The Charlotte News

Friday, May 27, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We must secure our borders at once.

Sasquatches are coming over in droves to take your jobs and to kill you!

When in the polling booth this November, remember to vote only for those candidates dedicated to one and only one premise: the wiping out of those who would seek to wipe out your life and the lives of your family members, the menace which breeds this terrible insecurity, the Hairy Ones, these Yahoos from up there, out there and over there, everywhere. These Yahoos who proliferate so widely with their Hairyness.

Vote against Sasquatch and other such foreign menaces resembling Neanderthalers pouring through our borders as sieves pushing goosedown into pillows, coming in here to our country, lasciviously and libidinously, to steal your jobs, to take your women, to indoctrinate your children, and to kill you in your sleep!

Vote or die, America!

No Sasquatches here!

That, to recover our dignity and solemnity, must be our motto with which to begin this fight in 2007.

And if they persist in their threat to our way of life, we must, regrettably, attack Sasquatchijuan, where they all breed like rabbits, and capture the King of the Sasquatches next year.

This must be the keystone to our cohesive new foreign policy, the Nieuw Century Policy.

Get us into Sasquatchijuan, boys, before it's too late--and the polls drop to 20%.

It Can Be Done

Don't let anybody kid you, pal. You can turn at Independence Square. A man did it yesterday evening at 7:37 by the clock--shot rapidly around the southwest corner from Trade into Tryon. Nine pedestrians jumped for their lives, and made it. And the cop, talking to a man in overalls, didn't even look up.

A woman did it, too, at 3:08 by the clock, sweeping at thirty miles or so around the southeast corner from Tryon into Trade, with the crossing already swarming with pedestrians. And seeing her, two other drivers immediately followed suit. They were all grinning a little nervously, like people who thought they were taking a fearful risk. But the cop, talking to a boy on a bicycle, didn't even look up. And the pedestrians somehow scampered out of the way.

Site Ed. Note: A largely lost art in these days of the computerized press, that of the typesetter. Candidly, while we have had on occasion, decades ago, an opportunity to stop a moment to observe these dedicated sentinels laying down their lines of print with nearly perfect precision in the flash of an eye, we have never been able to understand how they did it--especially without first laughing themselves to death in the pro-cess. Ourselves, we have enough trouble just locating the correct letters on the keyboard for a few hundred words at a gulp, as you may have at times noticed, let alone the thousands with which each of these dealt in a given shift.

So, kudos to those who provided this faithful service for hundreds of years after Gutenberg, at least until this thing, this machine, on which we draft these came along to replace them.

There is a great loss, we believe, in the striving, ever-striving, for convenience in replace of craft which machines provide us.

And one of these days when we figure out that all of these dot-dash, open-close, 0-1 electrical impulses residing in that sub-mystical realm labeled cyberspace are not permanent but are instead evaporative in the flash of a giant electro-magnetic eye, we may wish to the heavens we had never begun that sacrificial journey. At least, then, we shall hopefully still have the libraries and some semblance of the old print press to which to revert until the next purple-haired genius comes along with a technological fix for all the witch-glitches thus revealed.

Were it not for them, these craftsmen of old, this website would never have been obviously, nor would have the millions on millions of books, pamphlets, diatribes, broadsides, poetry, that of drivel, that of strength and courage, that of movement of the mind to some new plain of enlightenment, by its beanings, or even much of which to speak in terms of any lasting religious or philosophical tradition, whether that against which to inveigh in dialectic or that which to embrace as a fit to thine own.

And likely, by the elision of these results, we would all still be living somewhere in the middle ages, huddled in fear by the lonesome fires of the wilderness, sweating in hot humours in the summers, and worried about Sasquatch, witch-spells, recurring disease, death by 40, and trying to labor to figure out how to turn mercury to gold and otherwise perpetuate the species against the great hairy hordes of the backwoods and wilderness. Come to think of it, not altogether completely unlike it was even so recently as 1938.

Thus, next time you read anything, thank--or curse, as your opinion may vascillate--not only the author of it, but also that ink-stained, aproned fellow down in the thankless basement who earned his living by properly arranging the words as lard down, probably offering a little typographical correction here and there in the course of a day's work a' times, too--or, if dealing with anyone such as Cash as a writer, trying exasperatedly to figure out what was intended as truth qua error and what was an accidental, maybe even a subconscious slip of the eyeglass between the moment the impression formed effortlessly on the sub-lingual plane and its arduous journey through translation across the jumps of the various synapses down finally to the sometimes erratically wandering fingertips making their slow way to wedded final impressment with the webbed morass of mechano-physio-linguistically encoded keys, for better oir woise.

We hope that they all found work at least as proof-readers, if not writers in their own wright.

Aristocrat of Unions

The natural assumption from the International Typographical Union's apparent preference for an AFL instead of a CIO president is that the potency of John L. Lewis ain't what it used to be. This may be true, for he certainly suffered grievously in the Pennsylvania primary, but there is a more logical reason than John L. Lewis, himself personally, why the printers are about to replace their long-time President Charles P. Howard, who doubles as secretary of CIO.

The typographical trades require a great deal of skill and more than an ordinary education. Your full-fledged journeyman has no more in common with a mailroom employee, say, than he has with a street sweeper. He is an aristocrat, watching CIO's efforts to lump whole industries in one big brotherhood with much the same aloofness as--well, as Farmer Cam Morrison scans the paper to see what is the latest Federal offer for not raising cotton.

