The Charlotte News

Tuesday, August 25, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page this date offers readers their first glimpse of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, reported accurately. As we indicated, this battle was a huge success for the Allies.

On Papua New Guinea this date, as yet unreported, the Battle of Milne Bay would begin and would continue for the next eleven days through September 5. The object of the attack by the Japanese was to secure an air and naval base held under Australian command to enable a staging ground for attacks against the key Allied base on New Guinea at Port Moresby. The Allies would win this battle. It would be the first major complete defeat of Japanese land troops in the Pacific War, forcing a retreat from the area.

Late at night on this date, the Japanese landed 1,150 troops and two tanks at Milne Bay. Fighting began immediately.

On the editorial page, we note first the quote of the day from James Russell Lowell’s "The Present Crisis", written in 1845. Three-fourths of the next two lines of the poem form the inscription chosen by John W. Cash, born 1872, to appear on the headstone of W. J. Cash in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby, died 1941.

Last night, Senator Edward Kennedy passed away on Cape Cod. His end came not by the violence of a gun, as that of two of his brothers, or the violence of war, as that in 1944 of his eldest brother, but rather from a brain tumor with which he was diagnosed in May, 2008. The Senator served and moved his country faithfully from the beginning of his career in the Senate at the start of that fateful year in American history, 1963, through to the end of his life, championing health care reform in his latter three decades, consistently championing the rights of the poor and oppressed, always keeping the flame alive of preservation of basic civil rights and human liberties for which, in the final analysis, President Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy gave their lives at a too young age.

As we stated just on Saturday, Senator Kennedy’s memory deserves our respect and note through time as a courageous beacon of sustaining hope. The mantle he bore after 1968 is that which no one ever should have to bear, the memory of two beloved and assassinated brothers, both shot down in the prime of their political lives for their political stands, courageous stands, eloquent stands, for the betterment of mankind.

Senator Kennedy nevertheless accepted the mantle and bore it publicly with equanimity and grace. Privately, as we know, there were for the ensuing 22 years or so some problems. But who among us who cared for that which happened November 22, 1963 and June 5, 1968 can say that we, though removed from the immediate personal impact of those events, were not affected in negative ways through time by these tragedies which bore away on the wings of their fates so much great promise of the future which could not be fully realized of the time, which devolved to bitter cynicism in the country at large, which trangressed against progress and turned it to retrogression? The psyche of the country itself was diminished and impacted adversely by those fateful events in ways that those not living at the time or who were too young to be fully cognizant of them cannot perhaps fully appreciate.

For it was a time of bright hope for most, followed soon by that promise being dashed once, twice, three times in succession—as if the bullets fired into John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy occurred in a single shattering burst, so rapid and punishing the blows, so rapid and punishing the blows to human progress. And then the turn dramatically away from progress to the coiling bitterness and cynicism of Nixonian politics in 1969 and afterward.

To call the resulting time nightmarish is to say that the moonless night is dark. It is truistic.

We recall being alone in a hotel room at the Regency-Hyatt Hotel in Atlanta at around 5:30 p.m. on July 19, 1969 when the news was announced of the events of the previous night on Martha’s Vineyard. We had stayed behind in the room, that of a friend of our parents, to view news of the mission to the moon. The adults had adjourned to the twenty-two story open lobby of the hotel, then just a year old, for pre-dinner drinks. It was not our fare. We preferred happy-hour nourished on the events of the day.

When the three couples returned, we informed them of the news of Chappaquiddick and each of the six suddenly and visibly saddened, in a collective gasp of surprise and dismay. It took no lengthy explanation for anyone to comprehend the gravity to the country of this latest tragedy: the political career of Senator Kennedy might well be over, certainly any hope that he might aspire to the presidency was likely gone, and that just a little more than fourteen months after Robert Kennedy had been murdered at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles immediately after winning the Democratic primary in his run for the nomination at Chicago.

But despite the tragedy of Chappaquiddick, Senator Kennedy remained one of the most effective United States Senators in the country’s history and, especially in the last 25 years of his life, after his presidential aspirations ended, one of the most universally respected.

Had Chappaquiddick not occurred, he might well have been elected to the presidency in 1976, a time when there was an open field of candidates and, for the first time, multiple state primaries in the Democratic race. Instead, a little known peanut farmer from Georgia garnered the nomination.

