The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 7, 1950

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that U.N. forces, American and British troops, expanded their slender bridgehead at Anju, north of the Chongchon River in Korea. There was little opposition at Anju after a heavy allied bombing raid nearby.

Communists mysteriously withdrew in the northeastern sector at Myongchong before the advance of South Korean troops.

In the north-central sector, resistance also suddenly ceased before the advance of the Marines toward Changjin reservoir, stalled for four days, suddenly able to move forward a mile and seize a high ridge, the dominating point south of the reservoir.

Allied officers were perplexed by the withdrawal of the Chinese troops in an area where they forced U.N. withdrawal by up to fifty miles and speculated that they might be regrouping for a large-scale attack or that they were trying only to hold a buffer area around the vital Yalu River hydroelectric power grid.

In one northeast sector battle, a Seventh Division patrol was under heavy attack by North Koreans north of Pungsan on the north bank of the Ungi River, the first serious opposition faced by these troops in three days, driving within 30 miles of Manchuria in zero temperatures.

An air battle lasting 85 minutes, longest of the war, took place between Russian-made MIG-15 jets and propeller-driven Mustang fighter planes, over Sinuiju, just across the Yalu River from Manchuria. The MIGs attacked the Mustangs to begin the fight. The enemy jets eventually fled back across the Manchurian border after three were reported hit. No American planes were lost.

The Far Eastern Air Force lifted a prior ban on flying closer than three miles to the Manchurian border and permitted flights to the border. Pilots were still warned strictly to avoid any border incidents with the Chinese.

U.S. First Cavalry Division troops reported that Chinese troops changed into civilian clothes and rested in the North Korean villages during the day while allied planes flew overhead, then fought at night in their reversible uniforms found on some of the dead.

Ceylon and the U.S. signed an agreement this date to provide Point Four aid for Ceylon.

In the midterm elections, turnout of voters in key states was heavy, especially in Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. New York placed all of its 19,000 policemen on duty. Most of the country had good weather. Predicted turnout nationally was 42 million out of an estimated seventy million eligible voters, with up to 98 million including those in the armed services and new voters.

The President voted at home in Independence, Mo., and said that he voted a straight Democratic ticket. He then returned to Washington for a cruise on Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac aboard his yacht Williamsburg.

About 700,000 voters were expected to cast ballots in the general election in North Carolina. About 25,000 were anticipated to be at the polls in South Carolina, typically a low-turnout state for general elections.

The State director of Selective Service in North Carolina said in Winston-Salem that he predicted draft regulations would be amended to permit drafting of married men with dependents, as it was anticipated that single men would be exhausted in the state after the February draft call.

What if it is not drafty in February?

In Montana, a Northwest Airlines passenger plane carrying 17 passengers and four crewmen was missing on a flight to Butte from Helena, after losing radio contact ten minutes out of Butte. The plane could not be located by radio for eighty minutes.

In Burke County, N.C., an agent of the Charlotte office of the Federal Alcohol Tax Unit was seriously wounded by gunfire while conducting a raid on a mountain still. The assailant was shot in the head but was not believed seriously injured—because sawdust is easily stuffed back into place.

In New Blatz, New York, Oscar Tschirky, 84, the internationally known maitre d' at the Waldorf-Astoria died the previous night. He had retired in 1943 after serving the hotel since 1893.

On the editorial page, "The Future of 'Mr. Republican'" tells of the Taft-Ferguson race for the Senate in Ohio being the top race in the country in the midterm elections. Senator Taft was regarded as the quintessential Republican and so his fate was of central importance to national politics. In domestic policy, he was a rare combination of the status quo and progressivism. In foreign policy, he was alert to the dangers to America from abroad but also was unable to understand that the need for allies abroad was crucial to the ability of the country to withstand the threat from Communism.

He was able, honest, and courageous, but also was frequently wrong.

He remained, however, the most influential man in the Republican Party and if he were to lose, it would send shockwaves through the party establishment. If he won, he would be the leading "regular" candidate for the GOP nomination for the presidency in 1952.

Had the Democrats fielded a worthy opponent rather that the State Auditor, Joe Ferguson, a political party hack, they might have won the seat easily. But as things were, many of the critics of Mr. Taft would rather see him re-elected than to have the seat filled by Mr. Ferguson. They could not understand how a lackey would be an improvement over a man who was his own boss.