Even to embryo printers, the Typographers are distinctly cool. The apprenticeship period has been lengthened from five years to six, which is about as long as it takes a medical student to become a licensed doctor, and examinations are pretty thorough. And men who last out this long period of training and become real craftsmen are not, being perfectly human, at all anxious to throw in their destinies with overnight tradesmen such as John L. Lewis and the CIO are attempting to organize.

Site Ed. Note: For more on Senator Berry and his "marble lands", see "A Picked Berry", September 1, 1938.

An Official Trait*

Dr. Arthur E. Morgan did not emerge altogether immaculate from the TVA hearing yesterday. David Lillienthal and Harcourt Morgan undoubtedly do have the right to complain bitterly that he has waited until now to clear them of personal dishonesty in the taking of bribes. He never did, in fact, pointedly make such charges against them. But he used words that were certainly open to the interpretation, and his denunciation of them for their handing of the Berry marble claims (though it seems that until the last minute they had no evidence upon which to make charges of bad faith) made them look a good deal more the connivers than they appeared to have deserved.

The doctor might argue in his justification, certainly, that, after all, he was only trying to force an investigation of something that plainly does call for investigation: his conviction that these two men had been interpreting the TVA law to mean what they, and their masters, want it to mean. And that the President of the United States was all too plainly bent on heading off such an investigation. And that if he had ever flatly admitted he had no charges of personal dishonesty or bribery, the President would quite likely have seized on that admission to pooh-pooh him out of court.

Nevertheless, it is doubtful that even that is adequate justification for allowing men to lie so long under suspicions which, to some degree, must have permanently damaged them. To suppose it, is to suppose what the President and his immediate TVA directors have been supposing all along--that a desirable end justifies almost any means.

The Challenge

Day before yesterday The News carried an editorial the essence of which was that, with the notorious "Robert Taylor" bringing thousands of pints of liquor every month into Charlotte and with the well-known Carl Lippard chaperoning liquor cars on the highways, both apparently with impunity, something needed very badly to be done to restore the authority of the police over the lawless element. This editorial bemoaned the fact that Mecklenburg County had eschewed the weapon most likely to have put big-shot bootleggers out of business--ABC stores--and likewise expressed considerable cynicism at the failure of the victorious drys to carry out their brave promises made before the liquor election.

This brought a retort from Chester Morrison, who managed the United Drys' campaign, and we are publishing his letter on this page today. At first tempted to pick out the weak spots in Mr. Morrison's argument, we decided after reflection that the letter itself would perform that service admirably and, furthermore, that exchanges of disesteem would hardly help solve the capital problem of how to make the police masters of a bad situation.

We have no idea how it is to be done, no more, we suspect, than the drys who won victory and don't know what to do with it. The only thing we say with assurance is that it ought to be done, and that wets and drys alike ought to exert themselves immediately to see that it is done.

Thumbing His Nose

The Federal Government has been making a big noise about "investigating" Boss Frank Hague's abolition of the right of free speech and free assembly in Jersey City. And so Boss Hague is naturally scared to death? With the vision of Atlanta or Alcatraz frighting his dreams, he is naturally hauling in his horns? Oh, yeah? His stooge Director of Public Safety, Daniel Casey, has once more refused to grant Congressman O'Connell a permit to speak in Jersey City.

Mister Casey argues that O'Connell's a Communist, that he has spoken well of the Spanish Government and ill of Franco, that that's unAmerican and made a lot of Hague-ites mad, and that, therefore, his speech in Jersey City would cause a riot. In fact, O'Connell's a member of the Democratic Party, speaking ill of Franco is strictly in the American tradition which has always hated murderous tyrants, and the only riots which have threatened Jersey City were the work of Boss Hague's police and henchmen directly under Casey's orders.

But, then, of course, nobody is expected to take Mr. Casey's argument seriously. He speaks with his tongue in his cheek and tells us plainly that he proposes to go on doing exactly what the constitution says he can't do--to go on denying free speech and free assembly to any person he chooses to dub Red.

Boss Hague obviously remembers that he has the New Jersey delegates to the 1940 Democratic convention safe in his vest pocket.

The Sasquatch

The Indians in British Columbia have been paying homage to the Sasquatch. The Sasquatch are the Hairy Ones. And notions about them are somewhat indefinite. According to one school of opinion, they are huge, terrifying beasts who come down from the mountains and gobble you up if you get in their way. According to another, they are men-like fellows, heavily on the shaggy side.

Men have believed in such creatures everywhere, as they have believed in dragons. And all sorts of explanations have been offered by way of rationalizing such a belief. Anthropologists have suggested that the Sasquatch, who are supposed to live in caves and trees, actually represent the memory of some now extinct race of particularly primitive men that the Indians found already in British Columbia when they entered America from Asia, and whom they looked on with a mixture of contempt and superstitious awe. Arthur Keith has suggested that men of our species perhaps lived side by side with the Neanderthaler, who is only a cousin and not our ancestor, after their appearance in Europe, and probably looked at him very much as the Indians look at the Sasquatch--as a sort of Yahoo whom one would yet do well to propitiate

Other explanations have it that the Sasquatch are simply animistic incarnations of natural forces. Anyhow, there they are, with a name gorgeously calculated to convey to you the quality of their being. After which speech we hasten to cross our fingers against them. For we don't want them to come peering into our window at night.

(Hint: If these masked Hairies come peering in your windows at night, do as we did--provide them a new, more sophisticated family name, such as "J. Edgar", and go on about your democratically inclined business of republicanism, unperturbed and undaunted.)

Site Ed. Note: The remainder of the page...

Timahoe! Come in here, girl. Time for some executive-congressional action!

...Well, Ed., after all is said, it's like this: "The birthplace of the horse, indeed, is the sea, its kindred is the sea."


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