The Charlotte News

Saturday, September 12, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page carries for the second straight day a delayed report of the August 24^th battle at Guadalcanal, the first attempt by the Japanese to recapture Henderson Field, this entry chronicling the sinking in the Solomons of the Japanese light carrier Ryujo.

The first snow of the season is reported to have fallen in the Caucasus Mountains as Hitler’s juggernaut was once again slogging and sloshing its way unceremoniously to an ignominious, unvictorious halt.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon quotes FDR as ominously suggesting that the war in Europe was going to be won, not solely from the air, but on the battlefields. That was bad news for the young men of the United States, especially the 18 and 19 year olds not yet deemed draft eligible. It signaled that their time was coming when they would have to fight in the infantry and become among those with their allies who would finally let slip the dogs of war back onto the haunted trench emplacements of the Continent, barely overgrown to obscure from view the battle scars left from twenty-four years earlier.

Mr. Mallon, normally astute, appears to make a mistake in his column this date, calculating out the after-tax income of corporations to suggest that profits were generally down from the previous year, despite pre-tax profits being touted as having increased 400 percent, causing labor groups to want to vie for a commensurate increase in wages premised on a false basis. He reports that taxes had been raised on corporations from 52 percent to 74 percent. But that still leaves an after-tax profit increase of over 100 percent, viz. for every $4.00 of profit, 74 percent went to taxes, leaving $1.04 in after-tax increase in profits, while in 1941, 52 percent of that $1.00 in profits left 48 cents, less than half the $1.04. So, assuming the correctness of the 400 percent before-tax figure, it was incorrect to assert that corporate profits were decreasing in the first year of America’s involvement in the war, even if the rate of increase was only one-quarter that of the asserted increase stated to the press by OPA chief Leon Henderson. Mr. Mallon appeared to forget to calculate the after-tax profits for the previous year—unless that was the basis for the 400 percent increase, in which case the Mallon analysis was correct.

His basic argument, however, relied on a report from the National City Bank of New York finding that 125 large corporations handling the bulk of the war contracts reported income in the first six months of 1942 36 percent less than in the comparable period of 1941. But this result would be expected with war contracts controlled by law as to profit margins as against the ordinary free marketplace. Overall, however, with other businesses not so heavily dependent on war contracts but only supplemented by same in their normal operations, business appeared booming, the only problem being in certain industries, such as shipbuilding, where the raw material was running too low to continue production.

So, why shouldn’t the workers have wanted their fair share of the profit they were helping to make for the industrialists? Though the wages obviously should have varied from industry to industry, even from company to company, dependent on output and actual profit, not averages, no one should have been telling the worker in this time of war that his incentive to work longer hours and produce more in those hours was merely patriotism, not reward in better wages, that if his company was making 100 percent or more in increased profit, his wage should remain nevertheless fixed. Such was especially the case, with strikes held in abeyance for the duration, actively discouraged by both AFL and CIO, with agreement having been made to accede to arbitration without resort to strikes.

And, just to show that we aren’t alone in the experiential world on occasion interfacing with strangely quirky, coincident episodes of varying degrees of probability for their improbable occurrence, we found today in perusing the New York Times a story which we recommend for your consideration.

Indeed, the fact that it appears this Saturday, given one of our coincident sub-topics during the week past being Lester Maddox, arising as the Phoenix out of the jingle jangle print on the page of The News from 1942 chronicling the gubernatorial primary election won by Ellis Arnall, future opponent of Maddox in 1966, and our having just Wednesday night come across the 1968 interview of Lester by another talk-show host, prompting the mention by Joe Pyne in the process of a town in North Carolina to which we ourselves have more than a passing past connection, and, indeed, with particularity, the very theater in which we, presumably, saw our first cinematic presentations—title of which being lost to memory, though "Bambi" or "The Song of the South" might adequately suffice as a fair guess—is, in itself, not a little astounding.

But, with Dr. Cavett’s terminology, despite his erudition and many years on us for which we have enduring respect from all those years ago, we take issue. Coincidence is, we suggest, much too mundane a word to describe that which he relates, this phenomenon of temporal and spatial interplanarity.

