The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 5, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Sum of the Indictment" offers a bitter attack on the Morganton insane asylum, in support of the Tom Jimison series, the last of which was published in this day's News. It also indicates the prospective publication of a woman's story of the female side of the institution. We shall endeavor to bring you at least one excerpt of that story as well.

The remainder of the Bible quote today says: "Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have."

Hitler, on January 30, had said in his speech at the Sportspalast:

Well, did Jesus in the quoted passage mean to suggest to Hitler that the haves would have more while his poor countrymen, the have-nots, would have less than even that which they seemed to have? We think not. For that would be contra all for which Jesus otherwise stood. What he seems to mean has to do with spiritual being and understanding, not with material possessions. For, as it also says, more or less, the seed that falls on good ground the Lord shall call his own. That which falls among the thorns "are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection."

Blaise Pascal, referenced by Mr. Burt in yesterday's prints, said further, not dissimilar to that of which Jesus spoke:

So, who was this "Providence" of whom Hitler spoke and from whom he took his orders? As we have before suggested, we think it likely was his dog. Somehow, we tend to doubt that he was knocking on Jesus's door for wisdom. Nor Pascal's. In any event, the subsequent outcome of the war might suggest that his prayers were not heard or answered by whomever it was to whom he thought he did obeisance in seeking lebensraum for the German people. While lebensraum and empire were concepts in time incalculable, by no means invented by Hitler, they were, with the coming of the age of the Fast Express, the readily transient world, the air mobile world, outmoded in the post-World War age. Lindbergh himself had gone a long way toward making that concept outmoded. For in the brave new world, lebensraum could be achieved within the democratic world by simply moving elsewhere, to America. It was not necessary for Germany or any other country to effect empire to enable self-sustenance. It could be had by simply adhering to international law and participating within the community of nations. It was a subject too tough for Hitler and his spellbound dog to master.

Dorothy Thompson speaks of his having blamed the entire Russian fiasco on the cold weather, and such was the case. On that point, he offered:

There was, in actuality, much truth in what he said and in what he prophesied for the spring. But the blame for the operations having extended into the bitter cold weather, as Ms. Thompson points out, was exclusively from his own idiocy in undertaking the entire Operation Babarossa late in the year, on June 22, and then in launching a second major offensive, one to take Moscow, in early October when already the signs of an early and harsh winter ahead were upon them. Indeed, snow flurries were reported around Moscow and Archangel in mid-June, the earliest anyone could ever recall seeing snow in those areas. Hitler was too busy filing to close tolerances with his bastards to see the big picture--not the hallmark of any "genius", only a stupid bastard.

And, he was a coward to boot.

Ray Clapper today sums up the overnight production conversion from the four major automakers' factories to weaponry, tanks, planes, transport trucks, and guns. He tells of the 80% increase in employees at General Motors, for instance, and of the overall forecasted increase in productivity at Studebaker by mid-1943 to eight times its pre-war automobile manufacturing volume. They may not have been filed by the bastards to the close tolerances of the German machinists' product. But, their volume, nevertheless, won the war over the Nazi bastards.

Elsewhere on the page, the University of Virginia's articulate and erudite football coach, Frank Murray, responded somewhat ruefully to the editorial which had appeared in The News decrying the apparent fact reported in the national press that Georgia football players were receiving deferments from the draft. (Just five days earlier, as we pointed out, the Sports Publicity Director at Georgia had written a letter indicating that the report was untrue, that the University president had merely sought from the local draft board consideration for all juniors, based on a plan of early graduation mid-year of their senior year.) The News, nevertheless, stands by its guns, indicating in plainer speak than the coach that the coach had in fact proved their primary point: that those young men who were both reasonably intelligent and physically fit would be of greater service to the war effort than those who were of extraordinary erudition, yet of "physical depreciation". (Whether that premise always translated into fact at placements such as O.N.I., disregardng for the nonce the notion that an agile mind and reasonably fit body often are of equal articulation, is beside the point.)

We suppose that it goes to show that, with The News probably having the better of this argument with the coach, all the rococo rhetoric and citations and allusions to classical literature one might wish to enjoin to the cause of an argument notwithstanding, it is at base the soundness of the argument itself, in terms of its logical premises leading to conclusion, which in the end ought win the game, that is the debate. We have nothing against rococo rhetoric, mind you, and we grant that the Cavalier coach wrote a masterpiece of feather-dipped literary muse; but, despite that, The News it was which received the blues.

