The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 21, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We are first reminded by today's Herblock, caricaturing the discus hurled at the three old crows, of the Bohemian concluding page from 1919, the yearbook of Cash's freshman year spent at Wofford College, as set forth in the photographic section herein. In the latter, we glean that the two crows implied issues of a different shading from that of the more plainly stated Herblock. Or, did they?

We also learn today that Governor Broughton, apparently as an afterthought flowing out of newspaper criticism of his initial stance on the Roxboro lynch mob, decided to turn investigation of the mob's role in the matter over to the Lieutenant Governor, as the latter was from Roxboro. That seems a little transparently political, a glissading pas-de-chat, not a genuine effort to get at the root of the problem. The S.B.I. was to be used to investigate the CCC involvement in supplying African-American men to break up the mob; but only the Lieutenant Governor would investigate the friendly local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Well, we shall see in due course what ultimately came of all of it--such extraordinarily sensitive and perspicacious public relations exhibited by Governor Broughton in handling of this brickbatted matter. Perhaps he thought that the S.B.I. would only exacerbate the potential for violence among the rock-and-bottle throwers, but would have positively deterrent impact among the bat-and-stick wielders.

And we think Ms. McFarland should have moved on down the alphabet to the B's at least this time and tried rather to be alliterative there, a much benightened proposition in adumbration to construct with brio when compared merely to the far more plentiful A's full of those bagatelles pre-positioning themselves in the form of both articles et conjunctions, sometimes quite conjonedly so, faute de mieux. We tend to agree thus with the sentiment expressed by the editors, even if we adhere to Ms. McFarland's basic stance, though a little ostentatiously sententious in its execution: all things in moderation, enough of extremes. Besides, merely utilizing words all of which begin with the identical letter is not true alliteration. And, as any good alliterator knows, without a good onomatop or two in the mix, to break up the monotonic in syncope, the whole is likely to be no more than puerile bombast or a Trinculo's tinkled podpea, shuckled down in his codpiece from the get-go. We could offer an illustration of true alliteration, but we shan't deign to show it; for then we should think that we shall find ourselves perhaps overly alit, nay, even alow, with the bug thus engendered and consequently endangered of ending up the pretender with the same obnoxious, habitual bit of inabstentious abstraction, abnegating good impredicativity, as inhering herein, with impregnable elusivity, abandoning, willy-nilly, any pretension to elocutive example of erudition, as Ms. McFarland elected to demonstrate with elocation, nearly demonic, if ironic, in its boorish and painfully baneful result. So, enow. We simply shall not fall for such inefficacious, fallacious philistine bemusement.

The piece by Raymond Clapper issuing from London, not dissimilar to pieces from the same venue turned in of late by Dorothy Thompson, tells anecdotally of a people trying to get on with life in ordinary, even amid the omnipresent reminder in the rubble surrounding them, pervading inordinate chaos of the grossest dimension. The government was concerned about the "lull psychology" thus displayed, says Mr. Clapper. But the human mind can take only so much stress from disorder in its physical environment, until it must break the monotonous drone of that pattern with focus, through fogged Claude Lorraine glass, on the remaining dots still left within the pointillistic landscape of the commonplace, those to be found in the simple reminders of what had transpired before the slaughterfest began. It was the only way to preserve sanity. Drinking tea from within the gentle tint-for-tant, bon-for-bone anvil shake vibrato reassuringly ringing off the œil-de-perdrix, as Ms. Thompson related, as the bombs fell outside the shattering windows. Or, as Mr. Clapper makes note of the evidence propounded, children having dissolved the clatter from within by the simple restorative act of having touched the sculptured mice at the feet of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens.

As with an octopus, the argonaut is capable of swimming backwards, for its survival in the deep. So, too, we think it, did the children and adults of Britain in that time learn, of necessity, to accomplish.