The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 4, 1937

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We add our version of "Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes", even shorter yet, dubbed "The History of the Microbe, Divided by Infinity": At|m rad ‘em.

And, if Miss Greenbeck found her Dollar, then we must also query, based on today’s prints, whether it was yesterday, to-day, or back again, to-morrow. And if she went to-morrow, while getting back again to-day, would it yet be to-morrow to which she got backs from yesterday?

We trust that elucidates each facet of the diamond, also. If not, you may pick up the rice from the church where your wedding has been, throw it up into the sky, then pick it up again, boil it in the water tank by Central Park, then essen, essen in its twinkling light, in its ventral dark, in its sinking night, in its minstrel lark, in its linking might, in its pencil sharp—a rinking sight.

That leads us to the question of the day: Why is a safety called a safety, when in fact it is very dangerous? After all, the resulting two points to the opponent might cost the whole game. Moreover, there is nothing safe about one’s own end zone. It ought be called, should it not, a precarious. It is not as if the other nomenclature applying to the game carries some ironic meaning also. None of that inspires any mystery as to the origin of its appellation. We just wonder. Shouldn’t somebody complain? Shouldn’t it be cause for protest or for some new law to straighten things out once and for all? Indeed, shouldn’t someone be enterprising enough to say that they were ignorant of the rules because of the nomenclature and therefore they should get credit for two points when they have incurred a safety?

As to Greensboro’s retort to the Charlotte News weather report, we would have to inquire as to whether, implicit in the remarks, there was the suggestion darkly of emission of vast quantities of hot air in the dialectic atmosphere to which it inveighed. Or was it merely evasive of the tacit recognition of the stultified omission of Greensboro to have sufficient space for warmth?

Also, we would like to thank regular News letter writer, Mr. Hamrick of Shelby, 70 years later, for that succinctly explicatory divination, as he was wont to do on many topics, thus in those very few, but effusive, words, illuminating the intrinsic value of every living human being, even the lowliest of the lot.

Anyway, as for those Greek soldiers’ apparel, well, we’ve played lumberjack a couple of times ourselves, too, but not quite to that degree.

Aren't We All?*

Loud cries arise for Federal economy, for balancing the Federal budget, but in practice nearly everybody is still yelling "gimme!"

One of the latest is the president of the National Rivers and Harbors Congress, Representative William J. Driver, who sounds a note of alarm lest the President's economy program imperil the water program.

The states also are alarmed lest highway funds be reduced. Communities with CCC camps suffer high blood pressure and the shaking jitters when a proposal is made to eliminate some of the camps.

Budget-balancing and the "gimmies" don't work together. Let the other fellow economize, is the theory; but with so many hands reaching into the treasury, this is impossible. There are so few other fellows left.

Cynical Note*

Maybe Thomas Dewey, the go-getting District Attorney of New York County, has not dealt fairly by Albert Marinelli, Tammany leader and New York County clerk, after all. Maybe. In the late campaign in those parts Mr. Dewey said bluntly that Mr. Marinelli was "the ally of big-time racketeers, thugs, and thieves." And since he was elected Mr. Dewey has been preparing busily to attempt to prove it, having in the last few weeks summoned more than 300 of Mr. Marinelli's associates and neighbors before grand juries.

But yesterday, Mr. Marinelli resigned. He resigned sadly, gently, contemplatively, with a sigh for human miscomprehension. He resigned he said because--well, because his case was causing doctors to have to neglect their patients, mothers their children. Because if he held to his job it might involve men who had sometime gone wrong and got in prison, but who now, under his protecting wing, were manfully going straight; might bring useless shame and sorrow upon them and upon their innocent wives and children. Because he could not, whatever the cost himself, "cause any further suffering and humiliation to those people." Mr. Marinelli, in short, resigned as a beautiful soul resigns--for beautiful reasons--for the love of his fellow creatures. According to Mr. Marinelli, anyhow.

So maybe Mr. Dewey has not dealt fairly by Mr. Marinelli. Maybe.

Hedging in Stones

Diamond sales, says the Associated Press, are up astonishingly in New York--showing an increase for October of 23.6 percent over the same period last year. The reason offered for this is that many of the nation's wealthiest families are afraid that the dollar is going to be cheapened again and that another depression will bring on ruinous inflation, so they want to get their cash money into something easily salable that will go up in value.

But if that is actually the way these buyers are thinking, then they almost deserve the epithets flung at them by the floggers of economic royalists. Diamonds are ultimately simply polished bits of a rare mineral, and their value depends entirely upon the fact that there exists a sufficient number of people with sufficient surplus wealth to afford them as ornaments. And the overwhelming great part of the people who can afford to buy them reside in these United States. Isn't it plain, therefore, that if the disasters against which these people of wealth are attempting to insure themselves by buying diamonds ever came off, the market for diamonds would be one of the first things to collapse, that diamonds would come to be simply brilliant pebbles, exchangeable for nothing but other such brilliant pebbles?

Granting that there are many things in the New Deal to make capital fearful, the fact still remains that, if these people of wealth want really to do something toward insuring their status, they had best get their money out of such frozen investments as precious stones and put it to active work in industry and commerce. That way they will be hedged against inflation or no inflation.

