The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 20, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We return briefly to the Saturday story of Carole Lombard's death. We were reading in the Wicked-pedia that the reason given for the crash of the TWA plane, carrying her and fifteen pilots assigned to ferry bombers to Britain, was that the beacons in the surrounding territory had been blacked out and therefore the flight wound up six miles off course, hitting a mountain. That explanation, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. Why would absence of beacon lights cause a plane to drift six miles off course? Hitting the mountain, maybe. But on a clear night, that seems hard to understand also. Airplanes then and now obviously do not navigate by ground beacon lights, except on take-off and landing. So, if the plane was indeed six miles off course, was it because the navigation equipment, the basic compass onboard, was, during the refueling stop, rigged to read askew by some Nazi or Italian Fifth Columnist? As the wreckage was strewn all about the hills, it is likely that even then there was no way to establish precisely the cause. In any event, her last film, was a screw-ball comedy, To Be Or Not to Be. His, of course, 18 years later, The Misfits.

The editorial page today, along with the inside story, tells of the State hospital for the mentally ill at Morganton, its deplorable conditions. We have not acquired the whole series of Tom Jimison's articles for we think it enough to provide a taste of how it was there in those times. Such facilities no longer exist across the country, so far as we are aware. We therefore see no need to stir imaginations unduly. But we shall provide the taste, to enable understanding of that from whence we came as a society, to insure that we do not return to it.

Tom Jimison, as we have pointed out previously, was a friend of Cash at The News, a defrocked Methodist minister, and a lawyer for the poor and oppressed, a decent fellow. Why, incidentally, he was defrocked is not within our field of knowledge or inquiry; we suspect it was because he truly cared more about people than impressing the flock with pious assertions of "maurality"--in other words, keeping everyone in their place, in caste and class, segregated--including the churches, which often were little more than extensions of the country clubs and civic clubs--many, if not most of which, both church and clubs, are segregated de facto to this day.

Perhaps, to hit two cuckoos with one stone, North Carolina should have simply invited Hitler to tour their own concentration camp at Morganton and then locked him in it, telling him he was the new Reichsfuehrer of America. They would even allow him to conduct their ongoing eugenics program personally. And for participant-observer understanding, would he not care to undergo a little shock treatment?

The front page tells of the sinking off the coast of North Carolina of the tanker Malay and the wounding of another tanker, the Allan Jackson, in close waters during the previous two days. As with the U-boat activity earlier the previous week off Long Island and Nova Scotia, sinking three vessels in three days, the Nazis seemed oddly to be following the track of the L.I.E., the Long Island Express which originated off Dakar. Probably the little nut holed-up in Smolensk directing his butcher shop had figured it would be good psychological warfare. Paul Mallon reports on the editorial page that official sources estimated 31 U-boats were plying the eastern coastal waters of the United States. The black-out drills of the previous month in North Carolina were now becoming more signal of a reality with which to be potentially reckoned, not merely an idle exercise.

The war and the Nazis ended long ago; but the mentality did not. The mentality preceded them. We are very tired of the mentality and being governed by people, some of whom appear to embrace this fascist ideal, who cannot even read. We suggest giving every public employee in the country, local employees, state employees, Federal employees in the bureaucracy, even state judges, a thorough reading examination. If they flunk, they are out. Let the National Educational Testing Service administer the test blindly. In other words, make them take a Scholastic Aptitude Test and rate a certain standardized score to stay on the payroll. We assure that a lot of the fat will go away quickly. Give them the test biennially.

The jokers who can't read, those who plague the public because they can't read, will in time learn what they did and will wise up and learn to read--and to think. That is, unless we wish to stay on the present course. The overwhelming majority of the country have said no to that, emphatically.

Simple syllogism: Nazis steal dignity. People who steal dignity over speech and ideas are Nazis. They do not belong in government service--ever again.

Our new President today promised in simple language a return to the Bill of Rights. We respect him. We believe him.

Let us start: Reading tests for all government employees, save Federal judges who are tenured by the Constitution. In fact, as to the other judges, give them the LSAT, or some version of it, over again. Many of them need to learn to think again, to interpret, to reason, to intuit from facts, not subjective speculation.

And, we mean just what we suggest. It is a problem in this tv age. Many people's minds have become lazy and they simply do not any longer obviously understand how to read and interpret what they read. They all too often rely on young, unseasoned staffers, often political appointees, to do their reading for them. Their minds become flabby in the process--too little time, too much in need of hurrying about to raise money for the next election, glad-handing the population, selling them on ideas which wind up being idiotic for lack of thought in the premises. That has been the way of it for the last eight years. And it spread from Federal government down through state and local government entities as well.

That suggestion is buttermilk, not sour milk. We don't care for it, buttermilk, but, in limited doses, it is healthful nevertheless.

And now for something completely different--1942 has a suggestion for us to save electricity. Move up daylight savings time to February. The Federal Power Commission then found that it would save three-quarters of a billion kilowatt hours. And so President Roosevelt adopted the plan, beginning February 9.

Speaking of the new President and the inauguration, we thought the speech, while simple and without flourish, was effective and to the point. He did not try to tell the American people what he offered them, but what he intended to ask of them, what the country needed from them, that there were sacrifices ahead. Change comes only through patience, and no one need expect change overnight. 'Tis a gift to be simple. We also enjoyed the benediction. Here was a preacher who is an old time poet, one who understands the power of rhyme, even simple rhyme. We wish that other poets would effect a return to that power and understanding. It is an art we are losing. Proesy, we reiterate, is not poetry, has not a whit of the power of poetry, to heal, uplift, and to construct positively anew. Without any poetry and symbolism, we are lost of spirit. We are bland automatons, given to speed, running away from ourselves to forget our blandness. Poetry elevates and cleanses. It is a thought we must not forget.

Thought for the day, our one line poem: When we kill others, in body or spirit, we kill just us.

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