The Charlotte News

Wednesday, June 4, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Anyway, now you know why they put creosote on the poles. It's to keep the beetles out and the peckerwoods off who otherwise seek them out for provender. That way your telephone calls and electricity aren't interrupted by some peckerwood seeking out a beetle. Anyway, it worked for awhile, until, that is, the peckerwoods got used to it and started thriving on the creosote.

As to "C'est la Guerre", on the coming necessity of conversion of oil burners back to old-fashioned coal, we have it on good authority that Cash's parents, for instance, who built a new house on Sumter Street in Shelby in 1942, had a coal furnace, replete with a coal chute. Such were the times to hit home, from as far away as Germany and the icy fields of Russia, from the high seas of the Pacific. All was war, because blindness, both here and in Europe, had enabled complacency in the face of plain threat to freedom everywhere, worldwide economic depression, both inhibiting active threat to aggression and enabling exploitation of the worst instincts and fears of the depressed, left largely unchecked. The hubris of defeated peoples being allowed to seek, unfettered, retribution for their feelings of emasculation and impotence, rather than encouraging the funneling of those frustrations into productive activity of a creative nature. The seeking of the scapegoat, allowed, even encouraged in certain quarters, by the dumb reprobates, initially in England, then their compadres in the United States, who believed that good little Nazis in the hands of their wealthy puppeteers would serve as bulwarks to the bad old Communists.

As to the confinement of young rum-runners with the more hardened variety of criminal, both juvenile and adult offenders, we still have the same problem after all these years; only they aren't rum-runners exactly anymore. But domestic penology achieves a low priority when the excitement of the day is either catching terrorists or seeing who dunit on the news, who will be the next to be sent to prison, because the viewers are too dumb or lazy or both to read even cheap mystery stories any longer, let alone anything about current events or history, for perspective on their day. Too dumb to read much of anything, it would seem. Just dumb. That's why they elect dummies to office who want to purify society of "evil" which they perceive to be besetting them through the stories they hear in the news, and seek to put all of the critics of the dummies in jail for disturbing their perfect little narrowly misinformed world view, replete with all of its simple answers to complex problems. Because they feel at home with a dummy--like Hitler.