The Charlotte News

Tuesday, August 5, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

We saw yesterday, however, where they have now developed a ten-minute chargeable, 180-mile range electric sports car with 700 h.p., which goes 0 to 60 in four seconds--the Lightning. V-rrrooom. It's not due until 2010 and so the price tag remains a mystery. If it's anything like the $100,000 Tesla, however, it is little more than a pipe dream for most of us. But, we tend to think that what must be done can be done, and what can be done ultimately will be done. All we really need is a well-balanced 100 h.p. sports car or sedan or station wagon with like chargeability and range, within the reasonably affordable sphere of the ordinary consumer, and which looks acceptable on the road--the Mho. For now, all they seem to want to produce are odd and awkward looking little boxes on four wheels, with scant charm to the mass market--by design. The storms in the midwest attest to the stupidity of this continued strategy, of seeing no evil, while trying to push off all those nicely streamlined, jet-propelled rocket trucks on the marketplace.

We had to read through it a couple of times to appreciate what the Wave was attempting to say with all of this fancified elucidation he must have got from some great, thick old leather-bound book. Somewhere, however, we had missed that article he mentioned, so deep with profundity was his exegesis of the phraseology. Moreover, as to the decaying material, we still cannot quite fathom his depths as to the relation he suggests to ethics--unless we are to assume he relates ethics somehow to tooth care. (Diamonds again? We don't know. Perhaps, he should read the rest of War and Peace.)

If we thought he was simply trying to be funny, we might at least smirk a little at the gesture, even if so hidden away as to be permanently encapsulated within the Wave's cranial repository. But, that does not appear.

Then it hit us, as to the article at least to which he refers: the word is actually pronounced, according to the Wave, mono-the-ism. Just as, presumably, to him, deism would be de-ism. And, of course, communism would be common-ism. Well, we could go on.

The Wave, no doubt, favored something akin to poly-the-ism, as in "poly want the cracker?"

We won't even begin to investigate his pronunciation of pan-the-ism, or what he might evirtuate for us to slicker up its meaning.

The-ology would naturally be the study of "the", the primary article, being one attested only through faith. (For, candidly now, except perhaps within the evanescences of the augments, which, as we know, amount to nothing anyway, have you ever seen the material manifestation of a the? Not just the effect impelled or the impact on the mind or matter exerted by the the, nor merely its symbolic representation, regardless of medium of expression, but rather the the, itself, as a manifest, integral entity? No, you have not, have you?)

But, then, what would he make of dox-ology? Ah, by Jove, you see, now we see--dox, yes, the relation to decaying material. There, now, very elementary.

His letters, as the editors suggest, do, however unwittingly, provide insight to some of the problem through time.

Incidentally, in answer to the query elsewhere on the page: We don't know precisely. But maybe it was Forester?

Of course, while all of that, viewed systemically, is sound in theory, it nevertheless chafes the sensibilities to realize that a storekeeper in 1933, likely confronted with mothers struggling to feed their families in the throes of the Depression, merely wished to make it easier on his customers to afford bread and milk, was then prosecuted for that noble sentiment. Where does individuality fit with the systemic urges of economy? Must it always be sublimated to accommodate the whole, even if in so doing the individual is demeaned beyond dignity and recognition as a human being? If so, aren't we a bunch of Commies, Mr. Justice Roberts?

Anyway, got klim?

Come to think on it--price controls on a Tesla. Now there's a thought.