"People and Playgrounds" tells of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park still being the most popular national park in the U.S., with 1.7 million visitors in 1950, up from 1.5 million in 1949. Shenandoah was second at 1.3 million visitors. It also lists the other national recreation areas in the state, along with the Blue Ridge Parkway, with 1.8 million visitors in 1950. State parks also were popular, with Morrow Mountain in Stanly County topping the list with 250,000 visitors.

The tourist business in the state was growing and state residents were using national and state parks with increasing frequency. It finds therefore that the State's advertising program was paying off in rich dividends.

"The American Hero" tells of American psychologists and sociologists having in the past suggested American hero worship to be juvenile and a waste of energy, detrimental to the spiritual health of the nation. But in the case of Grover Cleveland Alexander, former baseball pitcher in the Teens and Twenties in Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis, common sense had prevailed and America still had it heroes. He had pitched more shut-outs than any other National League pitcher and won in excess of thirty games in each of 1915, 1916, and 1917. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1938 and had died the previous week. It concludes that there was much reason to mourn him as he had achieved that reserved for the few.

"The First Frost" fills space by telling of the interruption of Indian Summer—"an interlude in the transition of the seasons, a harbinger of the Wintry days ahead."

A piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "Translated into the American", tells of the British referring to peanut butter as "ground groundnuts", resulting in a Government order reading: "In the nuts (unground) (other than groundnuts) order, the expression 'nuts' shall have reference to such nuts, other than groundnuts, as would, but for this amending order, not qualify as nuts (unground) (other than groundnuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground)."

It suggests avoiding such apparent double-talk and circumlocution by simply referring to peanuts as peanuts, thus distinguishing peanut butter from apple butter, honey butter, creamery butter, and other butters.

We don't like peanut butter. Might as well eat glue.

Bob Sain of The News tells of a meeting of the North Carolina Neuropsychiatric Association, at which was discussed the concerted effort which would be required to prevent increasing mental problems among the aged, as by the year 2000, one in every eight persons would be over 65. While medical science had lengthened life expectancy, the ability of psychiatry to deal with the mental consequences had not caught up.

Some of the elderly were hard to live with but were not in a category to be "put away". Many elderly were occupying space in mental institutions which was badly needed for the truly mentally ill.

A stop-gap measure was to provide colonies for the aged in their own communities. That plan had been followed in Sweden with success and a Geriatric Colony had been established also in England with excellent early results. But that would not provide the solution for what was down the road by the year 2000. Required was a change in attitude of youth toward the elderly population. Frustration had to give place to love, and contempt, to respect. Society had to find a way to make use of the contributions of older people.

Well, we have solved the problem as of 2016. We now make the elderly and infirm of mind "President", such that he can say, for instance, after the weekly and nearly daily mass shootings, that the problem is not guns but mental health.

We, incidentally, are giving notice to both the mass-shooter kooks and the mass media that we are not going any longer to take time out to grieve for unknown victims every couple of weeks or every couple of days. It is patently absurd to allow guns to proliferate in the society, especially semi-automatic weaponry only useful for military purposes, only useful to kill people, and then after each mass shooting every fortnight or so expect the society en masse to join in candlelit grief for the unknown victims, dragging the entire society down into a consistently morose, fatalistic melange of anger and frustration, humorless to the point of being pathological, laying in turn the groundwork for the next mass shooter to step from the shadows and make his or her pathological mental morass known to the public through an all-network suicide—in between the commercials.

The tears are false if you believe in arming the population. You are part of the problem, part of the mass-shooters' insanity, doing the devil's work for them to supply the next shooter. Or don't you get that? The proliferation of guns is the only problem, not background checks and mental health issues, all having the consequence of getting everyone suspicious of everyone else, looking for the key indicator of what might suggest a shooter, without paying the least attention to the only indicator, the obvious one, the presence and accumulation of guns, while, in the meantime, destroying our democracy—all over some lunatics' insistence on the precious preservation, even to the exclusion of free speech, of the grand anachronism of the Second Amendment and its right to bear grief to others while ignoring its original purpose, to enable a ready militia in times frontier, passe in modern life.

