The Charlotte News

Friday, October 7, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

As a sidebar, Mr. Macmillan was heir to the Macmillan Publishing Company and retired from Parliament in 1964 to accept a post at Oxford and to become chairman of the publishing giant. Macmillan Publishing Company, just before Cash left for Mexico in spring, 1941, had tendered interest in publishing his novel should Knopf ultimately decline it. Cash apparently was not aware of Harold Macmillan's connection to the company as he misspelled his name below, though often referring to the company, correctly spelled, in his book review column.

Speaking of mama hogs and snakes and snake handlers and ladies flying through hoops (to say nothing of garters and hogsheads of real fire), "At the Fair" produces both subtle humor and pathos on the human condition in 1938, as well as the human condition to come, both here and abroad.

At least one little piggy, in desperate search, cried all the way home.

Hardly a Democratic politician has lost out at the polls this year but that he has made other arrangements to stay on the Federal payroll. Some of them, like Camp in Georgia, held to one job while trying for a better, but those who were shut out in the cold, like McAdoo of California, are being taken care of by the Administration in one way or another. Old McAdoo is to become board chairman of the Dollar Steamship Lines, in which the Maritime Commission has a proprietary interest.

Run through the list of the instrumentalities of the aborted Purge--Johnston of South Carolina, Lewis of Maryland, Wearin of Iowa--and the list of New Deal favorites who went by the boards--Maverick of Texas, McAdoo, Pope of Idaho--and it will be found that those who haven't already made a new connection with the payroll are being actively considered for some cushy place. The New Deal, for all its vaunted High Idealism, always seems to manage somehow to take care of its friends at the public expense.

The Hon. Harold McMillan, Conservative M.P., joined the Churchill opposition to Mr. Bumble yesterday on the ground that he was afraid that Commons was being treated "more and more as a kind of Reichstag, just meeting to hear orations and register decrees."

And, indeed, there is a good deal that is disturbing to the friends of democracy about the whole way in which things have been proceeding in both England and France. Despite the fact that Mr. Chamberlain seems to be under the influence of the pro-Fascist Cliveden set headed by Lady Astor, it is highly improbable that he has any notion of destroying democracy in England. And certainly, Daladier doesn't want to destroy it in France.

Nevertheless, it is quite true that the whole Czechoslovakian deal was put through without ever once calling the Parliamentary process into use until the thing was a fait accompli. More than that, it seems to be true that the Chamberlain government brought strong pressure on newspapers and radio stations to suppress facts and to keep down any demand for the calling of Parliament into session. It may be--and probably is true--that the majority of the English people (and French) acquiesced in the Czechoslovakian deal as a means of avoiding war. But certainly they were not consulted, and certainly they would have no recourse but to swallow it now, even though they had disagreed with it, since Hitler and his troops are already behind the Czech fortifications!

The single most unpleasant thing connected with the Czechoslovakian deal is the Pecksniffian insistence of Mr. Bumble, Daladier, the English Parliament & Co., that they have "saved Czechoslovakia from destruction."

It is clearly not so. At the very moment yesterday when Commons was adopting its resolution claiming this "saving," Adolf Hitler was stripping away his mask and doing what every realistic observer predicted he would do once he had the Bohemian mountain fortresses safely in his grasp--demanding, and getting from an international commission which has no choice left, even more than the original Godesburg terms called for, and at Godesburg he demanded more than at Berchtesgaden. His armies are going to march into the bottleneck which is Moravia, seize the rail heads, and cut Czechoslovakia in two--undoubtedly never to be got out again. The fellow is to have "reparations," which probably will total up at least to the full value of all property now held by the million Czechs living in Sudetenland. Dr. Benes has been forced to resign, democracy has been destroyed, and a government is now being formed which will "make economic collaboration with Germany possible." Czechoslovakia, in short, is today no more an Independent State than is Manchukuo. And tomorrow it almost certainly will be Nazified.

It is possible for Bumble & Co. to make out a case for themselves as having saved peace immediately. It is possible for them to justify their action by saying that Czechoslovakia would have been turned into a charnel house if war had come, and that, however satisfying it might have been to the Czechs to stick a couple million of the pigs who were overrunning them, it would only have meant their own practical annihilation. But when they (Bumble et Cle) claim to have saved Czechoslovakia, when they pretend solemnly that they believe that it now has an existence which can be guaranteed and that they want the Russian bear to join in that guarantee, they are only indulging in the most brazen hypocrisy.

The aging redhead finished her act of climbing a little wearily and creakily, but still adeptly, through her hoops, got on a fluffy green robe reminiscent of Mae Murray, and smiling eagerly crossed over in response to the gesture of the young woman. No, she had never played Charlotte before. Well, maybe, sometime, in the chorus. Her first time in the sticks. Always before that the big-time and Broadway, Little Egypt? Sure, she knew Little Egypt well, though, of course, not so long ago as Chicago and the Midway Plaisance.

Long ago the thing got its name from the Latin feria, which is to say holiday or high festival. And a festival it has remained ever since, from those great medieval fairs at Bruges to which came traders from the far East with camels and parrots and silks and spices, and from the faraway North with amber and furs. In the little country fairs in Provence, they laugh and drink and sing. In Mecklenburg they only laugh--and maybe sometimes drink. Only three beer places on the lot, and all of them crowded. The country woman in the ill-fitting dress, her tired face beatific. A girl drinking beer from a bottle while passing women stare disapproval.