We like our own portmanteau, or whatever you would call it, lopointu. But then that expression implies a deliberate, conscious action by the actor or actors, those engaged in the seeming conspiracy of interplanarity, to bring about the interplanarity. (We could describe this aspect as actus reus, but that connotes criminality in the law, bearing no relationship to the thing which we reference; there is no animus involved. So we leave aside the latin.)

Lopointu entails not just logic and positivism but also intuition, each brought to bear at once cohesively to try to understand a thing. And, while we concede the possibility that the intuitive part of the formulation plays at least a passive role in bringing to the surface the realization of the interplanarity, once the interplanarity is at work, how can it be that the actor plays any substantive role in bringing the interplanarity into being in the first instance?

In other words, in Dr. Cavett’s example, how could the intuitive part of the mind have played any active role in enabling the slot in the parking lot to open up at just the right moment to allow the interplanarity to become manifest? Did Cavett sense the book unconsciously from afar? Did his mind guide him to it, as a curious child might guide an adult into a toy store to purchase the newest bell-and-whistle? Did he arrange therefore, unwittingly, the parking spot to open, even though consciously he was just shortly before unaware of even the existence of the book fair? How can that be?

That would imply nearly, if not in fact, some sort of telekinetic power on the part of Dr. Cavett, that of the sort displayed by the spoon-bender of a few decades ago, Uri Geller. (We bend spoons all the time eating ice cream.) But, whether fake or fact, that is not the sort of telekinesis necessary to get the occupant of a vehicle at just the right moment to engage his seat, purpose the key into the slot to provide spark to the pistons, depart the parking lot at just the moment of passage around the bend in the road, after noticing the sign indicating the presence of the book fair.

This other thing of which Dr. Cavett makes note would have to have other aspects to it to enable all of this precognitive part of the event to occur before he rounded the corner or before he was cognizant of the book fair’s existence at the locus of interplanarity—and, of course, it also presupposes the precognition necessary to get lost on a country road on a day near Stockbridge, unplanned, and all the rest of it, to arrive just at the right moment when the open slot in the lot occurred, before the book fair wherein the book was to which he was drawn and opened its pages right to the spot where the precise point of interplanarity was manifested to his conscious mind.

Does the book possess a mind, independent of any animate physical being, to draw Cavett to it?

Thus, the precognitive territory, and whether that is what is at work, become the focus, taking the whole matter out of the realm of mere mundane coincidence and into something else entirely. For mere coincidence is that which is commonplace and subject to empirical verification in all of its coincident aspects, but nevertheless interestingly out of the ordinary, sufficiently so to call it "coincidental".

That which Dr. Cavett describes is not mere coincidence, however, we suggest, but rather this other thing at work, this interplanarity, not even necessarily adequately embraced by our term, lopointu.

It is plainly beyond psychological explanation, except in terms which explain our willingness of the moment to be open to the other thing as opposed to shutting down those senses which perceive it and thereby avoiding its intersective instruction.

Some, of course, will deny the thing’s existence in the sensate world entirely and call it craziness, that it is the manifestation of some dark corners of the imaginations, existing only in the realm of the ideas of the perceiver, a form of self-hypnosis, perhaps even hallucinatory, a catcher in the rye, if you will, or even the result of substance abuse of one sort or another. But such eternal skeptics are but those who darkly refuse to understand this other thing of which Dr. Cavett writes. It is, we suggest, the spice of life, the color of life, the spirit of life, the irony, sometimes darkly speaking to us through the cordon of the fog, other times brightly and humorously peeking mischievously from behind the arras of life to say hello, seemingly understanding the spritely awareness of our wits to be appreciative of it in the moment. Perhaps it all depends on the receptor’s state of mind of the moment. Perhaps, per pass, not.

