The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 1, 1939

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Here comes Vindicator Bob, with his feather in his hat, a button on his lapel, exhorting his pussyheads and boobs to his campaign against aliens...

Ah, yes, appetence, that is, orecticity, indeed.

Intelligent design?

How many hens a-laying does it take to emulate a lightbulb?

It all goes to prove the old adage: chicken see, chicken manifest itself, being a shape-shifter, into the formal quantum of which it perceives itself to be worthy within the meandering confines of Nature's boundless, bursting boundaries.

Or the one that goes: Which came first? The chicken or the grooves?

It probably is a good thing that a spinning record player wasn't nearby also. It could have given "over-easy" a whole new meaning, both to the hen and the rooster named Bob.

Speaking of such things, if you missed it earlier, (since we only just added it late), we provide for you the front page of The News, January 3, 1939, regarding the pending putative resignation of J. Edgar Hoover.

Nix lads, buttons!

A long while ago now a man named Lamarck invented a theory of evolution--the same being, in brief, that species changed their forms or the forms of their organs as an ultimate result of appetance, or, in plain English, of wanting and longing. A giraffe yearned for a long neck so as to reach the tender leaves on top of the trees, kept stretching up and up, and voila! he had it just like that. Such was the way it worked. But then men named Darwin and De Vries came along, and there was nobody left to believe in poor Lamarck's theory save only old George Bernard Shaw--which did not seem the best evidence for it.

That is, until last week when there marched into the scene the Yearning Hen of Russellville, Ky. The lady sat in a laying house gazing at an electric bulb that hung from the ceiling--intently, passionately, mystically. Plainly she was enamored of it--so plainly, indeed, that her owner, fearing for her sanity, sought to remove it. But she flew into such a huff and so alarmed the neighbors that he discreetly put it back again. And then she sighed happily, settled back down to regarding it again, and presently laid an egg: an egg, we have it on the authority of the AP, modeled closely on the lines of an electric bulb, up to and including the spiral grooves at the top!

We record it merely from devotion to science--not triumphantly--even, indeed, with a certain trepidation. After all, there are those hats in the windows...

Mr. Garibaldi frankly admitted yesterday that he had sponsored the Civil Service Commission bill without knowing what was in it. That's the Garibaldi-McManus bill, and Mr. McManus is standing by it "to the last ditch." He says:

Perhaps if the rest of us knew just what these conditions are, we too would be for a shake-up in the Rural Police Department. But about all the city dweller knows of behavior in law-enforcement in the county is what he sees and hears alongside the Wilkinson Boulevard, and from the quietude prevailing there he has assumed that conditions are a great deal better than they used to be. But if they are not, if, that is, the cops are winking at crime, real crime, and if they are in league with any of the criminals, which is the realest crime of all--why, all that needs to be done is to convince our city dweller that this is so, and he will grow indignant too.

Lacking that information, and perhaps not quite comprehending what the method of appointing civil service commissioners has got to do with it anyhow, most of us will continue to object to the McManus bill as a faulty means of correcting a situation that we do not know to exist.

Old Mr. Bumble yesterday emerged quite clearly as either the most naive statesman who ever came down the line or as one who is a good deal less than candid in his battle to hold onto political power at home. And of the two the latter seems by far the most likely. British politicians simply do not grow silly enough to actually believe in what Bumble told Parliament he believed in: Hitler's and Mussolini's assurances that they wanted nothing in Spain. And besides, Bumble said also that he believed entirely that Mussolini "means loyally to stand by his obligations under the non-intervention agreement"!

Which is Gilbert and Sullivan nonsense on the face of it. Over two years ago, Mussolini promised under that agreement to stop sending arms and troops to Franco. A dozen times in those two years he has been called on to repeat that promise, and has cheerfully repeated it. A dozen times, too, he has promised to stop sinking British ships. And last Spring he specifically promised to take his troops out of Spain. But all the world, including even the British newspapers, know that it was Italian and German arms which took Barcelona, as it was Italian soldiers that led the attack; that British ships still go right on being sunk; and that, indeed, Musso candidly told Bumble in Rome the other day that he had no notion of living up to his promise--that he meant to keep his troops in Spain until Franco won!

A less than candid man, obviously, this old Mr. Bumble.

Governor Hoey put on the rousements last night in the diversion-anti-diversion fight. He rang in the old folks at home and the blessed little children, duty, high tradition, honor--all the accoutrements with which the compleat orator comes equipped. And when he got through, what, in sum and substance, he has said was that the State needs and has got to have that road money to balance its general budget.

To be candid about it, we don't like to write about Robert Rice Reynolds every day. We don't think he's naturally worth it. But the trouble is that the great man has plainly begun to take himself seriously. Ever since he came back from Germany full of I-will-say-this for Lord Hitler, he has horned into the news practically every day, each time with something clearly designed to persuade his more credulous countrymen to accept him as a heavyweight in the councils of the nation.

And now he pops up with a scheme for a "national organization," to number 5,000,000 pussyheads, to call themselves the Vindicators, to wear a feather in their caps after the German fashion, and a button in their lapels bearing the cryptic legend "Vindicator."

It sounds comic opera, but, alas, it is no longer possible in this strange world to treat as comic all the opera that sounds that way. There is something dreadfully familiar about the outline of this new organization that Robert proposes. It is going to fight Communism, it is going to stress the idea of Anglo-Saxon purity, and it is going to battle against the "foreign invasion" of aliens. We had an organization like that in this country once before--in the 1920's. It wore night shirts and called itself the Ku Klux Klan. And they have an organization like that in Germany right now. It wears brown shirts and calls itself the National Socialist (Nazi) Party.

There is no important Communist menace in this country. And there is no very serious menace from any and all groups of aliens--who in the end are a small minority. But there is plenty of menace in this scheme of capitalizing on the prejudices and fears of the ignorant and prejudiced and launching a campaign of racial hate. It will not be merely Communism and the poor aliens, you may be sure. It never is. The Ku Klux Klan started primarily as a Negro-baiting organization. It ended, as everyone knows, as a violent browbeater, not only of Negroes but of Catholics, Jews, all aliens, all minorities whatever, and everybody who believed in the right of free speech. And under the cloak of battling Communism, Nazism has utterly destroyed free speech, free assembly, free science, free religion, free thought, free politics, free economics, even the right of the individual to dispose of his own person.

The Vindicators, eh? The vindicators of what? It hath the same ring as The Vigilantes or The Regulators, we observe. And it is our guess that that "V" in "Vindicator" will in the end indicate Violence.

Which is why we have to write about Robert Rice Reynolds. A lightweight who is content to take up his time as a kisser of blonde actresses and at traveling on the public purse is a negligible quantity. He can be ignored or dismissed with an occasional laugh. But a lightweight out to persuade boobs that he is a heavyweight destined to lead them on glorious crusades, is something else again...