The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 9, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Pwpppp, pwp, pwwwp, pwpppppp. Whiiiiinny.

On today’s editorial page, Dorothy Thompson takes on her journalist colleague, Robert Best, turned radio commentator for the Nazi propaganda cause out of Berlin. Ms. Thompson lights into him with an acerbic pen, as well he deserved.

But, for all that, Ms. Thompson does not grant poor Mr. Best his Insanity Clause, the one with which he was born. For he was born, with no complicity of his own contriving, into the State of South Carolina. He thus had at his disposal the perfect Petri dish into which could be curdled his sour anti-Semitic expositions into a completely formed bacterial strain by which to mold and mildew his fermented opinions into a sort of miasmic reality existing somewhere in the hazy ether wafting off the snifter fused in the consequent snooze with and through his mare nostrum—that not to be confused with mare nostrum, a wholly different thing.

Mr. Best, incidentally, was indicted in absentia for treason in 1943 and was subsequently, after the war, in 1948, tried and convicted for same, sentenced to a life term in prison where he died after four and a half years, in late 1952.

It should be noted that, as a study in some degree of similitude and another in contrast, the poet Ezra Pound was also indicted for treason for his similar collaborationist and anti-Semitic ravings on behalf of Mussolini’s Italy, both in print and in propaganda broadcasts. He had advocated fascism as a superior system to communism. Mr. Pound similarly was arrested at the end of the war, after having fled to the north of Italy with Mussolini’s band of fascists set up in the Nazi satrapy after the greater part of Italy was liberated from fascist rule by August, 1943.

But, in Mr. Pound’s case, he was declared incompetent to stand trial and confined to a mental hospital. Eventually, in 1958, the pending charges of treason were dropped, (perhaps because he had been such a rabid anti-Communist, and because by 1958, fascism in some quarters had become quite the fashion again, as still remains the conforming modality in some quarters dropped in the jukebox of life even today), and he was released from the mental hospital—the Catch-22, with corollary No. 696 attached, that being that you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd, not even with a fully loaded Springfield rifle slung over your guitar case as the Comanches surround your wagon fires with brimstone and floating spears amidst the ranch gate strafings.

Declaring that America was an insane asylum, he moved back to his adopted Italy where he lived out the remaining 14 years of his life.

In any event, as we prefer calypso--especially as adapted in the home of country & western music, which is Greenwich Village--to Mr. Pound’s sort of prophesying muse, we tend to laugh at him and instead opt for listening to somebody else’s blues, or, just glancing at the gleanings of some warmed-over news. There is, as Mr. Poe once uttered, a fine line between genius and madness. Mr. Pound, somewhere along the bowline, stepped over it and fell headlong flat into the sea of no return. It can happen out on the unsteady waves where the horizon may jump and play strangely transitory tricks on the too studiously confined perceptions of the moment. Be careful.

As we cautioned, don’t observe that photo of that building designed by Mario Pani in Mexico City, or even its twin companion, the one designed by Inap Oiram located in Laredef Otirtsid, while aboard a moving ship. It’s strictly for landlubbers, matey.

And, Mr. Jimison’s boys ride hard for justice in Dodge again, looking to prevent the lynching of those highly strung in Morganton. Chester, we understand, was leading the seven down through the valley, the one they call "No Return May Come of Your Echo Until You Ascend from the Valley", sometimes shortened to "Winchester Rockface". They all knew Mr. Jimison by his horse, a palomino with rude markings. In Raleigh, he was feared by his horse as much or more than by himself, the one they knew only as "El Triablo, the Malcontent".

Here’s a picture, below, which we ran across. Some fellows, probably some of those hippies from the 1960’s who used to get up like that and masquerade just to fool us poor lame folk, posing outside their family homestead maybe out in the country somewhere, or something.

Anyway, we thought that we would present it, in contrast to another photograph which we have presented to you, especially for its trees--so that you may zoom in and out on those trees and see all the little ghouly faces which pervade in among the greenery, that is the greyery, within the quick-silver and iodine flashed to glass in revelatory reflection as made evident in surviving daguerreotypes or albumen prints or whatever the composition of this particular one was. And yet, while so observing the twisted transmogrifications amid the bony reaches of the contrasts interposing the branches, distinguish that--despite those ghoulish figures which, before the age of photography as we know it, perhaps inspired the likes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel to give color in oils to such analogous nixies jumping about in the shadows of an evening’s mystery, those of which the naked eye may only obtain discernible countenance within the fogged afternoon or evening breeze, provided, that is, that one is observant upon one’s constitutional—such figures remain indistinct and formless despite themselves and their efforts to the contrary to make form from chaos in shades of gray, not coalescing on the flash to the retina, as did the figures discernible in that other photograph we showed you, into fully cohering human figures, fully formed photographs merely deliberately melded in montage.

Even so, having said that, we do find one humanoid figure, in the tree on the right, just to the right of the first story window, off the corner of the building, floating in between the first and second stories. He appears as an Oriental, for his hirsuteness, probably Japanese. He is squatting while holding in opposing hands what appears to be a miniature ferris wheel, observing its twirl. Yet, he is not fully formed.

So, here it is. Someone around the Tower here said that it was Appomattox Courthouse, April, 1865. We chuckled at that suggestion, of course. We knew it wasn’t true because we recognized two or three of these fellows as old friends of ours. But anything’s possible, we suppose.

Whiiiiiiiiinny.

Whoa there, Nelly. The fire’s out. Just a lantern turned over here in the barn.

As to the Herblock of the day: Was Reinhard Heydrich an analogue to John Brown? strictly speaking in irony, mind you, from the other side of the looking-glass. Was John Brown, by the same token turned about again, an analogue to Peyton Farquhar? that is, had the latter lived a longer life.

In 1976, at the same theater where Mark Twain used to perform in San Francisco, we saw John Brown’s Body, as performed by Rock Hudson, Claire Trevor, and Leif Erickson.

Bury the South together with this man,
Bury the bygone South.
Bury the minstrel with the honey-mouth,
Bury the broadsword virtues of the clan,
Bury the unmachined, the planters' pride,
The courtesy and the bitter arrogance,
The pistol-hearted horsemen who could ride
Like jolly centaurs under the hot stars.
Bury the whip, bury the branding-bars,
Bury the unjust thing
That some tamed into mercy, being wise,
But could not starve the tiger from its eyes
Or make it feed where beasts of mercy feed.
Bury the fiddle-music and the dance,
The sick magnolias of the false romance
And all the chivalry that went to seed
Before its ripening.