Wethinks that it helps in appreciation of it to have read and at least attempted to understand, and derive from that reading and attempted understanding meaning, some ancient, or at least deceased, writers of philosophy and poetry, and to apprehend from them the coincident aspects between those literary modes, whether accomplished in the interplanary modality, or merely in the more conscious realm of apprehension, not to say plagiaristic, whereby one reads or hears something and then has trip from the subconscious mind to a conscious thought a pattern which one may initially perceive as the result of one’s own aboriginal genius contributory to mankind of a uniquely seminal thought never before formed on the cortices of mankind, before eventually realizing that the perception of uniqueness was false, derived merely from what one read or heard long before.

But there are those exceptional times, apart from that modality in the conscious realm, when the intersection is derivative of that other plane, not from the fact of having seen or read or heard some thing which the objective analytics might presume was the source of original inspiration, that for the fact that one knows one has never before been confronted with that intersecting object which is causing the interplanarity of the moment with some pre-existing object which one did understand previously existed.

For instance, we knew of Lester Maddox; we knew of Joe Pyne; we had seen both on the tv in the sixties, and Lester again and for the first time walk off a talk show in 1970. We had heard that Joe Pyne had started his career in Lumberton, N.C. But, until this past Wednesday night, we had never seen the clip of Joe Pyne interviewing Lester Maddox, nor even knew that he had interviewed him, and certainly not in the context of including a reference to Joe Pyne’s time in Lumberton circa 1947 and with special particularity of reference made to the Carolina Theater there. Voila! There you are. "Bambi" and "Song of the South" rendered afresh to your mind.

And then there was the time involving that book and its origin from a library 2,765 miles from where our friend picked it up by chance in July 1993 in a bookstore wherein existed a table full of used library copies of that book, not all of which could possibly have come from that library or even that county, in a bookstore a block from where our friend attended kindergarten, only to discover by the book’s label the following day after purchase of the book that the book originally came from a small branch library right around the corner from his house 2,765 miles from the bookstore wherein he bought it a block from his kindergarten, with all the other interplanarity to go with it which we have previously imparted over six years ago in association with editorials of late May, 1941.

Anyway, whether there is a whirling maelstrom hole somewhere, maybe, in the Chatahoochee, from whence all of this derives and to which all eventually goes in return, we don’t know. Maybe that’s the secret, the Fountain of Youth which Ponce de Leon, or one of those Spaniards sought in this, the New World, which some believed then was downhill from the mother countries, from which return therefore was quite inescapably blocked, the El Dorado, for which Cortez came to plunder in the Azetc world, for which DeSoto went in search into what is today the smoky mountain hills of North Carolina and Tennessee, or whether just somehow beneath the stratified layers of the fuller’s earth of Georgia, or percolating below that field of fins in the Texas panhandle which we crossed in the early morning light one cold lightning gray panoramic crossing of Christmas Eve non-stop, alone across the whole expanse of the continent’s vision grant in 1998, or south of it, south of the Rio Grande, to which we went once in our little Roadster 25 years before that, all in a fog around smoky buses broken on the road to kingdom come, around the circuitous mountain corners slowed in rattling head-jarring drum to a stop on a dime for their falling pistons popping out in rhyme slots, with Bob and John, all the rest of the band, playing for our nesting accompaniment as we rode, we rode through the smoke past time, past the steer in the road of night’s freight lines, past the cows marking shines on the blacktop’s precarious guide, streaming out the hidden microphone’s windscreens, afar distant, yet close to keep us company in the dark of the night, amid the donkey honks in the Mexican midnight romps through the hills, unseen in the mist, the haunted hills of lost time, we just don’t know.

We agree wholeheartedly with the idea expressed in the article. We simply are suggesting a different nomenclature for that phenomenon described, to distinguish it from everyday coincidence. Call it, if you want, the "Cavett Habit".

Last night, we drifted back to the front page of July 13 which we did not have a chance previously to read when we first put forth, without our having yet acquired that front page, the editorial page of that date and its note a couple of months ago. It all becomes a little spooky when you consider it.

