Paul Harvey. “Not dead yet!” No, not Paul Harvey, who has a 10 year, $100 million contract with Disney/ABC Radio Networks, syndicated to 1000 radio stations, with listeners of about 18,000,000. “Not dead yet!” Paul Harvey, who my guess is would be all for capital punishment for flag burners, but has probably a few times in his life gotten too cozy with his love of genocidal porn to contain himself and shot a wad on the stars and stripes. Now he’s said as much himself. Don’t look for Playboy and Hustler tucked away in the drawer of his nightstand. For Harvey, it’s photos of bar-b-qued flesh and a flag smelling juicy of shit, piss, vomit and semen. Sound of missiles blighting the skies with their payload and Harvey delivers his.
A transcript of Harvey’s June 23rd show is at The Chicago Tribune’s, Eric Zorn’s notebook:
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.â€
That was his response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. That 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, Sept. 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.
We gave old pals a pass, even though men and money from Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for the devastation of New York and Pennsylvania and our Pentagon.
We called Saudi Arabians our partners against terrorism 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 into this continent by giving small pox infected blankets to native Americans.
Yes, 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.
And so it goes with most 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 and up and coming who are not made of sugar candy.
Zorn notes that Harvey prefaced this frank indulgence with the warning that he’d been “choking” on something for several weeks and he was going to “get it up and get it out for what it’s worth”.
Likes his fast, savage, uncivilized, this “not made of sugar candy ” Harvey who since 1946 has been fucking eardrums ’till they bleed with his “The Other Side of the Story” patriot candy shlock. And the excruciating thing is the public has loved it. Oooh, that laughable, lovable Paul Harvey who in his plain-spoken, Tulsa way tells it like it is for everybody. We’re repeatedly assured of that. His is the Amerikan voice. This Paul Harvey.
I remember when I was a child of about 12 or so and first heard Paul Harvey.
I hated him.
He was Something Wicked This Way Comes leering from behind the closet door, gumdrops in his right pocket and a lovin’ choke-hold in his left.
I understood why so many people adored the duplicitous plain-speech of Paul Harvey.
Mike Thomas at Salon.com notes Garrison Keiller doesn’t care for Paul Harvey either.
A few years ago, in the pages of Chicago magazine, radio storyteller Garrison Keillor fondly recalled his run-in with Harvey at a “stuffed-shirt” dinner in Chicago. “When the salad plates were whisked away and the entree brought in, he leaned over toward me and said, ‘Page … 2,’ just like he does on the radio,” Keillor wrote. “In fact, Mr. Harvey was exactly as he is on the radio. He read me a number of stories from a script in his pocket, most of them about ordinary Americans and their struggle to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world, and during all of this, he sold me a tin of liver pills and a utensil that dices, slices, chops, minces and prunes.”
Paul Harvey is at heart a blogger commentator:
“I don’t think of myself as a profound journalist,” he told Larry King. “I think of myself as a professional parade watcher who can’t wait to get out of bed every morning and rush down to the teletypes and pan for gold.” Introspecting further, he declared, seasoned pro to seasoned pro, “I think all of us, if we’re worth our salt, we’re for certain things and we’re against certain things. And it seems more honest to me to call it ‘Paul Harvey News and Comment’ and just let it all hang out. Because each of us expresses comment if only by what we read and what we toss in the wastebasket.”
Thing is, Paul Harvey is for once telling it like it is. At 86 years-of-age he apparently decided it was time for a little honesty. That the prosperity of War Lord Amerika and corporate giants and Sam Walton and his family comes at a steep price. One that people like Paul Harvey are unflinchingly ready to make everyone else pay, as are I suspect most Amerikans, deep in their prosperity-hungry, warlord hearts.
Amerika, a nation of warlords. You’d never guess it, the way they heart middle-class family values. July 4th picnic offerings on the red-checked tablecloth: mom, the flag, apple pie, pro-life, anti-social support. “You’ll have to pry my dime out of my red-knuckled hands unless you have a slavery-made Wal-mart worthless holiday knick-knack for the old curio shelf” Amerika.
Amerika loves its Sam Waltons for their ruthless drive. Winner gets all is the way Amerika works. Because they love a greedy head-banging warlord. The strength to do what it takes at the price of whomever must bite the dust along the way. It is a fundamental truth about the majority of Amerikans.
And if they tsk-tsk over Paul Harvey’s honest, ruthless, “I love genocide” commentary, it will only be because he laid the cards out straight in a culture where honesty may be lauded but do-what-it-takes two-faced slyness is the expected and what’s respected. Say one thing, do another.
Paul Harvey, in his broadcast, speaks with a thinner voice than he used to. The fading voice of one who’s lived nearly nine decades. But when he speaks of the use of pox-infected blankets and nuclear weapons his voice is not one of reflective regret of years, and compassion for the nameless, faceless humanity buried by power, instead it is one of resolution. The determination that whatever may get in the way of your commercial sponsors, you fuck-em-over, and you fuck-em-over good, for once and for all with as much collateral damage as possible.
Push a nuclear button to clear the plate. That’s “Wipe out”, Paul Harvey style.
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The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting people remind us that Disney refused to distribute Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911”, their excuse being, “Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film…could alienate many.” They recommend that one writes Disney to ask “why it finds Paul Harvey’s nostalgia for slavery and genocide and his calls for nuclear war acceptable, but deemed Michael Moore’s film unacceptable.”
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