The Charlotte News

Friday, August 15, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Rock 'n' Roll is here to stay, 'cause we were born with it.

There is also the thanks from Bundles for Britain for the News support of the swimming meet--you know, the one to the White Cliffs which brought over the toys, 'ey all.

You're welcome, again, sir and madame.

Somehow, Mr. Crutchfield's name is linked in our mind with old-time basketball of the early sixties era; but we shall have to investigate that some other day. August is not a time for basketball memories, even if a certain distinguished coach began his career in one.

"V", while perhaps seeming presumptuous of the moment, the Nyes and Wheelers and Borahs and Reynoldses and Coughlins and Lindberghs notwithstanding, proved poignantly prescient and lastingly simple in its communique to the world--that freedom is also here to stay.

For likewise, we were born with that, too.

And if Petie wants to stay in the cage like a dumb ape, well, that's Petie's right. We suppose. And that of the zoo which owned him to keep him there. But, Petie doesn't think. Petie is a dumb ape. Just like your dumb dog or cat staring at you behind a big dumb blank. They become conditioned to dependence upon your solicitude at chow time and your tolerance of their many daytime naps, disturbed only by your desire to rub their fur. Their wilder tendencies are thus sublimated to conditioning to an easier life than that afforded in the wild.

We think. We are conscious of our world, not merely by conditioning, though conditioned we may indeed become. We are human.

But, just what the hell Johnson meant today, we think we cannot tell, for it sounds as if he was saying that it was better to give peace a chance by giving into Hitler, letting him vanquish the Russians, for all he wanted to do was to destroy the Communist Party and acquire some oil and wheat. He seems to be, more or less, indeed, echoing what Hitler quite cynically and ironically suggested as the way of all true pacifists, to allow the Germanization, i.e., Nazification, of the world, to insure the sustenance of the pacifist ideal. "First the fight, then the pacifism."

Assuming that is the General's essential point, he failed to realize, as did the rest of his crowd of Firsters, that Hitler's delusion included not just red wheat, but grains of Orient Pearl; and that he was not merely jousting at windmills in some poetic-artistic manner, but intended to turn the whole world into a vast red sea of blood, lest it serve him at his whimsy until done with the mask of humanity worn by each, to revert the land to a zoo full of Pavlovian reactors.

But, perhaps, we read too much into what the General is attempting to say. Nevertheless, just what he is attempting to say otherwise, we have yet to fathom. Perhaps you may have better luck.

Anyway, that being said, we're taking a siesta. We're still catching up on yesterday.

Katherine Graham, incidentally, inherited the paper from her father who bought it in a bankruptcy auction after the Depression of Mr. Hoover and his merry cast of laissez-faireitissimos brought it down and forced the McLeans out of the newspaper business.

By the way, it was Concord, (pronounced in North Carolina, concordantly, as "Concorde", you know, the horse), not Gastonia, from which Gaston hailed. They are fused in our mind somewhere from being along the same road long ago, we suppose. Go to sleep, little baby, in one place, and wake up your sleepy head in another, and, to your perceptions, it's all the same place. And unto your perceptions, little baby eyes, 'twas truer than true as you then perceived it. So we leave the err for your higher understanding.

V; not "III". Go figure.

But, 'twas three o'clock, sure enough--Newfoundland time, that is.

We learned that from the Afghan hound.

He's leaning on the lamppost at the corner of the street, until a certain little lady goes by. Oh me, oh my, my, my, hey, hey, upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides...its iron claws attached. Shananaheyheynananananana. Keeping alive all the world going by our windows.