Oh, you gun nuts will say that cars and trucks can become lethal instruments in the hands of a nut. But barrier protections can be erected in public ways accessible to pedestrians and bicyclists to avoid those kinds of tragedies. Not so with guns. And it is at least possible to get out of the way of a mad driver, to avoid death by the dozens. Moreover, guns have no utility whatsoever in modern society as they once did in frontier days. Cars have their primary use for transportation. The claim that guns are needed for self-defense depends on the preceding condition that others have guns, and, in any event, are rarely effective to prevent a shooter from exacting intended carnage, whether en masse or to an individual. The shooter, after all, always has the drop on the unsuspecting victims, unless one is so crazy as to be ever poised for action, with guns ready at the draw. It is to say that we are to choose our poisons, that mass killing is to be expected in a society. Since when? The advent of 24 hour news, circa 1980?

You hellions who want more guns and "gun rights" are sick in the head and you are the root cause of every single mass shooting in the country, every single shooting death in the country. You are sick and evil. We are tired of you and your idiotic lies. Go live in a frontier society in South America or the Middle East where you will feel at home with your goddamned guns.

Armed guards and metal detectors to protect churches? Are you out of your goddamned minds?

Get it through your thick skulls: these shootings are going to continue until the goddamned Republicans in Congress are either sent home to convalesce in their chosen rest homes, or they come to grips with tough-minded legislation, irrespective of the gun lobby lining their pockets and keeping their rotten hides in Congress, to eliminate all guns from our society except those of the military and police, including your goddamned semi-automatic "hunting" weapons.

You are just lost little boys and girls playing games with guns—and American lives, all trying in vain to be "cool" like the character in the movie you saw.

We all, each of us, have a stake in this problem, not just the goddamned gun nuts. It is everyone's life on the front line, anytime you leave your house these days. What kind of a society have these goddamned Republicans in Congress provided for us? The blood is on their hands.

There is nothing weaker than a grown man with a gun. Go to the gym and lift some weights, you pansy.

Meanwhile, it seems everyone is worried now about some actor who may have jumped on some guy while drunk thirty years ago. Sounds like the locker room half the time in junior high. If a 14-year old boy managed to fend off a 27-year old man, it could not have been much of an "attack", now, could it? Get a goddamned life and grow up. We are sorry to impart the news to the children among us, but actors and actresses are usually not saints. They play roles for our entertainment in plays and movies, get famous and make a lot of money. They are not meant to be "icons". That is why we have told you idiots to stop using that trite word in reference to very ordinary people. And, usually, they do not write the script or direct their own performances. They act. Learn to be critical rather than living vicariously one's pathetically void life out of a goddamned movie. Learn how movies are made—scripted, directed, rehearsed, performed, and re-performed, in short snippets from different angles, then put together in the editing room, hopefully, into a cohesive story. It is not shot, as everyday life occurs, in a continuum of time and movement. And there is a reason for that: it is a movie.

The shooter, in reality, usually dies because they want to die and take someone with them in their little self-centered melodrama, to feel not so alone in their psychotic state. Curtain, lights out, in perpetuity. Why make it easier by giving them guns and semi-automatic guns with which to direct their personal soap operas?

Mental health? Why not just assume that everyone in society is potentially a crazy person, especially the current "President", and thus should not have a gun around? Make it a Federal felony to have a gun, any gun, outside one's home, with a non-probatable sentence of twenty-five years to life imprisonment for a first offense. Ditto for the sale of guns. Guns, or the criminals carrying them, would then be off the streets in no time flat. That is the only kind of law which will be effective in curbing gun violence. The shooter of the children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December, 2012 obtained his gun from his mother after he murdered her with it.

Have you got any sense left or are you just plain goddamned dumb?

From our perspective, the current status of the country is mass psychosis, as best exemplified by the results of the Russian-tainted "election" a year ago.

And meanwhile, the most pressing issue to everyone's future well-being, global warming, has been relegated to a non-issue by this uninformed nut in the White House, "elected" last year by narrow majorities of the tragically uninformed of three states—or shall we term them instead perhaps the misinformed, who gather their information from such purveyors of systematic political propaganda and disinformation as Drudge, Breitbart, Infowars and Fox News, presenting themselves paternalistically as "friends" to the "forgotten" Americans, those who can't or won't read and think for themselves, who insist on being exposed only to a view of the world sympathetic with their pre-existing one transmitted from childhood, one created therefore from demographic data by these disseminators of claptrap to be thusly compliant in perfect circularity within a closed circuit, mesmerizing with an affirming will the viewers and listeners and "readers" thereby with an echo of "their own" "thoughts".

