Good Day!

I've been remiss in not talking about the death of Paul Harvey. I know it's old news, but I wanted to say something before his corpse was fully rotted away. The obituaries of Harvey were interesting; they rightly focused on his voice as a right-wing populist, but also played nice in discussing his often disturbing views. I guess Harvey deserves some credit for speaking out against Nixon after he invaded Cambodia, but if that's the sign of a thoughtful conservative, the standards are pretty low.

In many ways, I am fond of Harvey. He reminds me of visiting my grandparents. The last time I heard him was when I was moving to Texas. I was driving through southeastern Colorado and I picked up his show. I figured I'd better listen since I knew it might be the last time I ever heard him. It was typical--his unique voice was still strong, his conservatism still there, his homilies and reporting of the news still somewhere between eye-rolling and amusing.

But let's not forget what a bastard Harvey was. Let me reprint one of his talks, from either the late 60s or early 70s, from a previous series I did on Harvey a couple of years ago.

"The Cannibal Society"

America has become a cannibal society, devouring its best.

The competents, numerically outnumbered by the incompetents, are being
corralled, restrained, confined and milked like barnyard cattle.

The giants who created our skyscraper civilizations are now ordered to obey
Lilliputian bureaucrats.

Common men--who owe their jobs to uncommon men who create jobs--gang
together to shackle their providers.

Americans are becoming congenital dependents. Even as loafing relatives
extort a livelihood by claiming they have a "right" to your money--so today
eight million homegrown moochers, insist that you are responsible for their
welfare!

Thus we subsidize promiscuous mothers and their illegitimate babies and
lazy featherbedders and goldbricking government payrollers...while we penalize
the strong, the purposeful, the productive with disproportionate burdens of
taxes, pressures, red tape.

We praise ventures which are "non-profit" and grant them tax advantages and
social acceptance, yet we damn the men who make the profits and make the
"non-profit" ventures possible.

Americans want to keep the electric lights and destroy the
generators.

What if the men of brains and initiative and industry should go on strike?
It happened once. The Dark Ages were a period of stagnation when men of
exceptional ability gave up, figured "what's the use," even went
underground--for a thousand years.

Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged," thinks it may have to happen that way
again.

Dr. Charles Mayo says, "I know of no individual, no nation, that ever did
anything worthwhile on a five-day week."

Already many American industrialists are turning the keys on their
corporations and going to Florida--either part-time or full-time--to become
nonproductive beachcombers.

Curiously, Russia is beginning to reward the uncommon men. Soviet scholar,
Vadim A. Trapeznikov--not without Kremlin sanction--is now referring to the
Soviet system as "obsolete." He says Russia's economy must now rely on the "more
productive profit motive."

We, on the other hand, continue to play the democratic con game which
pretends that all men are equal and that anybody who demonstrates any inequality
should be punished for it.

Any insolent beggar can wave his sores in your face and plead for help in
the tone of a threat.

You are expected to feel "guilty" for having more than he.

Any barefoot bum from the pestholes of Asia or Africa cries out, "How dare
you be rich!" and we beg him to be patient and we promise to give it all away as
fast as possible.

The economic creed of "enlightened selfishness" which made our nation the
powerhouse of this planet has been so maligned that it now sounds like heresy
when I say:

Any man who claims you own him a living is a cannibal. Whether foreign or
domestic, he is a cannibal.

If you choose to help him, that is one thing.

If he demands your "help" as his "right," he is a leech, a sycophant, a
parasite. He is a cannibal seeking to survive by consuming you.

This was Paul Harvey.

Absurd Texts in American History (V, c): Paul Harvey

Time for another selection from Paul Harvey's classic text, You Said It, Paul Harvey. Complied by Mrs. Paul Harvey.

Liberals Trying to "Capture" Nixon

"When Conservatives lose an election they rush to congratulate the victor, retreat to lick their wounds, and wait until next time.

When Liberals lose an election, they "offer every assistance" and try to stake out for themselves at least one corner of the White House desk from where they exert continuing influence on the incumbent.