Was the man they lynched there in Bowie County, in Boston, Texas--a town whose population in 1896 was but 175, in 1996, but 200--actually the man who attempted to kidnap the woman? Did the assault even occur? Or was it just the time for some repetition of the bloodthirst ritual, again happening on a hot midsummer’s Sunday, perpetual, when the dreams, the watermelon rind dreams, the cottonfield dreams, the hoop-dressed corse in some semblance of elegance rustling by you in the perfumed day dreams, the cottonwood trees bending into the stormy afternoon mud puddles’ spitback, haunting your sensibilities in the mosses dripping as wet lace, stirruping by you with hoofbeats silent as the coffins, are apt most to be infesting the mind of its darker demon times, those in conflagration, those in speculation, those in meandering, aimless contemplation, but especially dark and demonized in time when induced too much by the spirits of the dogs of moonshine doing their hoopbend, upside down demonstrations in the reasonless rimes.

As we said once before, don’t tell anyone, but it’s sort of like glass.

But there in 1942 Boston, it may have been glass and hoods and hemphill’s rope, a cannibal’s lethal combination. The screams perished through the nighttime screen but still scream there in agony in the nighttime should you listen.

Incidentally, it was Governor Arnall who abolished during his term the institution of Georgia chain gangs. The 1932 book by Robert Burns and the immediately ensuing film released late that year which chronicled the two stints on the same offense, interspersed by an escape, which Mr. Burns spent on the gangs’ chains for a theft of $5.80 from a grocer, not such an insubstantial amount in 1922 when the crime occurred, but nevertheless not one plainly worth the sentence he received of ten years at hard labor on the Georgia roads, came as a result of a second escape after being returned to the gangs. His subsequent capture in New Jersey was nugatory; New Jersey, reading the book, viewing the film, determined to refuse extradition on humanitarian grounds.

Governor Arnall met with Mr. Burns in New Jersey shortly after the beginning of his term as Governor in early 1943, and eventually, in 1945, arranged for a hearing for Mr. Burns before the Georgia Parole Board, the Governor acting as counsel for Mr. Burns, obtaining from the Board a commutation of his sentence to time served.

It thus becomes an extraordinary irony, one not explored by Joe Pyne, that Lester Maddox would seek the refuge of time, erroneously of course indicating that abolition of chain gangs had occurred in Georgia in the 1930’s, in the face of the grilling by Mr. Pyne over contemporary conditions then in 1968 afoot in Georgia’s penal system, when the refuge of time Lester Maddox sought was that provided over two decades earlier by the very liberal opponent he had beaten in 1966 by drawing between them sharply defined lines of belief, differentiation based on race and "law and order", and thus hard-line penology.

There is an element in hindsight, just as there was outside Georgia and inside it at the time, of the comedic with regard to Governor Maddox. But let no one become unduly sympathetic to Lester as a result, that he was just some harmless little clown too many people took too seriously; he was a dangerous little man with a dangerous and absurd point of view which gained him the Governor’s Mansion for four years, disgraceful to the reputation of the State of Georgia, and during four more years beyond that as its Lieutenant Governor. His closest analogue of the time, George Wallace, was at least an educated man who had started his political career as a populist, not as Lester had, a simple-minded racist, barely capable of hinging two logically consistent thoughts together in the same expression.

Witness his attempt of the moment to challenge Joe Pyne on his past efforts at eradicating the previously segregated facilities of Lumberton during the late 1940’s, while he, himself, came first to the collective attention of the nation through his 1964 attempts to perpetuate that very system of segregation in public facilities which the law had commanded him to integrate, which common sense and dignity should have led all but such an ignorant little man to want to do so voluntarily, and his failure to appreciate the interconnection between his refusal through time to integrate, insisting absurdly even unto 1964 in Atlanta just off the campus of Georgia Tech to so perpetuate that hotly contentious system of apartheid, and the theater there in Lumberton some 17 years earlier—all connected integrally as parts of the same system of apartheid maintained by the Lesters of the world through time, through time since slavery had been abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment which Lester, by his very distinguishing reference to Joe Pyne’s "country", clearly differentiated as being of one other than his own, the Confederate States of America, which continued in Lester’s mind to exist as real as any sovereign nation on earth--in a city where at the time we know, for having repeatedly experienced it at the time, one could enter a mere restaurant, not Lester's but plentiful others', full of white patrons served by black cooks and waiters, and, for its decor, its conventions, step all the way back fully a hundred years, and with but a slight effort and twitch of the imagination, the deft closing of one eye to the scene.

