The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 1, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: And they're off. It's Hitler leading, Italy running right along side of him, and here comes England and France, dead even, Czech and Pole coming up along the rail, and there is Hungary and America at the back of the pack, into the first turn Hitler is now two lengths ahead, woh, Czech just got bumped into the infield by Hitler, now here comes England and France threatening Hitler's lead, into the second turn it's Hitler still leading, Chamberlain just fell off his horse and broke his leg, but here comes Churchill riding Seaboodle, could be new race folks...

Incidentally, try this while watching the Nix film or the Muchmore film or studying the Key Biscayne Pitman or the St. Clement's Day or the erlichMan or the Warren Earl Burger or the Harvey or the Oswald or the Dillon or the smoking gun or the Watergate or a dozen other Ni-yonian riddles and anagrams--that is unless you're just plain too stupid and blind to cold, dark, damned, ironbound, ugly Reality: Alek J. Hidell as an anagram for? Try Jakell La Hide. Jeckyll Island, Georgia. Blackbeard Island, Georgia. Look it up, Pilgrim.

Where is it? What is the shape of St. Simons Island? Listen to the waves.

And then read The Gold Bug by Poe, as we once rad it a few years back. And then take on The Purloined Letter, hidden in plain view.

Blackbeard. Sullivan's Island, S.C. The skull, the treasure, the cursed treasure...

Dick, was it Studebaker, Pepsi, or who was it you went to see, ol' pal? Or was it Chevys in Md., you know, where Hoo lived? Or was it...? Or was it...? What tires did you ration in 1942, Dicky, boy? Goodriches? Sure wasn't Goodyears.

Who killed, Dicky?

Tine to fess you u. c. c.

What is that around Big D, Dicky?

That's right, boy, the Freewee in White Settlement. But what was its yclepter trying to tell us, Dicky?

Who thought up the Piggies, Dicky?

Where were you that Day, Dicky?

Love. Right, Dicky?

Look at Bosch's "Hell", boy.

That's right, Dicky, you're in it. Faust.

Read the Note, and see where we are right now, what has happened since, and ask yourself: Is this as a nation we should be, place? And for most of the last two score and two.

Why not ask old Gordo about it: How was the Hunt, Gordo? And what the hell is that on your dammed forehead? Where were you that Day? What were you doing then, creepoe? Why did even Dicky say you were nuts?

And who is the Scott Foreman creepoe, wearing the umpire's vest at the Big D that Day?

If you can't see him in plain view, it's because you were blinded. As many of us were. Not your fault. But, we'll say it again: Look!

And at something other than the horror, the hor-ror.

The solution to the puzzle of who the perps is not in the horror.

It's in the calm aftermath.

And, kindly do it soon, before the whole place is one big Not-see ville.

Who sane?

Wake up. Snap your fingers before your own face if ye must.

But think a little, if ewe 'aven't all Reddy.

And then ye might want to be kickin' that dust a little--for Dicky's sake. 'Twouldn't be nice to consign our ol' pal to too much Hell. Now, would it?

So as to keep yer hands and eyne busy, for we know what happens when too much the thingies get lazed, don't we? here's a lil bitty riddle fer ye: What is the mistake in Philharmoinic? Why is it there? Why did we change it, after we, we made the wee mistake on our lil painissimo keys, here? We apologixe, for we wuz a wee tired at the teem. Anyhuy, though ye may a'first be led on to think it, it is not just unfathomable anywho, though we know 'tis can be a bit frustratin', as it can be fer us, too, dear, ye know. (Oh, ye half no idea, not really.) But, we can figure it all, if ye try. Just don't go pointin' fingers where they don't belong a-pointin'. Ye Fala?

