The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 12, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: It’s good to know, as the front page imparts, that Caesar, the formerly villainous dog who attacked a villager in upstate western New York, had been released with a clean bill of health after a year in lock-up.

But what about Mr. Ward? What happened to him?

The old maxim is that every dog is entitled to one bite. But with recidivism being what it is among dogs, we think that Mr. Ward deserved a better chance than Caesar. But, we suppose that we are not only comparing across jurisdictions, but also anthropomorphizing Caesar when plainly he wasn’t entitled to such treatment. But since every sucker deserves an even break, it’s hail Caesar!

Yet we have still to wonder where that leaves Mr. Ward.

Ah, you say, but Caesar did not threaten to kill his lawyer. You say.

Across the eastern seaboard, motorists lined up over the weekend to beat the May 15 start of gas rationing by filling the tank to the brim, at least to the extent that supplies so permitted from overstretched filling stations, becoming in many places third-full stations.

"Stopped in at Schenectady’s Esso on the way home from work, my dear, and got her a third full, yes ‘am. That’ll have to do her through the weekend ‘cause they haven’t any more to sell. Guess we can’t go to Uncle Joe’s after all. We could take the bus though to the petting party across town on Saturday night, that is provided you don’t mind the strap."

In the editorial column, "Gas to Burn" reflects back to the latter nineteenth century when gasoline was only a noisome by-product of crude production which was burned up in great bonfires by the wayside. Kerosene for the lanterns and street lamps was the order of the day, along with lubricating oil. Then came the Daimlers and Henry Ford with their automobile and all that burning of gas was instead encapsulated within the combustion chambers at the top of those piston strokes ramming the compressed air to successive explosions down the humpbacked dirt road and eventually into the paved highway.

Out of the development of gas came the development of TNT and high octane aviation fuel as well. To fractionate and distill the latter, the editorial explains, requires the production of lots of ordinary gasoline. With the tanker shortage, however, the production of TNT and aviation fuel necessary for the war effort would produce huge gluts of gasoline with no means by which to transport it and no place in the meantime to store it, all leading back to the old time when burning it up in the fields was the regular practice. And with that, the editorial predicts, tempers were going to flare among the consumers cut to 2 to 3 gallons per week.

"For Sale" reports of another brilliant plan of Robert Reynolds, not only to lower the speed limit to 40 mph nationwide, as the President had proposed recently, but also to confiscate offending automobiles and provide fair compensation to the speed demon in the bargain. The editorial predicts that, in the unlikely event such a bill might pass, frustrated motorists, trying to unload their more than year old cars on an unwilling market, promptly would take to the roads with celerity and rev up and down the highway until caught, to afford themselves of the cooperative arrangement of government purchase of their old jalopies--and then, no doubt, send a letter of thanks to the Chairman of the Military Affairs Committee for having enabled the subsidy to their pocketbooks.

The better solution to the entire dilemma which faced the country was simple of course: the whole of the eastern seaboard’s population would simply relocate by bus and train to the Midwest. Then they could go to all the petting parties they wanted, so long as the rubber held out, that is.

"The Big Shot" misplaces reliance on a Japanese radio report that the Coral Sea battle fleet was personally commanded by Admiral Yamamoto. As indicated, while, as always, Yamamoto had ultimate control over the operation and approved its plan, Admiral Inoue was the actual commander of the Task Force which carried out the operations. Inoue, prior to the outbreak of war, ironically had been among the moderates in the Japanese military opposed to the expansionist policies of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The relative strength of the Allied Task Force and the Japanese Task Force in the Coral Sea was nearly equal, the Japanese having two more destroyers, twelve smaller warships consisting of five minesweepers, two mine layers, two subchasers, and three gunboats, and the light carrier Shoho, sunk on May 7, as their scant initial advantage.

