The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 9, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

In that bit of diplomacy was allowed a war criminal, Hirohito, responsible for the deaths of over a million people, mostly his own, not only to escape punishment but to live on in royal comfort, even being later received by presidents, despite his being an utterly despicable personage in history, ranking with Hitler and Stalin. For, had he said no to the war council of July 2, 1941, there would have been no move into Southeast Asia. Tojo would have needed to purge him to have done so and then he would have lost the people. Had Hirohito not been so spineless, so intent on spreading his own notions of Empire, there would have been no Pearl Harbor.

Again, some may argue somewhat persuasively even, that, in effect, the attack did America a favor by getting it into the war. But that is a position that is fraught with difficulty to maintain effectively as it relies on pitting actual historical events to hypothetical ones, subtracting the sine qua non which led to U.S. involvement in the war, which enabled FDR to go to Congress and seek a declaration without breaking his 1940 campaign promise not to send American men to war unless there were a direct attack on American soil, effectively a modified isolationist position. The most rabid isolationists of course were against even aid to Britain in the beginning and even after the Lend-Lease Bill passed in March. We are not suggesting that FDR was an isolationist, but perhaps the campaign promise was a bit strong when made. Nevertheless, no one can fault FDR for trying mightily to take the high road with respect to Japan, historically an ally, in an effort to avoid war, by cultivating what he believed were the moderate interests still around in power. Taking some phonied up "eastern" approach to the matter to suggest that Japan did the world a favor is, however, buncombe. We can't say how it might have turned out otherwise, but odds are that the war would have been over more quickly, certainly with far less loss of life, had America been free not only to concentrate on the war in Europe but also to have Japan as an ally in that cause had it agreed to the Hull Ten Points and withdrawn from the Axis.

For Japan, the difference in not engaging in that war with the U.S. and doing so is obvious. The post-war Japan could have begun almost immediately building and without the scars to its landscape, to its people, left by the ravages of that war--inevitable from the start to anyone but the stupid and stupidly bitter.

What perhaps the Administration did not realize was that the moderates had been purged and the moderation from the remaining moderates stultified and frozen in fear for being the next to be purged. The feudalist-militarist thinking had begun to take over by 1931, had solidified at least a co-equal position with the moderates by 1937, and was in full control by summer, 1941 with the coming of the new cabinet and replacement of Prince Konoye with Hideki Tojo. In truth, all along in that previous decade, despite all of the posturing and humble gestures outwardly, it was every bit the monster in waiting which had become Nazi Germany by 1933, as is any totalitarian state run by the military and by corporations feeding the military. Democracy and autocratic militarist thinking do not co-exist in easy terms, and rarely co-exist at all for very long.

Such is the lunacy in America of attempting in a modern age to presume an equality between the First and Second Amendments, that one protects the other. It is mockery on an autocratic model.

"Postlude" remarks positively on the award on Friday of the Mayflower Cup to Cash, comparing Cash's writing and place in North Carolina's literati with that of Thomas Wolfe. While time has often been kind to Cash, as often it has been quite unkind by not understanding his writing, usually during times when obscurantism runs rampant in our society, as in recent years. In contrast, Thomas Wolfe has enjoyed generally a much smoother ride for his literary reputation. There is always a direct correlation, it seems to us, between the popularity of Cash and the openness of the society to fresh ideas and positive approaches, to resolving issues with the mind rather than the fist. Cash was popular in the latter fifties and sixties, but began to lose popularity in the seventies and was scarcely a whimper by the eighties, re-emerging then in the early nineties, again receding by the late nineties. Wolfe can be taken without regard to society's vagarious wanderings between alternative adoration for mens rea or actus reus--though by use of that particular descriptive dichotomy do we mean to imply that either author or their readers committed any crime, mental or otherwise.

Whether The Mind of the South will have active, even if sporadic, readership for as long as Look Homeward, Angel, for instance, is unknown. It is questionable, of course, to what degree even the latter work is actually being read and understood today. It is questionable of course to what degree much of anything beyond the supermarket fare is being read by the bulk of the public. But that has always probably been the case, at least since the inception of the tv age in the early fifties. Regardless, Wolfe and Cash, in our estimate, really don't compare, as the one was a poetic effluvium of autobiographical self-analysis turned to human analysis in general, contenting himself within the universal paradigm of coming of age in the hometown world; the other, Cash, was decidedly less poetic, more analytical, though bringing the patina to the table of the poetic, the intuitive, the artistic, to nurture that analysis in ways that the academic rarely achieves for the rigorous strictures imposed from without, or at least so perceived, from within the confines of the institution representative of society.

