Site Ed. Note: Speaking of sowing yesterday, we were reminded of this one, especially its Herblock, but not only that.

We are still considering, incidentally, the historical relationship, if any, between yesterday's "Curfew" and "Statuetory Row", and whether in fact one should historically group as Tories, Presidents Jackson, Polk, and Johnson.

Moreover, while we know of relationship to the University of North Carolina campus of Presidents Johnson and Polk, the former having reputedly spoken there while President, slightly in his cups, or out thereof, at Gerrard Hall, whether on the subject of the former Fugitive Slave laws, we know not, the latter having one of the two "places" on campus named after him, the other being McCorkle, we know of no particular relationship between President Jackson and the campus, not that there necessarily had to be one to qualify for position in the Statuetory Row of Raleigh.

We note that the official history of Gerrard Hall omits the appearance there of President Johnson while recognizing that Presidents Polk, Buchanan, and Wilson each spoke there. Perhaps the story is apocryphal as to that building or perhaps simply shunted into the embarrassing dustbins of the University's history, out of sight, out of mind. Nevertheless, President Johnson did receive from the University in some building an honorary doctorate on June 7, 1866, just three months after having, in succession, vetoed the bills establishing the Freedmen's Bureau and enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the latter granting recognition to all citizens of the states and territories of the country full rights and privileges--clarifying the import of the Thirteenth Amendment just ratified on December 18, 1865 and subsequently, in 1868, conferred conclusively by the Fourteenth Amendment--both of which 1866 bills were nevertheless enacted by two-thirds majority vote of the Congress, negating President Johnson's veto.

Of course, parenthetically, in the South, it was all for naught for yet another 98 years and then some, that largely because of what took place on Christmas Eve, 1865.

But that still leaves us wondering aloud re the proper relegation of each of the three referenced Presidents to placement among the Tories. We wind up as thick as bricks on that one.

Once, we had opportunity to see William F. Buckley interview Sam J. Ervin on that campus, just a couple of buildings away from Gerrard Hall on the same street.

In the same hall wherein we saw Mr. Buckley interview Senator Ervin, we had, three years earlier, heard David Brinkley question the mental stability of the then current President, relating, we recall, as one example among several offered to substantiate his considered diagnosis, the story of his having, at a White House dinner, observed the President letting his eye slowly rove along the upper moldings of the dining room, apparently inspecting for termites.

We suppose that the object lesson is to watch where your eye roves when being observed by a reporter. Or, simply avoid cover-ups of the break-in of the opposing party's national headquarters and participation in or lending tacit approbation to that and other similar operations nefarious, all constituting a "Comedy of Errors".

Having rowed down that stream quite far enough for today, the front page reports that the Red Army had made further progress on the central front of Russia, forming first a "steel horseshoe" around Olenino and then capturing it, a town 35 miles west of Rzhev and last obstruction to clearing the 270-mile rail line between Moscow and Velikie Luki, the latter also re-captured, moving the Soviets within 80 miles of the Latvian border. Pincers from the north and northwest were now converging on the key Nazi supply depot and headquarters at Smolensk, west of Moscow, as the winter-borne army also continued to threaten Bryansk.

British Mosquitoes attacked Le Mans and Valenciennes in France within the previous 24 hours, also Hamm again in Germany, combining with the recent attacks on Hamburg, Berlin, and Wilhelmshaven, to lend credence to the threat of the previous summer issued to the Nazis and Fascists by Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris: "We will be coming over every night and every day--rain, flood or snow, we and the Americans."

In the northern sector of Tunisia, Nazi panzers under Col.-General Jurgen von Arnim tracked proudly into Sedjenane only to be met by fierce resistance devolving to hand to hand combat with the fierce troops under the command of K.A.N. Anderson who proceeded to push the Nazis right back out of the coveted town. Attempts to take Beja and Medjez-El-Bab were repulsed as well.

Winston Churchill received from a Londoner the gift of a lion after complaint by the donor's neighbor for keeping same in his backyard.

Whether the lion was then shipped to North Africa for deployment against the Wolf and Jackal was not yet reported.

Also appears a convenient list of typical words and their meanings prefacing place names in North Africa: "Sidi", meaning saint or lord; "Bou", father; "Djebel", mountain; "Bir", well; "Wadi", gulch; and "Ben", son.

The remnants of the result of the "flying buzzsaw" of Lt.-General George C. Kenney's Allied raiders, comprised of Australian, American, Dutch, and British pilots, were the only thing reported visible on the waves off New Guinea in the Bismarck Sea after the successful destruction of the 22-ship fleet of Japanese ships attempting to reinforce the base at Lae.

The Japanese found out what the Allies were talking about from this shower buzzsaw of bombs and machine-gun fire. Lifeboats, barges and rafts, crammed with survivors from the ships, were machine-gunned, bombed and split open with cannon fire, sunk, until not a shred of one little Japanese basterd among the 15,000 was left.

