In McRompers' Steps

Visionary young Milton McRompers, the Boy Senator, had a brave idea--to force every candidate for public office to have his head examined. But after three weeks under the fiendish McRompers law, the U.S. had had enough. Washington went wild over repeal and the joyous headline: "Government officials no longer to be selected on basis of brains and integrity." Cartoonist Al Capp (Li'l Abner), who had dreamed up the episode in his Sunday comic strip, turned his fertile mind to other things.

But last week the spirit of McRompers still marched on. At the United Nations Health Assembly meeting in New York delegates unanimously approved a psychological attack on the world's ills through "mental armament." Children, said Canada's Deputy Health Minister George Brock Chisholm, must be taught to live harmoniously together or mankind will follow the dinosaur into oblivion."

In Britain's House of Lords conservative, aristocratic Esme Bligh, Ninth Earl of Darnley, rose to propose a motion: "that this house hereby affirm its belief that peace will only be established ... by the adoption of the Christian commands of neighborly conduct." Viscount Addison felt "some regret that the noble Earl was not able to make some more practical and effective suggestion. . . ." The League of Nation's roommate, aging, disillusioned Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, could not believe that such a resolution would "advance the cause of peace in the very slightest."

Meekly and sadly, impractical Lord Darnley withdrew the motion. "I don't want to make any trouble," he said.

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To the ancient Greeks, meteors meant "things in the air"; to modern Swedes, "things in the air" do not necessarily mean meteors. Although meteors are more plentiful in midsummer than at any other time of the year, Swedish military authorities had ample reason to doubt whether the ten flashing things that passed over their country during the last two months were of celestial origin. Fragments grounded near Sundsvall were identified by experts as having come "from a bomb, probably radio-controlled." If the Swedish authorities knew who fired the bombs, they were not saying. But the public unanimously thought of Russia's new Baltic coastline. After another half-dozen things had flashed across the sky of middle Sweden last week, military authorities prescribed "special alertness" for amateur astronomers and laymen. The latter said: "The Russians are getting fresh."

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