The Charlotte News
Saturday, August 29, 1942
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: Imagine our surprise last night when finally we came to read the editorial page of the previous day and conned "It’s Cooking", the first piece in the editorial column, to find the subject of the editorial to be one Andrew McNaughton, Lt.-General of the Canadian Army.
Whether General McNaughton was any kith or ken to either John McNaughton or Daniel M’Naghten, we don’t know.
But, we assure that we had not read that print when we wrote out the note of yesterday.
General McNaughton, incidentally, passed away on July 11, 1966, the 25th anniversary of the establishment by FDR of the position of Coordinator of Information which, as we have indicated previously, led to the creation June 13, 1942 of the OSS, each office sharing a common initial director, "Wild Bill" Donovan.
We also add to yesterday’s note that on July 19, 1967, we were in Atlanta, per our custom of the time. And, it is altogether probable, as that date sticks in our mind, that it was then that we purchased from a record store on Peachtree Street near Rich’s, located at the little triangle where either Broad or Forsyth takes off from Peachtree, the newest record, having been released on Monday the 17th in the United States, by that well-known group of the time from England. We shall leave it to you to figure out of which waxy thing with the hole in the middle we make note.
It is somewhat interesting in certain ways, given yesterday’s page, which we again stress we had not yet read before drafting yesterday’s note—and should you consider it a little, would be rather impractical, if not altogether improbable, for us to have first read the page and then factored backwards and forward from the dates in question based on that reading, rather than starting with November 22, 1963 as a reference point.
Stranger coincidences and serendipitous intersections of time and print have occurred than that, however, during the process of presenting this material over the past 11 years, and so, while never ceasing to surprise us, it nevertheless has become more routine than not.
Not much of note appears on the front page this date which we have not already discussed previously. A man was arrested near Charlotte for threatening to assassinate FDR. Witnesses against him were his former wife and daughter-in-law. The case sounds to us as more of the war hysteria boiling over to the point of absurdity abroad the country--rather flimsy, so much talk at worst. If the individual had a gun and started speaking that which was attributed to him, then one might take it seriously, but for someone to have said that he wished he had a gun and then would shoot the President was obviously so much bluster. One cannot be held accountable for conditional statements, the predicate of which has not been accomplished. Such a statement as the individual was accused of uttering, made privately, is akin to saying that if one had a rocketship, one would prefer to be on Mars. The speaker would not truly prefer to be on Mars, obviously, but is expressing an opinion of frustration via the means of hyperbole.
Expressing, as the LaRouche people have, however, quite publicly a belief that the British might assassinate the President should he not adopt their favored health care plan—as illogical as that notion is—is nevertheless a statement to be taken seriously when the LaRouche people are busy obstructing the free flow of debate on health care in town hall meetings while others, to express their Second Amendment rights, are openly bearing firearms at presidential speeches, even if the Second Amendment says nothing which would authorize such a right when the individual is not part of the Militia.
On the editorial page we note the presence of the poem "High Flight" by John Magee, who died during a training mission over Lincolnshire, England, while piloting his Spitfire on December 11, 1941. The poem’s composition began August 18, the same date on which that strangely coincident and darkly prophetic editorial cartoon appeared from Herblock.
The first and last lines of this poem were recited in memory of the Challenger Space Shuttle crew by President Reagan the day after the ship blew asunder from defective 0-rings allowing, from their shrinkage in the extant unusually cold Florida weather, the escape of explosive gases during lift-off on January 28, 1986.
The question we have, however, is whether, by seeking in the heavens that which we commonly call "God", we make the mistake of seeking that from afar which is so perceptibly evident in the commonplace nearby. So, to conceive of slipping the "surly bonds" in fact might be viewed as a rather cynical statement which might be easily conjured only by a 19-year old training to fly in combat missions to drop bombs on people he didn’t know. We venture, regardless, that the "face of God" is not more easily observed from any aircraft than from the average beach or plain or desert below on terra firma or on a ship at sea.
The quote of the day may serve as evidence perhaps of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s alleged opium use. Or, maybe it was just his imagination at work.
But, usually, when we close our eyes, we fall fast asleep rather than "make pictures".
Sometimes, with our eyes shut, however, we do hear music which is not actually playing.
If that sensitivity sometimes finds you as well, just say, "I don’t want to play anymore." The music will go away.
Paul Mallon points out that Herr Goebbels was busy issuing propaganda statements on the radio that the Allies were preparing to open a second front at Dakar on the west coast of Africa and in North Africa. As to the latter prediction, he was actually quite correct. Perhaps, he obtained his information ultimately from the same source whose integrity and patriotic credentials Dorothy Thompson questioned the previous day in the last paragraph of her piece. But history does not so record.
Or, maybe he got it from smoking his hookah.
Whether, parenthetically, the Administration would have entrusted such delicate information to the Senator of whom we make reference is of course questionable, given the Senator’s known past public performance.
Maybe he, too, was smoking a hookah—and quite often.
Mr. Mallon’s short piece, incidentally, goes on to provide a nice map of what was at stake in Russia’s critical defense of the oil-rich Caucasus and the industrial base at Stalingrad, key to the Volga and thus the Caspian Sea, and how the Russians might yet defend both positions with the approach of winter only now five or so weeks away, at least based on the early winter of 1941.
"It All Depends" informs of the front page story of the previous day regarding the anti-trust suit brought by the Federal government against the Associated Press to seek an order compelling the organization to permit membership by newspapers without restriction.
We see "A.P." attached to news stories and photographs appearing daily in newspapers throughout our lives. What is it, this "A.P."? Where does this "wire service" reside? Is it just somewhere in the wires? In the air? Under the floor? In the ceiling? On the tip end of your radio antenna sticking out the fender of your car?
The organization began in 1846 in New York, where it is still headquartered, and serves as a conduit for news gathered by its own reporters and photographers stationed throughout the United States and around the world, as well as being a receptor and redistributor of news obtained from its member newspapers which pay a subscription fee for use of its stories and reciprocally provide permission to A.P. to redistribute each member newspaper’s stories printed without attribution.
So, being such a clearing house for mass dissemination of news, its issue may be conceptualized as akin to Heywood Broun’s etymological malapropping via that which the chief of the tribe said to the papoose when the papoose came of age.
Or, maybe it’s rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations no one ever sees.
Well, you do see what we mean?
Incidentally, following the Yellow Brick Road, the next Life issue, dated April 4, 1960, bore a photograph of Marlon Brando in his cowboy outfit during the filming of his directorial debut, "One-Eyed Jacks".
As we have said, things sometimes become embedded in the subconscious, derived from whence we know not, and, unless checked, may drive conscious thoughts to conjure beliefs ostensibly transmitted from the mystically divine out of the empyreal ether, no matter how irrational and in fact displaced completely from objective reality those beliefs and their sources from sorcery might be, sometimes, for their apparent celestial origin, selectively conveyed to their receptor, possessed with such tenacity and fervor that they actually actuate irrational and untoward behavior against another based merely on some childish notion fully formed consciously of a moment but forgotten over time, hidden away in the dim recesses of the human mind, awaiting only some dimly conveyed trigger to bring to confluence the irrational belief with consequent irrational action.
Just say, in that event, when so seemingly impelled, "I don’t want to play anymore."
Framed Edition
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