Of course, we could blame Lester for that. Lester was the cause—and from time immemorial. Lester was alive when Christ himself was crucified. Lester drove the nails while wiping his mouth of fried chicken grease.

Lester Maddox was a show-boater trying to achieve power through hurting other people, through dividing people against one another, blacks against whites, "hippies" against "respectable, church-going" folk like himself. Lester could not see beyond himself and those more or less like him.

His mentality left lasting scars on the Southern landscape, the scar tissue of which still co-exists today with a more modern outlook in the South, which co-existed in its time with a more progressive outlook.

That he achieved no real power either then or later, and had no impact nationally other than to breed reaction against his belief system, is lasting tribute only to the Legislature and the better lights of Georgia, especially those of the Fourth Estate, who stopped him dead in his tracks once he achieved through electoral flukes, successively, the offices of Governor and then Lieutenant Governor.

Hitler came to power as a little clown, too. Fortunately, there were term limits in Georgia.

And, by 1974, after the debacle of Watergate had led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, the people of the country at large were quite tired of the extremist timbre of such as Lester Maddox, George Wallace, and their ilk polluting the landscape with divisive bile, appealing to the lower lights, the worst emotions extant in the land, often, as with Wallace, denying their own better understanding in exchange for appealing to votes to achieve power, or, as in the case of Lester, simply too ignorant to know any better and actually believing the bile they spewed. They disappeared from the mainstream of American currency, even if their divisive notions based on other attributes and beliefs have not. Their brand of overtly racist platforms did.

What they left behind them, however, the over-sensitivity to racial issues because of the divisive history they and their ilk then and earlier caused, not only in the South but nationwide, provoke matters with which every American must still contend and with which we must sometimes agonize. Witness the claim in the campaign last year absurdly aimed at certain politicians that they were "racist" because of some comment made which offended somebody despite these same politicians having consistently demonstrated support through time for equal opportunity and civil rights for all.

We have to thank for that sort of absurdly ultra-sensitive reaction these sorts of Lester individuals and their cruel ambitions seeking in other little men the stimulation of untoward action founded on base emotions, causing the resulting bitterness and nearly imperishable memories through time to form that sort of ultra-sensitivity, often to the point of such twisted absurdity as actually to become themselves Lester in the mirror, as often happens with the victim of a crime against nature.

For without the captains, the Lesters, providing their tacit permission, even encouragement, to the little men to do their deeds with impunity, the car draggings, the lynchings, the chainings, the beatings, there would not have been more than isolated instances in all probability. There would not have been the long persisting behavior patterns so resistant to eradication had these thugs who did these crimes been prosecuted and delivered either the death penalties they deserved or, from mercy's mitigation, life sentences in recognition of their inherent ignorance and absence of extended education.

The man there in Boston, Texas was dragged in mid-July, 1942, already wounded from a gunshot's sword, out of a hospital bed before nurses who then refused to identify the men they knew in the community where they lived who dragged him out of the ward, chained him to their vehicle, pulled him behind it until scarcely anything recognizable as a human being was left and then lynched the remains for all other would-be troublemakers to see and take heed of their power over that community of its time. They were savages; they were cannibals. This was not as so often portrayed--well-meaning, but without proper understanding--an example of an act so much of hatred as it was ritual left over from the frontier past, that past brought forward into the present into which they were born and lived, cultishly so, thinking it to be part of their "religion", a Christian "religion", totemic in nature though it was, as surely as the fried chicken Lester sold was part of that same totemic "religion".

"Pickrick". What do you think that meant?

Here’s another clip we had never seen which we ran across just today.

By the way, during our last extended summer visit to Atlanta, in July, 1971, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, cover to cover, in between running laps at a high school track next to the campus of Georgia Tech, as we thought about it all.

Malcolm X was murdered, shot down in cold blood, in plain view, while speaking at a temple, on February 21, 1965 in New York City. This advertisement of Lester's, quoting Pickrick, appeared in The Atlanta Constitution on February 13, 1965.

Have you ever?