The Charlotte News

Wednesday, August 19, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Further questions being: what if Alias had no vouchers? What if Alias were homeless? What if Alias had some minor run-ins with John Law in the past, somewhere out West in his gunslinging days? What if there was a wanted poster out for Alias: "Wanted for Treason" in Dallas and other places West and South of the Mississippi and the Rio Grande? What would you have done then, officer? Run him in for vagrancy? Hold him until John Law told you what to do? Shoot him down like a dirty lowdown skunk-dog with a crooked hind leg if he dared to resist your lawful order to accompany you to a place of vouching?

You have no more right to violate our Constitution than we do yours. If you have the right to run in Alias merely on a hunch, or a neighbor’s hunch, or elsewise of the like ilk, then, well, reckon as not we’d have as much right to run you in for the same sort of hunch. You probably wouldn’t like it either.

For we still remember how to draw.

Ask Johnny Ringo.

Oh, no, not him. This one’s from over around Mon-roe.

Well, remember it next time when, based on a mere hunch or someone else’s hunch, you want to check Alias for id.

You need those specific articulable facts showing probable cause of ongoing criminal conduct before you can do that.

Such as in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of a President.

So, maybe, get Miss Kitty who called the thing in there sometime to read with you the Constitution and Mr. Lawson’s case, out of Berkeley, California--or San Diego, Tacoma, or wherever it was--circa 1983.

Heck, sing it in unison with her if you want.

And, remember, there’s more, a whole lot more, that goes into a name than merely id.

10-4, 25 or 62.

The front page this date boldly announces a major commando raid on the coast of France, at Dieppe. "Operation Jubilee"—which we never attended at Chapel Hill for it ended a year before our time, but in the summer of 1970 we did stay in Chapel Hill for a week exploring some of the old clockwork orange routine with some of the great coaches of it from our time--was a complete bust.

Led primarily by British and Canadian troops under the command of Lord Mountbatten, 3,600 of the 6,100 raiders were killed or captured and 106 planes were lost to only 48 Nazi strikes and 311 killed, no prisoners taken among General von Runstedt’s formidable coastal defense contingent. Among the dead on the Allied side were only three Americans.

The purpose of the raid had been to gain intelligence on such a strike and its capabilities and effectiveness, testing the Nazi defenses of the French coast in preparation for an Allied invasionary force. The lessons learned would be applied on D-Day, and it was also made abundantly plain that any full-scale invasion of the Continent itself via France had to be delayed until a sufficiently large phalanx could be trained and deployed effectively against the Nazis’ newly constructed Maginot Line along the French coast—a series of deadly pillboxes with peering transoms set into the sandsome heights above the beaches.

Jubilee was not, however, as accurately reported on the front page contemporaneously, intended as an invasion itself, merely a feint to hold a beachhead and its harbor for a short time and then retreat, hopefully with prisoners captured through whom valuable information might be gleaned. That latter aspect obviously failed. It was a costly exercise, one which General Montgomery had fought against conducting.

Dieppe, on the surface, therefore did little but cost the lives of 1,400 men; in greater depth of post-mortem analysis, however, it did much to prepare the way for the Allied successes of D-Day and the days following, twenty-two months forward.

The 1,400 thus did not lose their lives in vain.

This time, however, though inherently unreliable generally the DNB was, accurate came its echo in celebratory portrayal of Jubilee as a "debacle".

Ah, but my sweet, rest easy on the balustrade. Keep your scopes peeled on the voracious waves eating steadily by the passage your watch takes of your sandy front from out your yard in its petty pace of creep past the bar before you. For your day will come when your suitor shall bring you lots of candy and flowers from the Candyman and the Florist for your grave away from home to cast your body and soul, your Party, its leaders all aghast in glum, unto their dearly departed fate of lowcast gloam.

The Russians claimed the bounty collected on fully 1,250,000 Nazis since the beginning of the spring offensive in May, against half that number in dead suffered by the Russians.