Drew Pearson tells of the President telling his military aide, Maj. General Harry Vaughan, during the trip back from the Wake Island meeting with General MacArthur, that if the General continued to beat him at poker, he would ship him back to General MacArthur, who had once fired General Vaughan when a colonel as an assistant in Australia during the war and sent him home. Mr. Pearson finds it emblematic of the dual personality of the President, one person over poker and another during the day as President.

Recently, he had told a friend who counseled that the President meet with Joseph Stalin in Berlin or some other neutral location to discuss a peace plan, that he would meet him in Washington only, that he was tired of being treated as Harry Truman rather than as the President of the United States.

Tom Watson, head of IBM, though one of the biggest backers of General Eisenhower for the presidency in 1952, had also contributed $2,000 to Democrats in 1950. The du Pont family was the biggest GOP contributor at $16,000. The Jackson Day dinners provided the largest source of revenue for the Democrats. He provides a list of major Democratic contributors, including Averell Harriman and former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau at $5,000 each, department store and publishing magnate Marshall Field at $2,000, and movie producer Samuel Goldwyn at $1,000. Angier Biddle Duke, Duke family heir, of the American Embassy in Buenos Aires, had given $3,000. Eleanor Roosevelt had contributed $100. He also lists other contributors to the Republicans, including Robert Wood, head of Sears, and Sewell Avery, head of Montgomery Ward, each at $1,500.

Joseph Alsop tells of the Republican message in the midterm elections being "gloom and doom", and not playing well in the relatively prosperous Midwest in juxtaposition to the Democratic message of "peace and prosperity", "specious" though that message was. Republican Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana, for instance, claimed that the Truman policies resulted from an international conspiracy by Communists in the Government, as Alger Hiss, which had led to the sell-out of China to the Communists and then the war in Korea with "26,000 American casualties", and would probably, the Wurlitzer king claimed, lead to world war or a sell-out of the country to Communism.

The message seemed not to resonate that well in the Midwest where there was relative prosperity in 1950. The voters favored moderates in both political camps. They did not embrace either the Brannan agricultural plan or the Ewing health care plan of the Administration. Republicans, such as Governors Earl Warren of California and James Duff of Pennsylvania, who favored Fair Deal type social policies, were running stronger than the conservative Republicans. The moderate social policies of Senator Taft and the moderate foreign policy of Senator Arthur Vandenberg were more popular than isolationism and conservative social policies. Yet even Senator Taft was retreating from his moderation. And Senator Vandenberg was rarely mentioned by Republican candidates.

If the so-called "anti-me-tooers" were to win by sizable majorities, they would dominate the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. But if so, it was difficult to see how the GOP would become a majority party, as the country would not follow this extremely conservative path, a return to pre-FDR, business-dominated government and isolationism in foreign policy. The election, he concludes, might therefore test whether a two-party system would survive. There were some signs, however, that it might be the right-wing isolationists' swan song.

Marquis Childs, "en route home", tells of Americans being everywhere around the globe in the age of international air travel. He provides three examples, an engineer sent to Greece to survey a hydroelectric plant, a colonel who was second in command at an air base in Europe, disgruntled with Washington politics and allowance of the Chinese Communists to "get away with it", and a G.I. in Saudi Arabia, complaining of the dearth of women but tempering the deficiency by the fact that he would only be there for a year.

A letter from a minister in Spencer wants a law to protect fans at a football game from open drinking, drunkenness and profanity, as he had witnessed recently at the Wake Forest-Clemson game at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem.

Well, you should have known, Reverend, that those goddamned Baptists of Wake Forest are notorious for that kind of behavior, always have been. And Clemson?

Attend a UNC game sometime if you want to see decorous behavior of an exemplary sort.

A letter writer advocates getting closer to God as people were dropping dead every day and going to meet God unprepared.

How do you know? Are you God?

Judge not that ye be not judged.

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