The type of novel which Cash might have written, we don't know. And so knowing would enable the only fair comparison between the two. Wolfe, likewise, never wrote a book of non-fictional analysis, and so neither may we truly compare the works of the two, except by standing each of the books side by side as apples and oranges and reading them in sequence or dividing time between them, and then determining what if any commonality they may have. Well, young scholar, have at it. Just don't blame us for the experiment's result.

We note finally that our friend in the Bahamas informs us that his novel, started in September, 1991, began with a section titled "A Prelude to Understanding", meant as complement to Cash's "Preview to Understanding", but fashioned in the literary vehicle of the novel. When the notion of "prelude" came to him, he informs, he had never read these editorials; indeed, he tells us that he had never even laid eyes on these particular editorials before we sent them to him last May, but even then did not bother to read them until we duly posted them each day, as he was far too busy with other things down there in the shack to read ahead. So, as always, make of the various coincidences which we do not highlight what you will. We don't read ahead either.

The world was now at war. Yet, the page today was pretty much as that of any other day since the war began two years earlier, maybe even more hushed, perhaps from shock, perhaps from self-censorship, perhaps from anti-climax, or a combination thereof. These days, after all, were in preparation for some time, and, since the national emergency was declared May 27 by FDR, pretty much a foregone conclusion for all but the likes of Robert Rice Reynolds, who, the column reports, had still to think the matter over even on Sunday afternoon after the attack before committing to his vote on Monday.

Bob was too busy keeping guard over that Hope Diamond, no doubt. He had still to insure whether it was the right move on his road to the presidency in 1944 and whether it might upset his pals in Germany to vote to declare war on their partner.

New York, we are informed, contemplated at least the same fate with an air raid, as did the Aleutians. And Tokyo and Kobe, Japan and Formosa were bombed as well, as the U.S. or Russia got immediately into the act.

The nation was being aptly prepared for what would follow the war for at least two decades. When the military lit the poker, we all jumped--not unlike that of the period 2001-2003.

Anyway, they never found that carrier because, so far as we have ever heard or read, that particular bit of reconnaissance probably co-exists with the Roswell spacemen specimens--something your Government is no doubt still hiding from you, just like the fact that man never really landed on the moon as it was all concocted, as we know, on the back lots in L.A. at 20th Century Fox (which needs to change its name pretty soon), including the cool special effects of those semi-weightless jumps and landings in--what was it supposed to be?--40% G-force. It was just an alternative gig for Stanley Kubrick, just as Orson Welles had orchestrated the whole world war from that fateful broadcast of Halloween, 1938. Insofar as the S.F. reconnaissance planes though, perhaps they were real, just as real as Gort anyway. They, like the Roswell spacemen, didn't drop any bombs though or even land on Treasure Island. So what's the difference? Perhaps they were just sightseeing. Nothing to get hung up about.

America after all enjoyed the insularity of two oceans. Robert Rice Reynolds consistently told them so. Just as he told them that his native North Carolinians could hit a squirrel dead in the eye from 100 yards.

Page two provides, it would appear, a more realistic assessment than the front page of this strange day. No one, we hasten quickly to point out, however, could well blame them for that strangeness. Their sons, brothers, fathers, were now queuing up in droves voluntarily to go to the hell of the Pacific to die to protect their homes from the ruthless invader. Armageddon had arrived. It was not just Pearl Harbor. Millions, they knew, were perishing in short order in the killing fields and the ovens of Europe. And that theater, they also understood, was demanding now their entry as well, demanding their sacrifice, would inevitably enlist them to the cause--for in truth it was there, in Berlin, in Munich, in Hamburg, where the whole thing had found its origins since 1923, not in Tokyo.

Its Petri dish, however, probably had always been in the backwaters back home, in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, disseminated in the teens to Germany through the magic of film, superseding language, enabling the culture of violent enforcement of slavery to flourish once again, this time backed by the modern machinery of war and the will to improve it to perform its destructive death duty with utmost efficiency, alacrity, and celerity--these very places now furnishing many of the volunteers who were going to have to join with Britain to try to put out the fires which their own ancestors had, if not begun, at least nurtured through time.

It was, in short, in the bloodstreams, in the chromosomal arrays which governed their impulses. And it was now going to take the bloodiest war of all time to loose those arrays from the human spirit. Man, it appeared, changed by the industrial age, forced into self-examination by one bloody war in the teens, was now, twenty years later, after going through worldwide depression, simply tired of living. He was ready to be murdered; he was ready to commit collective suicide. The law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, would now be the rule of the day. They would see up close the other side and find out, first hand, on the other side of the world that which they could find out as close to home as a few steps out their own back doors. Many, perhaps most, already had a sense of that notion, but now it was duty which ruled them. It was duty which required them to fight. The fight was now no longer over there. They had been prepared now for months by their Commander in Chief for the eventuality which now faced them. And they were ready.

Or, did it really happen quite so simply that way?