The messenger at Marathon died in the offing. We wouldn't wish to be a-followin' him now, 'least not too closely. Though the moral is certainly there of mistakes of sacrifice well won, so as not to be condemnin' those who faithfully serve their countries and their peoples and their earth. Ye wouldn't want to kill Mercury, for that's the planet closest to the sun, they tell us. Ye know, like Icarus in his waxwings. Whatever happened to ol' Ic? We miss the boy. Where did he go? We think we espied him once down a' Kittyhawk, but that may have just been a bit of a phantasm, ye know. So we'll see...

Oh, the riddle: We nearly forgot.

A Chest Half-Filled

It's too bad about the Community Chest. As Dr. Rankin put it at the meeting yesterday, "the unarnished truth is"--that the campaign for funds is not doing so well. It is going to fall short of this year's goal of $138,000, and, unless it picks up, short of last year's $110,000 goal, which was exceeded.

There are several explanations of the stringency this year, all of them valid. In comparison with 1937, 1938 has been a bad business year. Many people simply haven't the money. Furthermore, the YMCA campaign, the Presbyterian and Memorial Hospital campaigns were supported to the tune of about a half-million dollars. These were capital donations, to be sure, non-recurring and payable in some cases over a period of years. But they were donations.

All these excuses will be conceded by the leaders in the Community Chest's drive. But conceding them doesn't alter the minimum needs of the twelve agencies which look to the Chest for funds on which to operate. Budgets have been set to a minimum, gone over by men and women who knew the strain that had been put on the community's pocketbook, and still there remained $136,000 to be raised. Receipts through yesterday were nearly $60,000 short of that sum.

Merry-Go-Round

Now we are going to have another one of those weary probes, though what there is to probe is difficult to know. Does anybody suppose the broadcasting company wanted to throw a lot of credulous people into hysteria? And that authors Wells and Welles darkly plotted to have them running around like chickens with their heads cut off and hollering for the cops? Nobody does, of course. The broadcasting company simply made an error of judgment as to how much rationality the American people could be trusted to show. And it seems to have stumbled sadly in supposing that a lot of people understand the word "fictional." But all that is plain on the surface, and all the probes on earth want add an iota to it.

But, then, of course, almost none of the everlasting probes upon which we have spent heaven knows how many millions everyday to on Earth anything worth the cost. The Teapot Dome probe dredged up some startling facts. But for the rest--take that Dies probe, for instance. After all these months what has it found out? Why, simply that (1) a lot of excited people think that there is a Red or a Fascist behind every tree in the country, and (2) that they arrive at that conclusion simply by assuming that everybody doesn't think exactly like themselves is a Red or a Fascist.

There are occasional cases of course that call for boards of inquiry. But by and large these probes serve no purpose save that of keeping the name of Dies or an Elder McNinch in the newspapers.

In Cap and Bells

Not many towns in America pay much attention to Halloween. A few remaining bands of merrymakers in costume and mask, and that is about all. But in Charlotte the evening has somehow, and without anybody's planning it so, got to be the chief fete of the year--a sort of little Mardi Gras. It is precisely as though the people tired of being eternally hemmed in with laws and rigid notions of decorum, had risen up and spontaneously decreed a holiday on their own account.

Yet what you chiefly noticed in the streets last night is that nobody seemed really happy or carefree. They strolled along in costume and mask. Some of the men and boys were got up like women and girls, and some of the women and girls like men and boys. They laughed occasionally, bantered one another desultorily. Sometimes there were flurries of clumsy clowning. Sometimes a girl shrieked ecstatically when somebody made a pass at kissing her, though almost nobody ever did actually make contact. They threw confetti, blew horns, shook rattles. But somehow the party never seemed to really get going--the atmosphere of genuine merrymaking was missing. When their faces fell for a moment into repose, most of them looked sheepish and self-conscious. By ten o'clock they were clustering in doorways to wait for the buses, their faces tired, their eyes dull. Pathetic little people, you felt, who wanted so hard to play that they made a holiday on their own account, and then somehow found themselves quite as unable to play, after all, as though the party had been one of those dreadful arranged affairs, with float and parades.

What's the matter with us? Why can't we play?