Had he been elected in 1976, perhaps Ronald Reagan never would have become President.

But, perhaps, another tragedy might have come as a result.

No one may say; no one can change the past.

Man landed on the moon June 20, 1969, within the decade of the 1960’s, the goal set in May, 1961 by President Kennedy. We stayed up late there in Atlanta, well into the wee hours of the morning, after the adults had gone to bed, to hear Walter Cronkite chronicle the report live.

The next day, at Rich's Department Store, we bought a globe of the moon for $20. We still have it, though its original phosphorescence has long ago passed away to the ether.

Edward Kennedy passed away on August 25, 2009.

Among other events which have occurred in history on this date was the launching by The New York Sun of a series of articles demonstrating that there was on the moon a large colony of animals and humanoid beings with wings, with a well-developed civilization flourishing there, all discovered via a newly developed telescope. The author was one Richard Locke, parodying the popular work of the time of Reverend Thomas Dick who posited that 4.2 billion people inhabited the moon, presumably not even including the Man in the Moon, whose nose roughly forms in the Sea of Tranquility.

Edgar Allan Poe had, just three months earlier, written a short story, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in June, 1835, titled "Hans Pfaall--A Tale". The story concerns a citizen of Rotterdam who, being much in debt and disposed to suicide, one day discovers in a bookshop a book on astronomy and determines from it to build a balloon, in which, along with his cat and its kittens and two pigeons, with the aid and assistance of his creditors, he sets out on a voyage to the moon, 237,000 miles distant from the earth. Thus having done so, and on the 19^th day of his voyage, having flown quite right above the North Pole, landing on the moon, he discovers there living, quite astonishingly, a people not unlike those of earth.

Well, you may read the story for yourself. Was it a hoax? No one may say. That was 1835 and, we, ourselves, were too young to read of it at the time.

But since Walter Cronkite didn’t provide an account of it live, we have a tendency to discount it.

From Charlotte, 237,361.5234 miles distant from the moon, down the road from Newton, the editorial column tells of a game of "skin", illegal gambling, broken up by police, but not before the officers themselves pocketed the booty--$7.00. They were suspended.

In Manhattan, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia announced, amid stir, a plan to ration hot water by declaring specific hours in which the substance might be properly adduced from the tap, to conserve fuel oil and coal for the boilers necessary to brew it.

From Washington, the FBI reported that, thus far since the draft call-up began a year earlier, 7,000 men a month were dodging it, already amounting to 100,000 caught for the cowardly offense. Of those, some 59,000 resolved their complications with the law by joining the Army. Of the remainder, 1,200 had been prosecuted and sentenced to prison; 40,000 cases stood awaiting their turn before government prosecutors.

Out of academia, a professor at N.Y.U. calculated that 2.3 million soldiers and another 6.3 million civilians had been killed in China since the war began there in 1937. In Russia, he said, 1.5 million soldiers had died and another 2 to 4 million civilians. In all, he calculated that between 14 and 22 million people had thus far been killed in the war.

Thus far, 7,000 of the dead were Americans.

The numbers, the editorial predicts, would rise dramatically.

It was correct.

And, based on recent reports out of Arizona, we suggest that those who carry guns to speeches of the President or anyone else ought not only be ashamed of themselves but ought be charged with inciting to riot.

If carrying a gun openly in a crowded urban environment is not tantamount to fighting words, then no words alone may ever again be deemed fighting words when uttered by anyone. Take note, courts of the land, judges who view tenderly the rights of these rapscallions. And that includes the words which ought be uttered, close up, in the faces, to these puling little pansified idiots carrying guns to speeches by the President. You are weak, dumb, and incredibly without understanding of our Constitution. You are children afraid of your own shadows, desiring to look tough because you are so inherently weak as individuals. You must have, for the salving of your pusillanimous tears, the protection, as when driveling children, of the apron strings to which to run: mama gun.

Real men do not need guns for their protection. They have the facility to think and debate issues. Think about it, little pansy with your mama strung to your hip or leg or slung over your shoulder as some jackass in a tv sitcom, disguised as high "drama", drama only for the mentally disturbed and deficient.

Tonight, a vision comes to us of Senator Kennedy, again young, out sailing anew with his brothers, somewhere off the haunted shores of Cape Cod, somewhere beyond the sea, somewhere beyond the sea, in serenity.

Good night and good luck.

Framed Edition

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