassination in South Vietnam on November 2 of her father and uncle, the brothers Diem (or, more correctly, Ngo Dinh). Madame Nhu and Le Thuy were still in the United States, however, on November 22, having been barred from returning to South Vietnam.

Ms. Davis, the author of the piece on the apostrophe, had yet a second contribution to the page of the day, that one being, in part, speculation as to the habit with which angels might adorn themselves. We make note of that because, in viewing those photographs in December 2005 which we posted in association with that December 27 page--before we ever saw the full page for more than those few fleet seconds as the microfilm whirrrred to an apt stop to be zapped onto the printer, coin dropped, button clicked, and photocopied quick, and then on to the next day’s page, occurring sometime, probably circa 2000--, we were playing repeatedly a song about an angel, sung by John Lee Hooker with an Italian artist named Zucchero. (Try it, and you will see what we mean.)

Incidentally, we are not blind. The two indiscernible words in our original photostatic copy are quite discernible in the .pdf version. They are, if you cannot see them for some reason, in that quoted sentence at the bottom of the first column, "authors" and "crimes", such that the whole sentence now reads: "And in an interview with an enigmatic Mr. Clifford, General Francisco Franco, probably the best single butcher that Europe has seen since the Albigensian Crusade, is made to think ‘it monstrous that Geneva permits the authors of so many crimes’ (the heads of the Spanish Government) to appear there at all."

In any event, we have yet to figure out how those numbers add up, but we are sure, within Mr. Ripley’s imagination, they must have. Every bit as much as that photo did to the Warren Commision.

As to the January 23, 1940 page, ditto as to our available view when we posted in 2007 the note on its editorial column; until yesterday, we had never studied the full page, having only retrieved it in .pdf format in January, 2008. You may peruse it for yourself. We find the "Side Glances" interesting.

The front page of this date indicates a successful RAF raid 600 miles deep into German occupied territory in Czechoslovakia to hit the Skoda munition works, the most valuable ultimate asset to the Reich out of the Munich accord when it was permitted to annex the Sudetenland in September, 1938, gradually thereafter, by March, 1939, violating the pact to consume the remainder of Czech territory, including Skoda, as the Bavarian cuckoos chirped their chorus in time.

It was the second occasion in ten days that the RAF had struck at Skoda.

A raid also hit Stuttgart, the home of Volkswagenwerk, where the Reich was manufacturing the German-equivalent of the Jeep, the Thing, with the same chassis and drivetrain as the pre-war prototype People’s Car, never actually manufactured en masse until post-war occupation.

If the late spring offensive to come in Russia proved unsuccessful, said a reliable source in Germany, General von Brauchitsch, once, prior to late December, and now again, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht on the Russian front, threatened, in a personal meeting with Hitler, that the military would displace Nazism and institute a suitable replacement government. Hitler was reported to have received the news calmly. This report, coming on the heels of Hitler’s speech the previous week, ordering the cashiering of any dissidents or incompetents among the military, or at any other level of society, was unlikely. That General Brauchitsch would have gotten beyond the door of such a meeting, with candor in extremis allowed to linger long in his wake, without being suddenly met with a fatal heart attack, was even more unlikely.

The leaders of the pro-Nazi uprising in Iraq in May, 1941, the subject of "In Iraq" of May 3, were court-martialed in Baghdad and sentenced either to death by hanging or prison terms. The leader of the anti-British revolt, 1941 Iraqi prime minister Rashid Ali Al Gailani, fled Iraq and was greeted by Hitler as the official government of Iraq in exile in Berlin where he remained until after the war, then finding asylum in Saudi Arabia until 1958.

The British attacked Madagascar to prevent the geo-strategically located island in the Indian Ocean from falling into Japanese hands, a gift from Vichy. Vichy forces were resisting the British. FDR sent a letter to Laval stating that an act of resistance against Britain’s taking Madagascar would be deemed an act of war against the United States. Laval had issued a statement saying that this letter was "inadmissible"--per reality in general to Vichy in those days, we assume.

Corregidor, the page reports, was still holding on after continuing bombardment. Time was short, however, as General Wainwright would surrender the following day.

On the editorial page, Burton Heath takes on, as had The News a few days earlier, the absurd endorsement by Senate Military Affairs Committee Chairman Robert Rice Reynolds of The Cross and the Flag, the late publication of dissident pro-fascist Gerald L. K. Smith. Mr. Heath quotes from the publication matter questioning rhetorically whether victory in Europe would be the death of Hitler with Stalin in his stead in Berlin. Mr. Smith had advocated building a "hoop of steel" around the United States and not venturing beyond the hoop in defense of the country. (Well, well, well, you’re feeling fine... (Sorry, we couldn’t resist, mate.))

Anyway, speaking of hoops of steel, remind us one day to tell you the story of our red aluminum hula-hoop, which we still have, and the portrait artist on the mezzanine of Ivey’s in Charlotte in December, 1959. Oh, that’s right. We told you about that one already. That hula-hoop, come to think of it, is probably the sturdiest free thing we have ever received. A lot of automobiles, some our own, have discovered the junkyard dog in the interim. But not that hula-hoop. It’s nigh on indestructible, in fact.

Dorothy Thompson advises against the Nazi line which preceded Munich, "Them or Us", Them being Communists and Us being Nazis. So, there you are.

The editorial column, itself, is again a little fuzzy today and so we shall try in the near future to obtain for you a clearer version. (When we do, you may ignore this part of the note, rather than assuming then that we must be blind. We do not alter our notes after they are done.)

In any event, we gather from it that the buses, not to mention probably the fuses, were considerably overloaded now to the danger point.

And congratulations, incidentally, to Mine That Bird, the colt who won the Kentucky Derby Saturday as a 50 to 1 longshot, the second longest longshot in Derby history. We don’t know much about hayburners, except that they appear to like hay very much. But we always have kind of liked them and so we hope they give Mine That Bird an extra load of hay or something for his supreme effort.

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