Rice in Fast Company

Five commodities figure in the control features of the farm bill new before Congress. These commodities are: cotton, tobacco, corn, wheat, and--rice. Now, however did rice get in there? The other four commodities are the major agricultural commodities of the United States. But rice--in 1935 the total rice production of the country was valued at only $26,565,000, whereas the oats production, for instance, was valued at $317,515,000, and the potato production at $231,233,000. Even yams counted up to $58,555,000.

We thought we had come upon the key to the mystery when we bethought ourselves that after all Senator Cotton Ed Smith, of South Carolina, is chairman of the Senate committee that framed the bill. And South Carolina--why of course, South Carolina has always been celebrated in the geography books for its rice and indigo, as North Carolina used to be for tar, pitch and turpentine. But pursuing our inquiry further, we came upon a puzzler. South Carolina seems to have lost eminence in rice as certainly as North Carolina has lost it in tar. In 1935, indeed, our Palmetto neighbor produced so little rice that it is not even listed in the tables. The great rice producing states are Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and California.

There remains the one possibility--that some of Cotton Ed's political pals from the coast country own rice plantations. That's a natural sounding answer, under the American system of politics. But it's a pure guess, and we are not prepared to say that it's a good one. Yet if it isn't, we're flat stuck to explain otherwise how that pygmy, rice, got into the company of the giants.

Site Ed. Note: The 10th Panshen Lama was born February 19, 1938 and was selected in 1944, installed in 1949. His reign until his death in 1989 was turbulent, marked by denunciation from the Communist Party of Chairman Mao as well as criticism from Buddhists as having been merely a puppet of Communist China. He stayed in occupied Tibet when the Dalai Lama entered exile in India in 1959. He was imprisoned from 1968 until 1977, for his criticism of the government and complaint of the suffering of the people in Tibet.

Upon his death in 1989, the Dalai Lama, according to tradition, was initially consulted with regard to identifying the new incarnation of the Panchen Lama. The Chinese government, however, upon discovering this forbidden consultation, replaced the selection committee with a government-friendly constituency. The new Panshen Lama, born in 1990 and installed in 1995, was selected from a list which omitted the Dalai Lama’s choice.

For an editorial on the selection of the present Dalai Lama, see the piece of February 12, 1940.

We must admit—and if you only knew the full story—it is all very interesting.

The Panchan Lama

In Tibet, soon, they will be watching for some portent at the birth of a babe, some miraculous sign by which to know that a new Panchan Lama has been born. And the priests will take him away as a boy to some monastery, where he will begin by learning to twirl his prayer wheel and to intone his Om Mani Padme Hum and from that progress to the memorizing of the rituals in the holy books.

For the old Panchan Lama, the high spiritual authority in Tibet since his own miraculous birth, is dead. In western China he died, far from the land he loved and hoped someday to modernize. Thirteen years ago he set out from Lasa over the precipitous trails and the rope bridges leading down to China proper. A great procession it was, its pack animals laden with gold enough to ransom a king, and everywhere it went the people gathered in throngs to see and be blessed by the reincarnation of Buddha himself. Nor was the Panchan deserting or being deserted by his Tibetan people. In any test of strength with the Dalai Lama, ruler over things temporal, the Panchan had good reason to believe that the deep religious instinct and training of the simple Tibetans would instantly rally them to his support. But being a man of peace, he chose the peaceful way. When in 1933 the Dalai Lama died, it was too late for his self-exiled superior to return.

Luther in Tibet

The Panchan (or Pantzen) Lama was once the incarnation of a member of the first of the seven Buddhist trinities, and the Tibetan Luther.

Buddhism was first introduced into Tibet in the seventh century by monks startlingly like the Christian monks of the same period--tonsured, hooded, pledged to celibacy, and using bell, candle, rosary, and incense in their rites. Politically the land resembled the Germany of the same period: a collection of numerous petty feudal states ruled by petty lords. And under these conditions, the abbots of the monasteries (all of whom had the advantage of being the incarnation of some heavenly creature) often managed to seize secular power for themselves, just as the European abbots and bishops did. Then in the Thirteenth century, Genghis Khan, being converted to Buddhism, was persuaded to confer full secular rule and the title of Grand Lama upon the great abbot of the Sakya monastery. As the Dalai Lama, his successor is still the real political master of Tibet.

But in the Fourteenth century there arose Tsongkapa, to preach a return to the simpler and purer principles of the early Buddhists, just as Luther preached the same sort of thing in Christian Germany. And before long his monasteries, distinguished by the wearing of an orange hood, were outnumbering the older order, distinguished by a red hood. Then in the Fifteenth century, the Chinese emperor who claimed some phenomenal lordship over the country, recognized the advent of the chief monastery of the new sect as spiritually equal to the old Dalai Lama--under the title of the Panchan Lama. And, save that the Panchan Lama has gradually become spiritually ascendant, that constitution of Lama-ism has remained essentially unchanged down to the present.

Yea, voice of every Soul that clung
To life that strove from rung to rung
When Devadatta's rule was young,
The warm wind brings Kamakura.

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