--Take that, you little butchering basterd. What are you talking about? Geneva Convention? They don't respect it. Why should we? General MacArthur said it was alright, after he smoked it awhile in his corncob. Anyway, sorry, mate, we got a little carried away. Next mission, we'll be kinder and gentler.

Reports of the previous day that 55 Japanese planes had been bagged were now amended to increase the toll to 82.

Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard was launching an investigation into the black market on meat, attempts to circumvent the rationing program set to go into effect April 1, limiting each person to a quarter-pounder per day.

Meanwhile, the OWI was looking into just how it was that information was leaking out of the government to the press on food rationing programs in advance of their effective dates, causing bootlegging and hoarding activity by the pigs.

Perhaps, they would find that it was the only ship which leaked from the top.

And from the Cocoanut Grove Ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, hosted by Bob "Join the Peace Corps" Hope, "Mrs. Miniver" dominated the 15^th Annual Academy Awards Ceremony for 1942, winning the Oscar statuary in rows for best picture, best actress, Greer Garson, best supporting actress, Teresa Wright, best director, William Wyler, and best screenplay and black-and-white cinematography. James Cagney won in the best actor category for "Yankee Doodle Dandy", while Van Heflin, subsequently starring in such films as "3:10 to Yuma" in 1957 and "Cry of Battle" in 1963, won the best supporting actor prize for "Johnny Eager". "White Christmas" won for best song.

Whether, incidentally, "Mrs. Miniver" was favored equally by the Liberals and the Tories, we do not know.

Ourselves, we confess, having tried to watch “Mrs. Miniver” some decades ago, found it rather conducive to sleep. Maybe we shall try again.

The ceremony had been moved forward six days from the February 26 date the previous year. (Since we have not yet acquired the front pages for February, 1942, we do not yet know whether the ceremony made the front page at that time.)

Whether the Cocoanut Grove Ballroom was chosen in remembrance of the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub fire November 28 in Boston, we also do not know. The site rotated between Los Angeles hotels annually, haunting though the subject becomes when juxtaposed to the tragic event occurring at that hotel 25 years later.

Best documentaries were "Moscow Strikes Back", "Kokoda Front Line!", John Ford's "Battle of Midway", and Frank Capra's "Prelude to War".

We note that the present 2010 Academy Awards Ceremony for 2009 films, scheduled for this Sunday, has likewise been moved forward by two weeks from its latter February dates of recent years and the best picture category expanded to the old number of ten nominees, not seen since the awards for 1943, doubled from five, a sort of back to the future kind of thing, we suppose. We make no predictions. Bad for glass. Besides, we've only seen, thus far, one of the nominees. We found it rather glorius, of the applesouce, especially the scalpeing scenes.

We think that the movement of the ceremony back to a time closer to spring more befits the occasion for those not living in Los Angeles, where it is always spring.

Have we ever told you about the rides we used to take on the night of the Academy Awards? Oh, that's right. We did. Those would never have worked in February.

Collectively, we think that they were properly titled "Motorpsycho Nitemare", but such is collegiate life when you're young and impressive.

We made them an offer they couldn't refuse and the rides stopped. They got stung.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson celebrates the memory of Swiss founding father of the International Red Cross, Jean Henri Dunant, who established the order in 1863 and the Geneva Convention a year later, as symbols of brotherhood and peace, after witnessing the carnage at Solferino, 37,000 wounded and killed in one day of fighting on June 24, 1859 as the armies of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia met those of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, opening M. Dunant’s eyes to the realities of war.

Ms. Thompson reminds of the contrapuntal design of the order's sigla in a world gone mad under the menace of its antithesis, the Hackenkreuz.

She does not mention, however, that its symbol was also co-opted on Christmas Eve, 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by the forerunner of the Nazi, with a circle drawn round its form, the same circle, which, hypnotically, the hackenkreuz forms when whirled, as with an airplane propeller in Bavaria, the Grand Cyclopsian one-eyed gathering of Cloudcuckoobury.

The Christian Science Monitor piece on Madame Chiang Kai-shek reports of her father having been raised by step-parents in the 1880's in Durham, N.C., from whence sprang the font of Charlie Soong's Christian faith. Just how that ever reconciled itself, in his daughter's mind, with marrying Generalissimo Chiang, who himself eventually, on encouragement from his bride, professed faith in the Christian religion by virtue of Baptism, daily prayer, and attendance of church, and becoming party to a Chinese form of military dictatorship, is not explained. Both Chiang spouses should have carefully read the text of Matthew reprinted on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial page of July 13, 1968, as we happened to stumble upon yesterday most propitiously and serendipitously.

But, that said, we do not pre-suppose to judge another person's version of the Christian religion, no matter how silly the proposition when juxtaposed to the reality of their lives may appear. It is not ours to judge. Nor, we are certain, did Mrs. Roosevelt when she offered her sign language while sitting aside Madame Chiang on the White House lawn. Yet, we stress, it is a very different proposition to profess Christianity from living one's life in accord with its precepts. Indeed, one may so live and never even profess faith, we suggest, without the least bit of compromise or detriment. The Chiangs plainly had a ways to go. The Soongs, it would appear, came closer to the understanding; yet there were problems in the nest.