Dorothy Thompson reports of Vice-President Wallace’s New York speech on the previous Friday to the Free World Association, a speech concerning the post-war quest of the world, once victory was achieved over the counter-revolutionaries, to continue with renewed vigor the consistently evolving revolution for the Rights of Man, ongoing since the American and French Revolutions 150 years earlier, now sought to be socked in the jaw and laid to rest by the bandit nations.

Vice-President Wallace, along with Sir Anthony Eden in Britain, Ms. Thompson informs, favored a post-war world in which cooperation and universal education, technology, and science would wage peace, rather than the tried and outmoded post-World War I concept of balance of power. In the meantime, until this end could be achieved, Eden favored a United Nations policing organization to keep the peace around the globe and to check potential rogue states and rogue leaders in them.

Their vision would obtain in part with the creation of the United Nations, and, by the 1960’s in the Kennedy Administration, with the creation of the Peace Corps for underdeveloped countries throughout the globe and the Alliance for Progress with Latin America. But in a world in which nuclear armament suddenly became the weapon of choice at the end of the war, the old philosophy of peace through balance of power would again coalesce to hold its potentially deadly sway over the mind of man, far more dangerously so than at any other time in world history.

Yet, the cockatrice’s fearsome eye, upon which no man may look save in death made instanter, would nevertheless serve, in combination with the United Nations’ peacekeeping role, to forestall the outbreak of another world war, as the consciousness of humanity came to understand the terrible portent of another such global conflict, this time sounding the tocsin for the final reckoning and destruction of the very soul of humanity itself. Was therefore--at least insofar as the tale thus far tolled has been by the idiot tolling it--this inherently evil weapon, at least fully deployed, instead an ironically salubrious check vis à vis humanity, given the inherent nature of humanity, caught innately between often contradictory impulses, the instinctive drive to survive in hostile environs in juxtaposition, within the same being, with an inevitably unremitting tendency toward conscientious compassion for fellow living creatures?

Mrs. Roosevelt’s May 8 "My Day" column to which Raymond Clapper refers in his column of this day, anent son Elliott Roosevelt’s malarial condition acquired from his military stint in Africa, concludes with a question for the isolationists in the country: how would they like the shores of the United States turned into a Corregidor? It was the question of a Verstandesmensch, albeit loaded with hyperbole. For the great problem which created Corregidor was the lack of supply lines to get the men and materiel to the front, some 5,000 miles from the U.S. mainland. But then, the United States on its own continental turf, having to send tankers to provide fuel for the subs, convoy ships and carriers at sea, and tie up its rail cars with transport of munitions, alcohol, and military fuel across the land, hadn’t the means now to convey gasoline for but scant civilian use from the Gulf Coast and Texas to the East Coast. So, perhaps, the First Lady made her point.

The "iron hoop", favored by Gerald L. K. Smith and others, to be drawn up as tight as possible to U.S. shores, was best tossed broadly around the globe, to insure the insularity which isolationists, by their ideals, espoused. The Christ of the Ozarks statue notwithstanding, it was far better to deal with Hitler and Tojo on their own turf than somewhere, say, in the middle of Arkansas--where they would bring to bear with them the full weight of the defeated French and British navies, with the machines of the RAF absorbed into the Luftwaffe for cover.

It is not surprising, incidentally, to learn from the front page piece about the Kerch drive, that Hitler needed to invade the Caucasus not only for oil but for lumber. For, as we recall the lad with the hot doggerel, William Bardwell Curts (not Curtis), who was prosecuted by the Nazis in June, 1939 for same and, in consequence, spent a month in the cooler, Der Fuehrer had to look elsewhere than under his own sagging roof for solid timber.

Upon his return to New York in July, 1939, Mr. Curts said that the Nazis had treated him "100 per cent white".

It is not meet you know how Caesar loved you.
You are not wood, you are not stones, but men;
And, being men, hearing the Will of Caesar,
It will inflame you, it will make you mad:
'Tis good you know not that you are his heirs;
For, if you should, O, what would come of it!

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