The snake man hands over the black snake to the young woman who accompanies us while we get as far away as possible. A soft-voiced, insinuating fellow with handsome clear eyes, he looks somehow like a Cajun. And when you ask him--sure, he came from Louisiana. But, no, that slurring tone of his is too nasal. It sounds like--well, like Boston. He grins at that. Yes, he knows Boston, has spent a lot of time there, but he sticks to the Louisiana story. His helper whispers the information that he is really from Worcester, and confronted with it he grins again. How ever did he happen to take up with the shows as a snake man? Well he needed a job and got one. Besides, he likes snakes. Snakes are nice people when you know how to handle them. And then, his sly grin flashes, he has snake in his own nature.

The sacred baboon (Papio Hamadryas) sitting sedately and contemptuously in his cage, under the placard announcing that he sometimes attacks and kills lions in Africa, and looking, as the young woman with us opines, for all the world like the portraits of the old royal colonial Governors. The spitting image, we agree, of Sir Francis Nicholson or Sir Edmund Andre in wig and robe.

Mr. Neal of Kings Creek, S.C. And Mr. Neal's hogs. Seven pens of them. Three of them filled with great black sows and their litters of little pigs. The sows on their sides, snoring peacefully, with their huge gross teats held firmly by the rows of little pigs. Two little pigs, surfeited, sleep in high beatitude, their pink snouts still nuzzling their appointed teat. One little pig, somehow pushed out of line, running in circles and squealing his despair. Each little pig, Mr. Neal explains, has his private teat, which he somehow knows how to identify, and no other will do.

Mr. Neal is talking to a friend. Mr. Neal is a long, lean man in faded overalls, with an angular kind of face. You can find Mr. Neal's doubles all over the farm country of the Piedmont. There is something immensely quiet and patient and gentle about him. You see it in every line of his face and his body, in the careless way he sits on the edge of the hog pen.

But Mr. Neal is talking. He is telling the friend--a new one apparently--that when the depression struck he was making plenty of money as a cotton farmer. Well, if not plenty of money, at least he was doing pretty well as cotton farmers do. But the depression ended that, and for awhile Mr. Neal had it pretty tough. He pulled through, however, mainly by turning to hogs. He gets his stock from Clemson College, and by now Mr. Neal's hogs are famous. He takes them a long way to exhibit them at fairs, sometimes a hundred miles.

Yes, Mr. Neal is doing pretty well now. You can see it in his face and manner. You can see it by looking at the seven pens and reckoning up the ham and bacon therein contained. You do look at them, and you think again that Mr. Neal and his sort are the salt of the earth.

Further Note: All of which reminds us of that command from another Book, one sometimes hard for us latter-day humans to understand fully, especially when it comes to this sort of thing: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. We have commented on it once before, albeit cryptically, in connection, oddly enough, with Roe v. Wade. Which rather fits here, too, since the Lady was big on temperance, not at all a bad thing, mind you, unless carried to extremes, violating other commands of the same afore-referenced Book, as her lately friend, Herr Hitler, did--reading one part, you see, mockishly, in perfect rationale for one's own increase, separate from the other parts, and the interests of the other parts--in isolation from all the others, that is.

Well, what does it mean, then, that bit about the witch? Does it mean to kill the witch? If so, we stand a bit confused. Why didn't Winston simply then produce his sword in Commons and have at it?

Ah, we think we understand. For that would violate some of the rest there. So, to provide concordance, it probably means rather precisely what it says, doesn't it? It doesn't say, Thou shalt burn the witch at the stake until the witch is dead as a doornail in Worcester. No. It expresses itself rather differently there, you will note.

For a witch, after all, is but a figment of one's imaginings, you see. So, not suffering it to live does not carry with it a violation of the command against killing. Nor does it counsel to kill, as only the Devil would confuse us like that.

There now, little piggy, all's better. Run along home now. You've been running in circles for far too long. After all, you always knew that that little piggy was good for something. It isn't just hanging out there on its little lonesome for no reason. Darwin called its purpose the result of natural selection. Genesis said...well, our little feet are tired. Another day.

Until then, since that old link is now dead, you may read Mysterious Stranger here.

And if you want to know what is meant by Midway Plaisance and Little Egypt and other things, incidentally, you may consult The Education of Henry Adams. His comments on the Cunard lines and musings as to when the great steamliners would reach their limits are a bit haunting, as that would come not by technological limits of power, tonnage, and speed in 1927 as he predicts--though that year would see a feat which would indeed ultimately render them obsolete insofar as passenger traffic was concerned--but rather by the desultory circumstances of Nature's foreboding jagged block of ice ripping a long hole beneath the cruel, chilling waters of the Atlantic on an April night in 1912. Such it is, this fight between Man's will to excel and Nature, sometimes. Now, those bergs aren't so foreboding out there. They are melting at increasing rates, we hear. In fact, the entire polar cap has receded 20% of its area just since 1979, the satellites tell us, and its filling up of the bathtub with warmer and warmer water is accelerating arithmetically, for the white cap reflects the sun from us in a balanced world--until it no longer is there, that is. Now, all we need do is call the Plumbers to clean out the drain. Ah well, trading one disaster for another, we appear to be? And you should worry of the NYC subway system? Better to buy some snorkel equipment uptown and save your breath, little piggy. There also happens to be a new documentary out on the Expo of 1893, just 26 days ago, in fact. We haven't yet seen it, so, until then...