The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 7, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Returning a moment to the Wave's statements of a couple of days ago, as our periodontal tendencies lead us to seek to refine by further research just what it was he meant and what source material he used to reach his finery in conclusive epistemological didactic, redacted reductionism, we quote below a possible source of some of his platitudinous, monocled Platonicals:

The real truth is that, not only has man failed to overcome Nature in any sphere whatsoever but that at best he has merely succeeded in getting hold of and lifting a tiny corner of the enormous veil which she has spread over her eternal mysteries and secret. He never creates anything. All he can do is to discover something. He does not master Nature but has only come to be the master of those living beings who have not gained the knowledge he has arrived at by penetrating into some of Nature's laws and mysteries. Apart from all this, an idea can never subject to its own sway those conditions which are necessary for the existence and development of mankind; for the idea itself has come only from man. Without man there would be no human idea in this world. The idea as such is therefore always dependent on the existence of man and consequently is dependent on those laws which furnish the conditions of his existence.

And not only that. Certain ideas are even confined to certain people. This holds true with regard to those ideas in particular which have not their roots in objective scientific truth but in the world of feeling. In other words, to use a phrase which is current to-day and which well and clearly expresses this truth: They reflect an inner experience. All such ideas, which have nothing to do with cold logic as such but represent mere manifestations of feeling, such as ethical and moral conceptions, etc., are inextricably bound up with man's existence. It is to the creative powers of man's imagination that such ideas owe their existence.

Now, then, a necessary condition for the maintenance of such ideas is the existence of certain races and certain types of men. For example, anyone who sincerely wishes that the pacifist idea should prevail in this world ought to do all he is capable of doing to help the Germans conquer the world; for in case the reverse should happen it may easily be that the last pacifist would disappear with the last German. I say this because, unfortunately, only our people, and no other people in the world, fell a prey to this idea. Whether you like it or not, you would have to make up your mind to forget wars if you would achieve the pacifist ideal. Nothing less than this was the plan of the American world-redeemer, Woodrow Wilson. Anyhow that was what our visionaries believed, and they thought that through his plans their ideals would be attained.

The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth. This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure according to which its application would become difficult and finally impossible. So, first of all, the fight and then pacifism. If the case were different it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of its development, and accordingly the end would not be the supremacy of some moral ideal but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos. People may laugh at this statement; but our planet has been moving through the spaces of ether for millions and millions of years, uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again--if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of existence, it was not the result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature.

--Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, 1923

Well, it is too bad that a large part of what Hitler wrote there in jail in 1923 was merely co-opted from others, those without the Party line which he adopted, divide and conquer by finding a convenient, identifiable scapegoat to which to ascribe all problems of society, thus making it semi-palatable to large numbers of people, those educated, those semi-educated, and those of little education at all, united in one nationalistic concept, Germania as the supreme Aryan conqueror of all mankind, to bring about an enslaved peace over the rest of us unworthies, those who would not fawn at the feet of the Biermeister and throw up the arm, strait-laced, in the well-known Sieg Heil. For had Hitler actually understood the implications of what he co-opted, he might have come out far differently.

Laugh at the statement, Herr Doktorfuehrer? Why, no. We would not dare to do it, for fear of thine Will. But, we might wish to correct Herr Doktorfremdlingua: You see, Herr Hookumeineke, your logician's flaw, as eminent as your credentials may be, nevertheless is manifest in its inflexible reliance upon the rigidity of the curve of civilization posited by your countryman, Herr Spengler. You seem to understand it that, because of the theoretical inevitability of the devolution to barbarism upon this curve's nadireal arc, such necessarily implies a literal zenith, founded on an overcoming and departed from on a downgoing, as another of your literati posited was the plight of Mankind, that the coldly analytical, objective, rationalistic Übermensch, in its purely rational, logical, Icelandic preserve, would become the zenith of man's overcoming and downgoing.

The trick, then, you no doubt posit, is, once the heights are taken, to remain at the zenith as the Übermensch.

Now, then, Herr Rudifundamentdentiusplenteouspublicus, when we examine further into your most worthy ideation, you appear to devolve, however, to the rather idiosyncratically self-contradictory notion that in order to be inferior to the zenith, necessarily coincident to your plane of assumption, the apocalyptic superior vision, one must first, and thus logically, forever always, wage the fight, in order to achieve the zenith, but without the downgoing naturally consequent from its rarefied air; that is, of course, within your gestalt of conceptual reality, the fight literal, not the fight figurative, for the latter is the mere resolution of feeling and not logic, you contend. And while the essence of man is feeling, the essence of the Übermensch is pure logic and science, able to bend steel in his barren bear hands. Thus he eschews all but the literal.

For, you deem it illogical to seek pleasure, to seek the pleasure of others, to facilitate comfort, to breed in nature something good as opposed to something bad, which you divest of descriptors until it is amoral, stripped of morality or value judgment, and thus is no longer good or bad, dispossessed of quality, neutered, the Übermensch--until, consequently, you view war as good, as bringing about this zenith you proclaim as its logical end.

In short, poetry is for suckers; the science which nurtures war is for winners, like yourself.

But, we suggest to your eminence, that the reason for this simple mistake on your part, though infallible you no doubt are, within your gestalt, is that you witnessed war, participated in same, being inclined of an artistic, sensitive nature, yourself, yet rejected as possessed of such by your unfeeling peers, and your unfeeling papa, nevertheless persisted in want of same, struggling to become Übermensch, to rid yourself of the guilt of your persistent failure to live up to the perfection engendered by the thrust of the overcoming.

