The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 27, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page announces Churchill's demand for a vote of confidence from Commons, assuring them that the war news in the Pacific was temporary, that the new contingent of several thousand American troops to defend Northern Ireland comprised but the vanguard of those to come. He received his confidence vote. The headline might well have read: "Sitting on a Cornflake, Waiting for the Van to Come".

Ah, well, we had our oatmeal.

In Malaya, the Japanese moved a fifth of the distance to the goal line in Singapore, twelve more miles advanced.

Save a dog fight in which two American P-40's downed two Japanese planes, and anti-aircraft fire from a PT boat having apparently fatally struck three more, all was relatively quiet in the Philippines.

In Libya, the British had temporarily halted Rommel's re-advance columns, aiming for Bengasi.

The editorial page first explores the association of the Macassar Strait--the scene of the five-day old ongoing fierce naval engagement, the first of the war involving the Japanese and American navies--and its city of the same name, (now known as Ujung Pandang, largest city of Celibes), and the etymology of the little pieces of fabric, dubbed antimacassars, used to shield the armrests of chairs and either end of the horse-haired sofas, the tail-end being ticklish on the love seats.

The piece assumes correctly that the cacao oil from Macassar, used as a key ingredient in some of the old fin de siècle and debut de siècle hair oils (greaser creams) for men, formed the etymological basis for the term applied to the antigreaser doilies. (Now they call the greaser creams mousse--their product, however, still look like greasers to us--and besides, we always consigned mousse to the category of something to eat as a dessert, as Baked Alaska--perhaps the reason for the popularity of the snowball-head look of the last twenty years or so, that Otto Preminger thing.)

Lord Oxford informs, however, of one extra step in the lineage of adaptation before antimacassar got to be a word: macassar was a proprietary name for hair oil. Whether or not somewhere loosely in the minds of the proprietors who owned the patent to this sweet-smelling conjuration, it had to do with massacre and consequent visions of prairie scalpings of the same late nineteenth century period, we don't know. But, it came immediately to our mind.

In any event, we again remark that the front page "box score" for sinkings in the Battle of the Macassar Strait, attributing 11 Japanese warships to the guns of the Allies, was in error; the true tally was only four, and those were transports. Nevertheless, it provided the first apparent good news for the Allies from the Pacific theater since it was reported in December that Wake Island's small contingent of 452 gutsy Marines had managed to hold firm for two weeks against superior numbers of Japanese and even the Japanese Navy, which lost two of its ships to the "Devil Dogs" of Wake. (We are reminded by this fact, incidentally, to congratulate the Wake Forest Demon Deacons for being number one in basketball last week, the first time in our memory that has ever happened in nearly a hundred years of trying; should they have held out as long as two weeks, it would have provided a nice coincidental collision of circumstance. Ah, well, maybe next time...)

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!

"At Long Last", remarking on the decision by the Governor to utilize unmarked patrol cars to enforce speed limits, reminds us again of that fatal coincidence of the August 18 Herblock reaper caricature and the death toll at Pearl Harbor, 2,390 both being the latter and the difference between the deaths nationally in automobile accidents in the first half of 1940 and those of the first half of 1941.

And then there's another letter to the editor on milk, this time recommending that the citizenry rise up in unison and protest the Iron Dukes of the City Council in their attempt to allow substantially lower butter fat in milk sold in Mecklenburg, skimming the butter fat off the top and leaving behind the watered down "bluejohn", not the real buttermilk. If you can get milk in that roundabout lingo, you obviously have the best of butter on your wrist. For our understanding, might as well join the Army.

And one of the perennial letter writers to The News, J. B. O'Meara adds, among his now long list of pet societal demons, including radio programs and just about anything else coming about after 1910 or so, both the fanaticism demonstrated over sports, that those who attend football in the pouring rain in January need their heads examined, and the proliferation of child loafers on the streets, from whom, he opines, shall come tomorrow's criminal element.

