The Charlotte News

Monday, September 2, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Incidentally, Ms. Palin, your vaunted comparison of yourself to Harry Truman and his supposedly unusually vaulted track to the vice-presidency in your speech the other night to the Republican Convention with all its fervor for drilling for oil as you tell us how you fought the big oil companies, causes us to remind you that Mr. Truman was first a judge in Missouri for seven years, then a United States Senator for ten years. Next time, try studying your history a little better. Your track and his track are about as similar as some slick ice is to a Mad Hatter. Harry told us to tell you that.

But we don't blame you for selecting a Democrat for your role model. In truth, however, in his time, Mr. Truman wasn't so popular with the country because he was a rather ineffective speaker, even if he had plenty of good common sense in spite of it.

Maybe if only he'd gone to broadcasting school like you...

We were hoping to find out from her what she thought of the Supreme Court decision in 2007 upholding the Juneau high school principal's decision to discipline a student for carrying a sign saying "Bong Hits 4 Jesus", off school grounds and when school was out of session for the passing of the Olympic torch parade, and whether she favored the student or Ringo K. Galaxy who represented the principal for free, but we couldn't find her. They said that, to cut government waste and to raise revenue for the State of Alaska, she was extremely busy thinking through a plan to put the North Slope up for auction on ebay, renaming it for the purpose, "The Libertine Belle Ski Resort and Slippery Ice for the Kids". But, as to that "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" thing, we can assume that she didn't like it.

Wait. This just in. Sarah Palin has cured world hunger by turning water to wine, discovered the cure for the common cold--heavenly warmth, and found a way to restore the permafrost in and around Wasilla with a machine called the Real Snowjob, so that the Iditarod can once again start from there, whereas of late, due to the meltdown from all the warmth she generated during her decade as Mayor and City Councilperson, it has had to move north. She declared the Iditarod, however, corrupt and unwholesome because the Iditarodders were neither hockey moms nor her political supporters. She also was able to get through subsidies of $1,200 per person to attract a million African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans from the urban sprawl and pollution of Los Angeles to move into Alaska in a special pilot program which she calls "Color Me Like Me, Brellow--And, Country First". Let's all give it up for Ms. Palin, right now. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Looks real good. Yeah. "Drill Now!" Okay, you in the middle section and the one on the far right there can put your cards down. Yeah, Yeah. That's even better. Good. Right on.

The piece on today's page regarding Methodist Bishop Cannon is reminiscent of Cash diatribes on the subject in 1928 and 1929 while Prohibition was in full flower. (See "Our Independence", in The Cleveland Press of October 2, 1928; the note related to October 30, 1928; the "Moving Row" of November 9, 1928; and "The Mind of the South" from The American Mercury, October, 1929, wherein Cash states: "But--I have myself watched a lone copy of 'The Cream of the Jest' gather flyspecks for two years in a bookshop not two hundred miles south of Monument Avenue. For, gloss it over as one will, it is undeniably true that Mr. Cabell's persons do things forbidden by the Bible, that Poictesme, as compared with the satrapies of Bishops Cannon, Mouzon, et al., is in sin, and that (O base infidelity!) he fails to view these matters with becoming indignation. Of late days, I have heard often the complaint that 'Mamba's Daughters' is both pointless and untrue to the Southern Negro, which at last is to say that Mr. Heyward's portrayals fit neither the Uncle Tom formula nor that of the vaudeville buffoon. And Mrs. Peterkin's 'Scarlet Sister Mary' is barred from the library at Gaffney, in her native State of South Carolina, as an immoral book.")

"Long War?" again hearkens what is just three months away now from Japan. It miscalculates badly, however, the level of force necessary to bring Japan to its knees. It would take 1,335 days, not a week; it would take the development of the most terrible weapon ever imagined by man, not just a few flying fortresses taking off from Vladivostok, Chung King and Hong Kong. It all sounded simple on paper.

Dorothy Thompson's piece fairly cast the stakes in Europe of letting Britain be vanquished by Hitler, and the myopia inherent in isolationism of the time. She puts forth in brief the Macklinder-Haushofer theory of geopolitics, on which Hitler based much of Mein Kampf--that Europe, Africa, and Asia comprise the World Island and are not in reality three different continents, that seven-eighths of the people of the world live on this land mass, that once subdued, which would inevitably be the case should the Soviet Union and Britain fall within the Nazi sphere of domination, then the remaining one-eighth would have little chance of resisting. Of course, as Hitler found out, as did Alexander and Napoleon before him, the problem eventually comes to rest on the sustenance of supply lines in hostile territory. If a nation, as did Britain and the Soviet Union, is able to resist the onslaught initially, then the effort to subdue a nation over a long period will ultimately give way under the weight of necessary supplies being conveyed over long distances, especially where, as in Russia, a scorched earth policy was employed to prevent acquisition of supplies in conquered territory. Moreover, the problems of fighting on more than one front was immediately manifest by the report of the lack of resistance to the raid on Bremen just a day or so before, as briefly mentioned in "Long War?"

Finally, as for the shoeless South comment falsely attributed to Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins from 1938, see "Paging Madam Perkins", July 12, 1938, "Shoeless Manhattan", August 21, 1938, "Not Very Helpful", August 31, 1938, "A Bid for Ridicule" November 1, 1938, and "Madam and the Shoes", January 12, 1939. She actually only said that the South was a good market for shoes, but let's not split hairs over language. When some Southerners hear some Yankee, or just someone who sounds like a Yankee, even today, say or vaguely imply that Southerners need something, it inevitably means that they lack something, which inevitably breeds insult. We have no doubt that the suggestion that the South needed better education facilities in the 1930's suggested to many that there were dumb Southerners running around. Banish the thought.

So, between this note and our note accompanying the pieces of September 6, 1940, we feel we have said quite enough for a Saturday afternoon, having fairly covered, once again, and plentifully so, shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and all such wondrous things, maybe even pigs with wings, that is Ham Fish's frank lent to William Dudley Pelley and his Silver Shirts of Asheville, and the fact that Raymond Clapper, by way of suggesting less censorship of the press on the effectiveness, the daily operations, and pitfalls encountered in red tape of lend-lease operations in Britain, tells us that Britain has always taken its bacon lean while America prefers it fat.

Thank God, said Mr. Webster, that he, too, was an American. But that was circa 1840.

What of today? Well, "no one can doubt the word of America." Thank God. And if you do, you know what's gonna happen to you. K-boom. You better know. You gotta know and notice when the lights are changin'. You know, like the man in the House of Lords, protecting the citizens' guns, those who are part of the community of royalty anyway, the ones entitled to 'em. You know, the royalty; not all those mentally ill Mad Hatters. That's the American way. America's gotta know that its President is not a crook or a liar. Thank God! Thank God! Yeah, just as Danny said: "Bang! You're dead."

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