Be it resolved: Football players should serve along with everyone else in the military and thus should not be exempt from the draft. That was the only real point of the editorial and the coach merely disagreed with the manner of presentation, primarily its styling the bulk of them as less than stellar scholars.

Of course that broad statement was quite unfair. Indeed, if you were paying attention back during the summer, we posted a front page of The News which made mention of the young "Whizzer" White of the University of Colorado having been drafted, or perhaps, having volunteered, for the military--we forget which. Regardless, he eventually joined the Navy, departing his professional football career with the Detroit Lions, interrupted once already for his trip to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, after a year with the Pittsburgh Pirates pro football franchise following his graduation as valedictorian of his class. Byron "Whizzer" White of course was in 1962 appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Kennedy, himself a Harvard football player, and served there with dignity until his retirement in 1993.

There is nothing wrong with football, as long as it is played with the helmet on.

We note that Rube Waddell, the mighty pitcher whose arm swung like a lash, apparently was given to being distracted by puppies and shiny objects, as well as giving chase to fire trucks during games. That, according to the Wicked-pedia, anyway. Somehow, wethinks it sounds a bit suspect, even if documented somewhere, more than likely apocryphal fish stories within the sporting world. But the point is that numbskullery, or, for that matter, skulduggery, are not by any means reserved to football, either within the sporting world, or in the world without.

Be it therefore further resolved that many people are distracted by the holding up of a puppy or a shiny object, without thereby necessarily being mentally deficient. Indeed, if while we were writing this very paragraph, someone were to walk by us holding up a puppy or flashing a shiny object at us, we would no doubt be properly distracted. Failing to react to such might indeed be the sign of a defective mind and personality, devoid of any sensibility, devoid of any reactive sentience.

And an Army corporal also carps at the editorial appearing a few days earlier on the nighttime accosting of women by one or more men identified as being black. The corporal takes the editorial as a racial slur and thinks it potentially stimulative of vigilante reprisal. The News defiantly counters by again sticking by its guns, repeating its previous premise that such a situation was deplorable.

Well, was it racist? Was the story any less effective of its intended end, to lessen violence, by remaining race-neutral in its description of the attacker--or was it considered to be a public service, a warning to those walking the streets at night to identify the race of the attacker? Was it simply hearkening back to the old "Birth of a Nation" paranoiac mentality, the rape-complex of which Cash wrote so articulately and accurately, the fear by the white man of the black man running off with his white woman? triggering the lynch mob mentality out of chivalrous protection of chastity and Astolat sanctification, Elaine's protective gauntlet and Excalibur-Durindana Blade, that often forming pre-emptively over such superficial acts as leering or wolf-whistles, the latter being that which got 14-year old Emmett Till savagely beaten and lynched in 1955 in Money, Mississippi, becoming the inspiration to Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat at the front of the bus, beginning in turn the bus boycott in Montgomery which launched the national reputation of Martin Luther King and gave birth to the modern civil rights movement and the dream--the dream ultimately of defeating and knocking down that rape-complex of fears leading to segregation based on sentimental superficial suspicions and superstitions.

We cringed a bit when we read that editorial, but we grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, not in the time of "Birth of a Nation", as did the editors. So, we offer no judgment. We only suggest that the corporal probably had a sounder, more progressive approach, on the one hand, than the editorial. But, on the other, not so, as his remedy was to suppress the news entirely. And that certainly was potentially to endanger future victims, not the discharge of responsibility owed the public by any newspaper worth its salt. But identifying the attacker as black and preying on white women also sounded atavistic, a return to the Red Shirt days of the 1890's. The same function of the story, it seems to us, could have been achieved by simply referring to there being one or more attackers in the night, preying on women. Indeed, by identifying the race, undue relief in the face of predatory males of another ostensible racial characteristic might have been the result.

Does the subject of "No Moral Issue" in the column, re the proliferation of soldiers in Mecklenburg and the consequent presence of prostitution, bringing with it venereal disease, not equate at least to the potential also that some unsatisfied soldier, unable to find sufficient companionship as clientele, might also then become a potential attacker in the night of white women, be he white, red, brown, green, yellow, black, or purple?

Well, there's twice as much silver in twenty nickels as in a single silver dollar. So...