With the front pages being as they were and had been consistently for the previous two months, we certainly couldn't find anything to blame in the child loafers, for they knew it could be, any day, their last day on which to loaf, especially given daily reports of U-boat sinkings of vessels immediately offshore of the North Carolina coastline; likewise, the sporting crowd had no idea but that the rainy football day would be their last opportunity to see the Blue Devils lose to the Beavers in the Rose Bowl in Durham--as it was.

But, everyone has to carp about something, we suppose. With the whole world gone obviously insane and in chaos on every front, on every continent, everyone, save perhaps the penguins of Antarctica, on the verge of being placed in Nazi chains or under Japan's feudalist yoke, why not carp about 56,000 sports fans in the rain and children loafing in the streets of Charlotte? It's better than doing nothing: idle hands are the Blue Devils' playground, after all. (Incidentally, you best remember that, men, come early February. We have warned you already about the consequences of that third misadvertence belying Merlin's precognition, the pons asinorum as 'twould be, were it so to become. Let us speak no more of it. Hope you enjoyed the laps week before last.)

Dorothy Thompson chronicles the plight now of the little Nazi soldier, doing his duty for his Fuehrer, now left on the cold plains of Russia to die, not of bullets or the dragon's breath, but a combination of the thirty-below temperatures and typhus fever acquired from the deadly little men with white faces who kill in the night, the louse, the one louse in a thousand such lice infesting his fur clothing, which acts as carrier of the deadly virus, for which no remedy exists in these remote purlieus of the demented and devastated. Kaput.

On the home front in Germany, as Paul Mallon reports of rumors circulating out of Stockholm, potatoes are said to be in short supply because of the harshest winter of the century in Europe; cheese had to be requisitioned from France for the depleted, starving troops in Russia. Best estimates placed the killed, wounded or captured among the Nazis at two to three million.

The Russians this day retook Smolensk, der Fuehrer's prior winter headquarters, now gone before the end of January.

The war was over. The Russian troops were collecting the spoils of war, the Nazi booty of tanks and trucks abandoned along the Smolensk road. Spring thaw would see a new Nazi offensive and more terrible fighting for another three years on this front. But the war was over.

As the French champagne flowed freely among the Wehrmacht command, to keep their minds off the misery before them, however, they had blinked the fact. They were having too much good time to be bothered with such indistinct minutiae as depletion of their entire armies by a quarter to one-third in a mere seven months. Whatever their accuracy or not, there were more boys from whence those had come, plenty of children and women, too. Let the champagne flow. Strength through joy!

A little piece on the front page tells of 15 Associated Press journalists being retained as prisoners by the Axis, eight by Japan and seven by Germany and Italy. The foreign press itself was not off limits to the Axis for reprisal and imprisonment as putative spies. A press card meant nothing save threat to these deadly little men with incalculably vicious motives and no inhibiting stop in the brain to check them. The inhibitor, normal to most humans, had already been removed long ago by the militarist kulturkampf under Bismarck, the discipline instilling on precipient command that adrenaline rush unrestrained by superego, by conscience, that reversion to the bestial state where preservation and survival are the only motivating factors and where conscious thought, if any there be left, tends only to the sentimental, avenging the progenitor's death, avenging the deaths of the spent lives around them, not the least any moment of the rational, sentience long since dismissed from the martial boots strafed in twain along the steppe--concerned now of just ridding the collar of the lice and laying down in the ice-cast shadows of the darkened winter's afternoon hut, to rest awhile, to wrest from the febrile choler so induced the unremitting bite of the insatiable gusts whistling death through the crumbling, checked caulkage which barely holds intact its cargo of trembling panes, the mirror betraying corrosion of the mortmain messenger's élan vital. Nothing left to beseech, nothing left from which to implore mercy: the Fuehrer is safe at Minsk.

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.

Goldfish. Think about it. Will you think about it?

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