Site Ed. Note: A soul, a soul, a soul o' keke, pleaz gud missus, a soul, a keke...

He Stoops to Conquer

There is that paradox again--that grotesque contrast between the vaunted High Idealism of the Roosevelt Administration and the coarseness of its politics. The President has just come out with unequivocal endorsements of Earle in Pennsylvania and Downey in California, both candidates for the Senate. And Earle is under investigation by a grand jury, while Downey is the fellow who got the Democratic nomination by false pretenses: i.e., by championing $30 Every Thursday and then quietly ditching it.

There have been too many instances of this kind to leave any doubt of the President's political code. He'd prefer his minions to be both subservient and upright, but faced with a choice between the two, he'd take subserviency and let uprightness go. There isn't any doubt of that. Anybody who swallows Guffey of Pennsylvania, Huey Long's successors in Louisiana, Hague of New Jersey, Pendergast of Kansas City, sets a cheap price on integrity. The President is determined to perform his operation on the body politic even if he has to use unsterile instruments.

Rubbing It In

The dose of contempt and arrogance dealt out to England and France by Hitler & Co. continues to grow larger with the passing days. For instance, that speech delivered at Essen Sunday by the Governor of the Rhineland, Joseph Terboven, in which he boastfully proclaimed that Germany does not believe that it was love of peace which actuated Mr. Chamberlain at Munich but simply craven fear of what German airplanes were going to do to English cities in case of war. Such a speech by a high government official is without precedent in the history of the relationships of modern nations. And there is little doubt that it was made with the full consent of Hitler himself. No government official in Germany who had not altogether lost his senses whatever make such a speech without first obtaining Hitler's are Goebbels expressed approval.

The same sort of thing shows up, not only in the staggering demand that everyone of the old German colonies be returned out of hand, but also in the fact that England and France have been elbowed completely out of the settlements of Central Europe. The commission set up to oversee plebiscites has been ignored, and the German Foreign Office has disposed of the question simply by announcing that there will be no plebiscites. Similarly with the Czech-Hungarian dispute. In the settlement of that dispute England and France certainly have an interest, since they were the nations which made the treaties out of which the dispute has arisen. But the dispatches yesterday reported that Hitler made it perfectly plain that he intended to settle the thing with no other aid than that of his echo, Italy, and that he wanted it very clearly understood that England and France must stay out.

Red Cell

The Hudson County, (N. J.) Veterans' Law and Order Committee, we observe by the papers, has again gone on record as being a determined to labor for the destruction of Americanism and the establishment of Communism, or perhaps Fascism, in the United States.

For it voted to continue to lend its active support to Boss Hague in organizing gangs to put down the rights of free speech and free assembly in Jersey City. And the rights of free speech and free assembly, of course, are the very bedrock of Americanism. When we have destroyed them, the American system will be gone, and we will have moved a very long way toward the Communist and Fascist systems. The destruction of free speech and free assembly was the herald of the rise of both systems.

And as for Boss Hague, he is undoubtedly the most effective agent the Reds have in the United States at present. Every time he puts down the freedom of speech and assembly in Jersey City, he furnishes the Bolos with quite concrete proof of their favorite contention--that freedom in the United States is a lie and a sham, behind which a brutal tyranny masquerades and works its will. And that is a far more decisive weapon for breeding new Red sympathizers than whole legions of soapbox spielers could ever be.

The Hudson County Veterans' Law and Order Committee might as well go whole hog, though, and formally join the Red Front. After all, there's no sense in their laboring so hard for the cause for nothing, when they could cut in on that Moscow gold.

Site Ed. Note: Alright, me boys, we be a lil behine deadline t'day. The men in the Tower were having a confab all day, as to what to say about the day's news. Git those papers out there a movin', now. All in yer bags, rubber band 'em, satchell 'em good. That's it. Now, hit yer routes, toos 'em, hit their doors. Hit 'em good, so they'll know the papers are not a day late, but merely by a few minutes. What the difference? It's only Teem.

 


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