On the death of radio’s Paul Harvey, it’s hard for me not to think of his June 23, 2005 broadcast as his most revealing moment.
That’s the episode where he delivered this memorable rant (Extra! Update, 8/05):
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people–he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, “We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy.”
And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.
Following New York, September 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.
So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity…and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.
Even now we’re standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies–more moral, more civilized.
Our image is at stake, we insist.
But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.
Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.
And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.
So it goes with most great nation-states, which–feeling guilty about their savage pasts–eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.
To Harvey, in other words, failing to use nuclear and biological weapons because we feel guilty about genocide and slavery means that we’re “made of sugar candy.” And this will mean the end of U.S. civilization.
It’s hard to know how to respond to that worldview, or to the fact that the person who promulgated it was one of the most popular and longest-running personalities, other than to note that he was taking Churchill out of context. Churchill followed up his observation–which was made about the “peoples of the British empire,” not about Americans–with the vow that “we shall never descend to the German and Japanese level,” meaning the Nazis and the World War II-era Japanese Empire. Harvey seemed genuinely worried that we wouldn’t descend to that level soon enough.
See also Extra!: “The Right of the Story: Harvey Peddles Tall Tales–With a Conservative Kick” (9-10/97) by Dan Wilson.
Well, I wonder what ol’ Paul thought our gummint was holding back … other than nukes.
They’ve used pretty much every other weapon in their arsenal … in large measure on civilians.
Doesn’t that qualify as descending to a terrorist level?
Ask the people of Gaza that question. They were used as test subjects for the newest horrors US military science has devised, weren’t they?
Rest easy, Paul … your government is as capable of war crimes today as it’s ever been.
Good day.
I think its particularly despicable to be spitting on a man’s grave when it hasn’t even been dug yet. Haven’t you people ever heard the term “decent interval”? The feckless thuggery of this post is the last hit on the first page of Google, which is how I found this site. You, sir, should be ashamed of yourself. While your point is valid and what he said is very inflammatory, I think it base cowardice to start your post with, “On the death of radio’s Paul Harvey, it’s hard for me not to think of his June 23, 2005 broadcast as his most revealing moment.” Refrain for a bit before you show your true colors as the scum of the internet.
And the thing is, I know for a FACT that there is no way that’s his final point on the subject he was addressing. He has a signature sign off that was not included, and so it was certainly only a small part of the whole comment. His point was that Americans have, for better or for worse, carved a niche for themselves in history. There are parts we are not proud of (like this war), but we have to take those challenges, do the best we can with the devices we have been given, and fix the injustices that arrive. Slavery was a reality in the time of the settlers. Bigotry and racism were rampant among the founders. But we have moved past that time to today, where we have a more open society and an open forum to talk about further injustices.
So let’s have that open forum, free from internet hacks like yourself who try to tarnish the works of a good man who grew up in bad times and tried to make sense of the day he lived.
He was, after all, the man who, after backing the Vietnam War under Johnson, turned that stance around under Nixon’s expansion of the war by famously stating, “Mr. President, I love you … but you’re wrong.”
Maybe he’s not as one dimensional as you painted him.
So now you know…(thanks for teeing this up for me)…the Rest of the Story.
Did you already write this in 2005, when it was, y’know, relevant? You couldn’t even come up with anything new?
I find this post to be both lazy and cowardly. Get a life.
I particularly like Shawnway’s comment above, enthusiastically enjoining all of us to “have that open forum” and then immediately thereafter commanding us to keep this same forum “free from internet hacks like yourself…” Now that’s a shining miracle in thought processes, and I thank her/him for offering it in this open forum for our consideration.
Paul Harvey was a wonderful broadcaster. Jim Naureckas? A little wart on some random animal’s butt.