POSTSCRIPTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 52, 30 August 1939, Page 10

POSTSCRIPTS

Chronicle and Comment

BY PERCY FLAGE

Somehow II Duce's silence recalls Pisa, the leaning tower of strength. « # ■siBritain has not issued bread cards. Nothing ir-ration-al about John Bull. * *• # No, Melisande. It was not George Washington who said: All's quiet along the hippopotomac. We didn't know what to make of the international situation until a gentleman friend of ours explained lugubriously: "It means peace or war"! * # * Kirn: The waterside workers don't like the idea of no free beer across the bar counter. Well, it does seem to be rather a case of "the tumult and the 'shouting' dies!" * * <* j TAX ON EARNINGS. Here is another avenue for expoitation for social security. Was engaged in a spot of gardening the other morning and greeted young New Zealand passing by with: "My word, Bill, you're a lucky chap having holidays." "We earn them," was the laconic reply in a somewhat lugubrious tone. K. * * * ' • INTIMATION. L.S.J. wants to know "the name of a tattooing firm" in Wellington. Anybody know? Staff: "Typist"—without the "c," which is an affectation. Speigal: Many thanks for those notes. Pro Tern: (1) Anything in Col. 8 not signed or acknowledged is our own personal work, such as it is. (2) We have so many inquiries to answer that postscripters necessarily have to wait their turn. Good wishes reciprocated. O.G. (Feilding): Major A. W. Marchant (U.S.A.) claims to have perfected a ray so powerful that it can cut quarter-inch steel plate at 300 yards; and wither animal and human bodies. Student: Sorry, but we have not J been able to come upon the particulars you ask for. A.L.: Curiously enough someone else has put forward a similar suggestion. It's being considered. Alpha Street: Here's one of them— Japuneasy (apropos the Russo-German Pact). * * * RETROSPECTION. Dear Percy Flage,—As war may possibly come suddenly into fashion, again, let us, for a moment, dwell upon what the average young man * in a civilised community didn't knowbefore the last World War. Here is a list from an American "authority": Ha might be suffering from an inferiority complex, although he has never heard of one. He has never heard of daylight-saving. Nor rayon. Nor Soviets. Nor jazz. Nor insulin. Nor G-men. Nor broccoli. He's never seen a one-piece bathing suit, nor read a gossip column. He's never heard of a step-in. Nor an inhibition. He's never heard a radio nor seen .a talking picture, nor listened to the whirr of an electric ice-box. He has never seen an animated cartoon, nor a cement road nor a neon light. No, nor a filling station. Nor a wrist watch. ' He doesn't know what a. job or war is. He thinks the former Is" something any man can get who is willing to work, and the latter a practice still carried on * only^ by remote, comic opera countries ' in 1 Central America and the Balkans. POOR ME. *' * * ' \ • NO-STOP THIEVES. Dear Flage,—ln your column of the 16th you published some samples of shocking alleged sentences (excuse alliteration), perpetuated by Collie Knox. One was: "In fact, not a bus, but a tram." By one of those fascinating and unexpected happenings that give variety to life, I found, within two days of your publishing it, a clever limerick, quoted by St. Loe Strachey in "The River of Life," which turns the above combination of words into something making sense. Here it is:— 1 "There was a young man who said 'Damn'! I clearly perceive that I am Predestined to move In a circumscribed groove, In fact, not a bus, but a tram." The author is Father Ronald Knox, and I should not be surprised to learn that he is related to Collie Knox, who possibly thinks he has licence to use the family's literary furniture and fittings as he thinks fit. But as a practical journalist, he ought to know that sayings lifted from other authors should be included in inverted commas —except in such cases as well-known passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, ; etc. The writer who lifts without the commas is a No-stop Thief from a writ- ■ ing point of view. J.M.M. * * « SPRING SHOWERS. First a ray of sunshine, Then a shower of rainThen a gust of wind to blow The weather fine again. See the heavens changing— Grey—then blue again, 1 Warm, delicious sunshine Then—listen! Pattering rain. 1 Fickle springtime weather Teasing us again— : See, the sun is smiling Through the tears of rain! NELES. .. Nelson. * * ♦ ANOTHER ANGLE. Your answer to "What's the Truth": in last Friday's "Post" seems to have evaded the fundamental point in the question and it is this: "Are the children in Soviet Russia being taught to be mere materialists, and is all religious training banned?" And the reply is definitely in the affirmative. As-" suming, however, your correspondent did not desire that answer but one on the lines given by you, then I am afraid that the statements contained therein are not confirmed by Eugene Lyons, who, as a staunch American Communist, went to Russia, came back a thoroughly disillusioned man, and* wrote his' book "Assignment in Utopia" published as recently as January, 1938. At page 334 the author states that the assistant Commissar of Education confidently advised him to send his daughter to Berlin or Geneva to be educated! At pages 256-257 Lyons says that he found it impossible to place his 6_-year-old daughter in a none too sanitary and overcrowded kindergarten in Moscow, and the child was considered undesirable as a "bourgeois element." The culture to which you refer may be represented by the existence of the schools, museums, and buildings, but according to Eugene Lyons at page 468 the education itself, which is the thing which really counts as it affects the life and actions of human beings is not actually on such a high plane as you seem to infer. As "for the cultivation of creative selfexpression of the children," it is according to the same author simply not tolerated unless it gives abject servility to the Soviet State brand. AM.