Samuel Grafton examines more obscurantist paradoxes: Herbert Hoover's advocacy to return soldiers, bottlenecked stateside for shipping sloth from inadequate numbers of transports, to the farm to increase food production to relieve rationing problems, juxtaposed to the notion that Rosie the Riveter then might find rationalization to relieve rationing by malingering on the job, throwing fewer red hot rivets to her compadres impelling them into place on the joinery of the steel plates in the shipbuilding yards; Senator Bankhead's proposal that ten percent of the Army infantry be furloughed from the service to work on farms, presumably cotton farms to alleviate any clothing shortage, though the precise type of farm is not indicated, again, regardless, creating a hole in the armed forces to provide more goods on the run for the home front.

He concludes that the plans, ludicrous on their face, were to delay the war effort to insure plenty at home, contrary to the President's plan of providing a total war effort to end the fighting as soon as possible, with the least sacrifice of American life, with the least number of lifeboats left afloat in the Atlantic with passengers awaiting pick-up by search planes and ships before either they should freeze, as did very quickly the passengers left adrift from the two merchant ships, again recounted on the front page, the worst single American maritime disaster yet of the war, or starving before being found after days on end of enforced fast.

"Competition" compares unfavorably the righteousness of Gandhi's ninth fast just concluded with that of like duration for twenty-one days spent adrift on the South Atlantic by seventeen British sailors whose ship had been blasted away from them by a U-boat. Mr. Davis opines that the martyrdom of the sailors, made involuntarily a part of a fast during the same period, was more genuine than that of the self-imposed incident of Satyagraha staged by Gandhi in deliberate sufferance to achieve independence for India.

We disagree. We think both fasts make their points, that they occurred simultaneously, exampling an even stronger message conveyed by the spirit of the earth, that the reasons for this war in the first place were the quests for empire, atavistic notions of which were retained by the French, the British and the Dutch into the modern era--a notion President Roosevelt himself in 1944 confided to his son Elliott as the ultimate cause of the war, in both the Pacific and in Europe. For had Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo found no examples in modern history by which to guide their errant destinies, there would have been no attempts to build their own empires?

Is it any the less sacrificial and honorable voluntarily to place one's self in harm's way peacefully to make a symbolic point aimed at achieving freedom from tyranny than to place one's self in harm's way aboard a man-of-war aimed at achieving freedom from tyranny? Was one form of resistance to the same overlord superior to the other in this time of threatened freedom worldwide, regardless of the antecedent causes?

Did Gandhi's point not convey itself into the future fabric of nations to confirm their roles as peacekeepers and insurers of sustained democracy throughout the globe, not as empire-builders, as royal overseers of any people considered inferior to themselves for want of royalty?

"Turning Point" finds Admiral Halsey's former prediction in January of probable victory in the Pacific in 1943 confirmed by the devastating loss to the Japanese in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. With greater numbers of trained and increasingly battle-savvy troops, sailors, and pilots being poured into the theater, in contraposition to the increasing rate of attrition of the best-trained, most war-experienced Japanese pilots, sailors, and infantry, along with their ships and planes and guns, indeed, the end did appear closer than it was by this point, as the stubborn Japanese, fighting for their place in Nirvana in defense of the little Emperor and Empress at home, would, regardless of the determined fate set now ineradicably before them, fight on to the last, to the last gleaming pair of exhibitions of man's worst nightmare come to fruition, one ultimately developed out of the Nazi mind, manifested finally before the world as warning that the planet was fed up with world war and would as soon risk complete annihilation as to lose its freedom to the tyranny foisted upon it by empire.

"Fourth Term" does not a bad job of predicting the politics of the future as it contemplates whether Mr. Roosevelt would, come 1944, seek the White House for another four years. It suggests that he would, as he had in 1940, keep the matter close to his vest, until the penultimate hour of decision. It also suggests, contrary to the column’s more recently expressed hopes for victory in 1943, that 1945 looked like a safe bet for achieving the peace. It breaks from accuracy, however, in forecasting that either Wendell Willkie or John Bricker of Ohio would be the Republican nominee in 1944, even if Governor Bricker would be the vice-presidential nominee with Thomas Dewey, who, the editorial states, was, with Senators Taft and Vandenburg and young Governor Stassen of Minnesota, the latter about to enter the Navy, "out of the picture".

The piece offers, as perhaps predictive of another who would seek the office in 1968, with, we posit, a good deal more calculation in tow, that the President might fare better in 1944 if the peace were not yet won, whereas, if so, he would be regarded as having satisfied his duties--predictive precisely of the fate of Churchill, replaced by Labor's Clement Atlee July 26, 1945, even if called later in 1951 to lead Great Britain again for three and a half years.

Between that, the Chiangs, the Soongs, Durham, and the Herblock, there you have 1968 pretty well summarized, as well the period of the ensuing six years.

As to the quote of the day, we return five years to this rather serendipitous pair of notes associated with the editorials of two years earlier.

Framed Edition

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