The Charlotte News

Saturday, January 31, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

In Burma, Moulmein was abandoned by the British, with a last stand to protect the Burma Road to be made at Rangoon, just to the west of Moulmein.

In the Dutch East Indies, the Japanese opened yet another fighting front, on Amboina Island, midway between New Guinea and Celibes, and the site of the second most strategic Allied naval base in the Indies. Japanese troop landings, bombing, or naval activity now spread across the entire width of the East Indies, from formerly British-held Sarawak to eastern Borneo to Celibes to Amboina to New Guinea and Australian Papua New Guinea, with landings at Rabaul in New Britain and Kavieng on new Ireland in the latter, to become the staging areas for the entry to the Solomons and Guadalcanal immediately to the southeast.

A piece reprinted from The Hour, as with the piece earlier in the week on William Dudley Pelley's propagandizing which landed him a North Carolina jail term for sedition and libel, this time abstracts from Father Coughlin's Social Justice. While these individuals, along with the America First Committee and the American Bund, had been a corrosive force in destroying cohesion of public opinion in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, since the attack, unity was so firm and unshakable in the country that such voices of dissent had ceased to have any real potency, instead appeared to virtually all as simply empty movements led by and stocked with fools.

Another letter to the editor confirms Tom Jimison's series on the insane asylum, that the treatment was nightmarish, that the food served the patients was so inedible that the writer's teenage daughter, confined in Morganton after she demonstrated emotional trauma from an automobile accident, nearly died of starvation. As soon as he removed her from the facility and took her home, she nearly ate everything in sight, and eventually was restored to health in familiar surroundings, at home. We have to wonder, of course, just why anyone would place a victim of an automobile accident in an institution for the insane, but there it was in a different time. The parents obviously believed the hospital to be just that, a hospital for treating mental illness, not the dumping ground for society's unwanted and forgotten, as it was.

In another letter, the Publicity Director for the University of Georgia football program clarifies that the football team, as previously criticized in the editorial column, was not getting an exemption from the draft. Instead, he indicates that the University president had implored the local draft board to "give careful consideration" to all juniors at the University, as he was encouraging an accelerated program whereby the juniors would graduate mid-year of their senior year. He lays the error off on an Associated Press reporter, over zealous to obtain a story.

A third letter comes from a non-drinking soldier at Fort Bragg who insists it a mistake for the WCTU and groups and individuals like them to dry up liquor sales in counties surrounding military bases, one which would deprive the soldiers of the only chance many of them had of forgetting for the moment the Army and their perilous duty ahead overseas. He was likely right. As the facts of the decade of the 1920's and those in dry counties since the repeal of national Prohibition in 1933 had suggested, prohibiting liquor around military bases would have only led to bootlegging operations and the worse ills usually attendant with it than those limited by state control of sales.

And we think that maybe the "Ballad of Hoarder's Gaol" later was re-arranged and adapted for "Mary Poppins". There is a misprint, we assume, in the lyrics--that is, unless the hoarder was getting sugar in hal paces pi vat.

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

It being another lazy Saturday here at the Tower, another of our old friends dropped by to say hello. Willie Jes B. Ornery was born in East Texas. He refuses to identify the town because he admits to being wanted in several places out that way. Nothing serious, he says. Mainly failure to pay child support, several times over, for several different households. Willie has traveled the country on fast freights many times and knows it all now by heart, in fact has a tattoo of rails across his chest, amid, around and upon which is written, in cursive print, a cryptic slogan, the meaning of which only Willie knows for sure: "The rails never fail a Boot's guest from the West".

Well, we asked him, of course, whether he might be willing to read that same Wolfe passage which we had Spooky, Waverley, Frankly, Ernesty, and Jack read for you in the past few weeks. He of course said, with characteristic equanimity, "I hold no brief against any man over the shade of his skin, the background of his parentage, his heritage, his religion, his language, be it foul or fair, or his ethnicity, and so I don't know that I could do that for you, pardner. This thing looks somehow suspicious to me, full of funny words."

We then explained that such words and phrases as "flowery smell" were not the point, that the passage merely speaks both poetically in hexameters and sociologically in vexata quæstio of various examples of violence and hurriculous harangues in the hurry-durry of modernity, as well as the more salutary aspects of American life, both poles of being having characterized the land for time immemorial, that the only hope to conquer that violence and those negative careers is not by fear and consequent demonstrations of law and order in reprisal such that innocent people wind up in jail or killed, but rather by discussing the matter openly, encouraging by it debate, and realizing the truth of occurrence as an issue which might then be looked on without blink, to find peaceful resolution without bloodshed.

Well, Willie scratched his head, rolled up his dingy blue shirtsleeves, rubbed together his palms, caked with the greasy aftermath, he said, of a transmission job he performed earlier in the day out beside one of the country roads over by Concord, appeared unimpressed by our eloquence, and finally wrinkled his brow and grimaced menacingly, emasculating our further desire to counteract his will, saying that he still didn't know about the sound of it, but that he would give it a go, provided that, should he not like the result, we would agree not to allow anyone ever to hear it. We agreed and so he read it.

He said at the conclusion that he didn't like it at all and didn't want anyone ever to hear it. But we were persistent in cajoling him, making note of his mellifluous voice, sounding as if he had eaten honey mixed with ochre and gravel from a hard lonely road through the prairie, listening only to the sad tenor howls in the dark of the wishtonwishes--as quintessentially American as the variegated richness of the soil itself.

Eventually, after a couple of more hours of debate, exhortation richly enlaced with blandishments aplenty--in which at one point he got to spoiling over perceived indignities, when we informed him tersely of the characteristic prettynees of his mouth, saying, "Hey, are you lookin' to go out behind the buildin' and fight? I've got a greasy chain around my waist that says that you just might"--, we were able to convince Willie that the right thing to do would be to have the thing heard. Willie, who weighs about 280 on a light day and stands 6'3" without his hobnail boots, after agreeing, stroked his long black beard musingly and then nevertheless pronounced laconically: "Okay, then. Have it your way, Pilgrim. But if they don't like it, I'll be back for you, and soon."

To stab the point home, he then hiked up his pants, made a beeline for his truck, pulled out a shotgun from the rack in the back of the cab, and proceeded to blow a roll of dimes through our largest window of the Tower here, one with gold-plated filigree and platinum insets between the stained panes hand-painted by a local renowned artist named Gilbert Steaned Hanes, a glasswork hard to replace in times not of plenty, in times where shame exceeds fame. As he did so, he simply said, "Keep the change, Pilgrim, and pay for the glass with it, on your side of the grimly grimy bloody sheet, that is." Whatever he meant by that, we don't know, but we felt compelled to do precisely as he directed. And so we did.

Last we saw him, he was laughing uproariously as he drove away in his truck, leaving skid marks out front about a half a mile long. We hollered after him from the blown out window through a dense cloud of smoke and bits of pavement, splashing up wildly through the gloom of a late hazy wintry afternoon, already darkened by the gray choleric choker refuse of the coal flames beaming intermittently their fiery-faced waves of orangeado through the soot-striated factory windows in the distance, that such bedevilment and pomeroyal recalcitrance and reconditeness, while popular back in the mid-Thirties, in the era when desperadoes were likened to Robin Hood, were no good now for the tire rationing program, neither for the glass. But Willie just stuck his blackened hand out of the thread-hanging window of his shambling tumbrel of a truck as he pulled away in some unknown gear, drip-locked, providing withal a standard gesture of good luck on parting, the international symbol for the pièce de résistance of the otherwise four-in-hand, waving it wildly through the already smoke-laden air of the city, as an obvious gesticulation of good will.