And, from your fundament, therefore, you found the righteous way to reach the zenith, after the overcoming: war on the world until the world recognized your fundamentally unique quality--that is to say, fundamental awareness of your fundament.

But, returning for a moment to the problem you pose, if the fight, as you logically propose as the consequence of your fundamental awareness, is constantly to be waged, lest man reach the zenith and then only become the downgoing off K-2, what would be the point of your existence? For the reaching of the zenith immediately leads only to the downgoing, as you fully recognize.

Which leads us to conclude that in that bunker that day, April 30, 1945, you must have soundly realized the error in your fundamental logic back there in 1923. Hence, the resolution you logically reached in the end.

In sum, you seemed to have failed to realize that the summits are numerous, the valleys, full of greenery, and that the waters of time pass from and through each. It is not just a feeling, but rather a system of relationship determined, not divined, from simple observation of the most elemental simplicities observable by and among humankind.

Now, then, we do see things a little better, don't we, Herr Schickelgruberluger?

The infinitesimal, you failed to realize, that which you sought to penetrate and split in your laboratories, is precisely the same as the infinite, something inconceivable by the petty, petty pace of time in which we find ourselves stuck on this side of the river, and from which thus we must evolve to some basic structure of relationship in order to maintain mutual sustenance and gratification while thus stuck. That, insofar as we might fathom it, is likely the closest analogy to the zenith that we might make. But the downgoing, while perilous, is always inevitable, sure enough. Yet, it need not lead to barbarism, if care is maintained and the ropes are not of cheap material, lacking proper tensile strength, hooked to weakly forged Karabinerhagen. And, if one does not undertake the zenith, or the downgoing inevitably constrained by the frailty of human existence to be a result of it, ignoring the fundamental laws of nature, primary among which are the rudimentary vicissitudes of weather.

Simply put, if you wage the fight and reach the zenith, you must, according to you, either continue to wage the fight to yet a higher peak, or remain at the zenith, lest it become the downgoing, inevitably resulting in barbarism. That those who resist your resistless powers of Will are not, as they naïvely assume in their limited rôles, enrobed but in mere gossamer raiment, whilst you possess the finer silk divined from the worm whose meat is made more fatted in the fetid fête of caves which dat corse, not verboten nor well forgotten, be dazed of like on which it feeds, the threads of discourse being woven from no coarser matter phrased than that on which you scratch your feline-fancied cays, is all quite obvious, of course. That they are engaged in a Titanic struggle between good and evil, in ice floes melting down the stream of time, is more of their delusion to which your Will has resistlessly inveigled them not to understand. For, as you have divined it through your superior logicianship, there is no good or bad thing. To war on one's neighbor is consonant with supreme vowelism, as the war avoids the zenith which is the end. And thus, the good thing is to war until the zenith is accomplished only by the one true superior being, that being you, standing alone at the top of the world, triumphant, without triumvirate to bring you down into the valley--for no one would then be left.

But, as we have shown, not by feeling, but by simple resort to common experience within nature, you cannot remain at the zenith; and there comes a point when the zenith is the highest peak imaginable; thus, the inevitable downgoing.

So, if you are inconsonant with our perception of that valley, as being with green, you will forever fear the valley and the downgoing, by perceiving it, from your limited warring experience, as being one fraught with devils and sheep, one within your fundament conceived thus as being tantamount to barbarism, where bestial tendencies come forth fundamentally.

Well, enough for today, Herr Muensterhausenhofbraufrauliebmilchenfeister.

You look a little pale. Perhaps an increase in rations would do you some good. Tomorrow, after you have embraced a fine meal, inclusive of, but not exclusively, truck, we shall explore the Archimedean cattle problem, together with his water pump.

Meanwhile, the page today, tells us many things. Carson McCullers, whom Cash had met earlier in the year, and who had spent a year in Charlotte in 1939-40, just before publishing her first major work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and who had most recently published Reflections in a Golden Eye, which hit the stands four days after The Mind of the South, had some unkind things to say of the South, from which she had recently removed, back to New York. That the editorial takes rueful issue, however, with Ms. McCullers's relatively mild criticism, suggests the open seat left by Cash, who likely would have embraced the effort as true in its own right. For, it was central to his premise that the main problem with the South was that it was overborne with feeling which stifled and vanquished at all turns any effort to question, to think, in its long stream of development through time on the frontier.

As to why the use by Ms. McCullers of the word "peasants" incurs the ire of the editorial writer, we cannot explain. The author then proceeds to use the word, not a bit ironically it would appear, with respect to Europeans in the Thirties, the same Europeans of course from whom most of the white peasants of the South derived. Thus, what issue there be?

Or, as Cash questioned himself, did they? Were the tables truly turned topsy-turvy after the Civil War? Were they in need of a Wash now and again other than on Saturdays?

Cash, himself, too, however, had often used the word, that is "peasants", to describe the helpless Ethiopians against the Bruno Mussolinis of the day, who had, as Cash wrote several times, described his experience in bombing as being something akin to the blossoming of a beautiful rose. The column this day reports that he himself became finally such a rose, yet one by any other name but, that is Bruno.

Perhaps, he should have stayed home and studied the botanical rose instead, while venting his destructive urges and traducing his poetically perceptive analogues from less literal fare, by following the Belgian tradition at Lent, rather than trying to practice horticulture with incendiary devices.

Lure, kill, cooking pheasants, NASCAR's assignee.

In any event, as John Lennon said...

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