The Rarest Emergency

For a few fleeting days of last week the thunder from Asia, Europe and the Middle East retired to quiet mutterings beyond the horizons. In the relative silence the U.S. heard--like the comfortable tickings of a grandfather clock--some of the nostalgic noises of old-fashioned normalcy.

The newspapers screamed the details of Manhattan's great $114,800 jewel robbery (see Crime). Reporters overreached themselves to get something funny out of groundhog day. In New Haven, Conn., a "beautiful blonde divorcee" was sued for $25,000 worth of alienated affections. Politics spun their plots and counterplots and moved toward the inevitable day of decision. The stock market "ended the week on a firmer note." Even the latest crisis in Europe--serious as it was--had the ring of old cut glass: Germany and France were feuding about the Saar basin.

Closer to the heart, the new 1952 motorcars were being unveiled in a thousand showrooms across the land. Thoughts of steel shortages and skyrocketing prices went glimmering in the dazzle of chrome and the razzle of the "jet scoop hood," the "Quadri-Jet carburetor" and that glassy monument to planned frustration, the hardtop convertible. "It's loaded, so be careful," pleaded the Cadillac ads. "There's more power in that dynamic engine than you'll ever need--except for the rarest emergency."

Then, at week's end, Russia's Jake Malik shattered the mood with a thunderous cry from the United Nations in Paris. Said he: "This world war has in fact begun!" Nobody got panicky, for the U.S. had for a long time suspected that this might be true. With a heave of its shoulders, the nation pulled itself together, wistfully pushed from mind the delightful thought that the "rarest emergency" was just a getaway race with the next V-8 when the traffic light flicked to green.

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