One pauses at those numbers, probably accurate, to consider the unholy nature of the cost of human life being expended on that front on both sides. Against the Russians, no blame may be placed. They were bravely defending their own home territory against ruthless and calculating slime breaching its borders, slime crossing the Don, holding its Bend, fording the Kuban, and trying to breach the Bend and Volga’s combined protective moat of Stalingrad.

Yet, reflect again: 1.9 million lives taken in a mere three months, 1.9 million corpses floating face down, numb and void of any further perception of sensory stimuli, down those rivers, and one’s sensations become drowned in rivers of blood, divers reticula of torrentially flowing, pouring, unstanchable, unquenchable blood.

And all, as Herblock paints in high relief on the editorial page, for the acquisition of someone else’s oil to continue creating more little Nazi rivers of blood all over the globe, all over the round globe.

As Dorothy Thompson stated on Monday in a different context, it could not go on this way for much longer.

Or no one would be left after the war to calculate its cost or consider its victory.

"Exciting Speculations" in the column surmises the purpose of the raid on Dieppe, concludes that it is likely not an invasion, per the reports, but potentially, if successful, an advanced messenger, a parry to a larger offensive thrust coming in its wake. The speculation, in any sense of imminent action, was raw and wrong for the most part in this instance, but not for the long haul.

Paul Mallon analyzes the crippling burden on business of the new confiscatory corporate taxes being sought for levy to pay the increasingly record budget for the war. He cites an example of a Pisgah Forest, N.C. cigarette paper manufacturer who testified before Congress that if the currently pending bills were passed, the company would need double and even quadruple its price in order to turn any profit at all. That, of course, would have an effect redounding through the economy, including the personal economy of the regularly smoking G.I., in need of his minute to minute nerve-fix from the PX in order to survive the nerve of the next and the next.

Solution to that one was simple: smoke-enders.

Leave the poor mountain forest to heal itself back into nature and find some other way to rip off the hapless consumer without killing him with cancer or implements of war, you drug-purveying idiot.

But then Hitler was waging the war, and Hitler neither drank nor smoked. Hitler did little but wage war and pet his German shepherd dog and pose for pictures in the press and pat little Eva on the head.

That was enough to drive just about anyone to smoke and drink.

"How Now, Pete?" might be summed with the notion: now, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. But, all in a necessary enterprise were there to be, after the war, anyone except Boss Hitler, a real bad boss for whom to have to work.

That would have been enough probably to drive just about anyone to smoke and drink.

"Poor Man’s Luck" tells of the paradoxical fallacy in the professor’s wisdom proposing to Congress a plan by which savings would either not be taxed at all or very little: saving too much, causing finally investment and the consequent running of riches into the higher tax brackets, now running as high as 80% on the richest.

That, too, would probably have had the same result.

"The Challenge" from The Monroe Journal sounds a little to us as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair 60^th anniversary might sound twenty years from now, when those of us who survive that long are able to say: it was twenty years ago at the 40^th anniversary--when we were still young.

Be there. But, please, this time, leave your clothes on, great-grandma and grandpa. It may have worked to garner a photographer’s attention once, but don’t press your luck.

As to the little story out of Warsaw on Hitler’s attempt to get through the Pearly Gates—1-2-3—we might add: "We’re just jammin’ up here. You can leave if you want to."

Incidentally, while reading a little about Sch’lb’y R’w’ of the Detroit Tigers in 1942 and Pr’ch’r R’w’, Ch’by D’n, V’rg’l Tr’ks, and D’zy Tr’t, we ran across this poem by somebody, whoever he was:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb's weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its heats;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.

O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweeds' iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world's ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.

O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see you boys of summer in your ruin.
Man in his maggot's barren.
And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

--D'l'n Tho's, 1934

And, we have a correction for yesterday’s print even in its clear version. It is not "C’carat". But, Mr. D'bbs, so as not to spoil your quest, you have to find the gold in the hills up there for yourself.

Or, ask the little M'x'can b'y.

Then, when you find it, don't look back to ask "why" but only dream of the future to ask "why not".

In Chapel Hill, by the way, Jubilee was a tobacco debacle. The people out on the Isle of Wight didn’t give a damn though.

Ourselves, we blew up the dams, every damned one the Axis had.