As they moved in on Eisenhower, they are now seeking to "assist" President Nixon in his appointments and decisions.

Traveling, it is difficult for me to pass a news stand without perusing the editorial pages to see what issues are of most local concern.

Inevitably I peek at my own column to see my name in print. Recently, characteristically, these columns have subscribed to the President's suggestion that we "pull our country together."

But elsewhere on the editorial pages and in prominent national periodicals I read so many liberal pundits who are already hard at work trying to pull Mr. Nixon over into their corner.

This is not intended as criticism of colleagues; I am criticizing me. So starting now I'm going to be a little less pull-together and a little more pull-away from those sore losers.

Mr. Nixon owes the Rockefeller-eastern-liberal-establishment nothing! They fought him at the Convention and they helped him not at all during the election. Nixon lost New York, and New England this election by a greater margin than when he lost it to John Kennedy.

On the other hand, those Conservatives who did deliver Ohio and Illinois and all those southern border states to Mr. Nixon--those to whom he truly owes his selection--deserve much consideration.

Recent days I hear and read so many seeking to convince the new President that he "has a mandate to adopt many Humphrey programs"--and perhaps appoint Humphrey to his official family--"because the election was so close." Rubbish. Kennedy "squeeked" in and nobody questioned his "mandate."

"Nixon must shift to the left," another insists.

Significantly, many demand that Nixon turn his back on the Deep South which voted against him but none I have read says he should reject the Manhattan Islanders who rejected him.

The post-convention Nixon-Rockefeller shotgun wedding was an understandable political expedient.

Indeed, I am sure Mr. Nixon is genuinely determined to try to keep his party together and pull our country together.

This will necessarily require some accomodation. [sic]

My fear now is that he will listen to the concerted voice of his enemies to the subsequent neglect of his friends.

It is because Mr. Nixon's historic image is "conservative" that the liberals are now making such a concerted effort to influence him thataway.

It will be easiest for him to yield rather than suffer the criticism which the eastern liberals are able to mobilize against any who dare to oppose them.

Mr. Nixon, therefore, is going to need all the encouragement he can get to stand by what most voters considered to be his own personal principles.

Whatever other interpretation anybody tries to put on the returns from the recent election, this fact is incontrovertible: The liberal ism was rejected. In fact, by the combined Nixon-Wallace turnout, it was overwhelmed."

Good Day!

Absurd Texts of American History (V, b): Paul Harvey

The problem with using this Paul Harvey book is not finding absurd texts. It's that there are just so many. How to choose?

Well, here's one sure to warm the souls of all Americans. I personally love his understanding of America's racial history.

"Negroes and Indians"

"In the early American slave states, the law provided for the welfare of the slaves.

The constitutions of the slave states generally specified that the slave owners must provide their slaves adequate housing, food, medical care, and old age benefits.

The Mississippi Constitution contained this additional sentence: "The Legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves...(except) when the slave shall have rendered the State some distinguished service."

Again: The slave was guaranteed food, lodging, medical and old age care--but the highest honor the state could bestow for distinguished service was to set a man free from this security.

The state's highest reward was to give a man the personal responsibility to find his own job, pay his own way, to look after his own welfare.

Eventually the slaves were set free--free to earn money they could keep, to build or buy their own houses, to arrange for their own medical care and to save for their old age.

Then they weren't slaves anymore.

On the other hand, consider the American Indians.

The Indians we made permanent wards of the government. Them we gave "security." The American Indians we placed on reservations, assigned 13,000 federal employees to look after them. That's one federal employee for every 30 reservation Indians.

The Indians became steadily less self-supporting.

Today the average American Indian--once so virile, strong and self-sufficient--would likely die of starvation unless fed by the government.

American Negroes, who were slaves just one long lifetime ago, are today mostly self-supporting, self-respecting, responsible.

The evolution I have just described--progression on one hand and retrogression on the other--has nothing to do with the color of a man's skin or the shape of his cheekbones.

The Negro was free to work or loaf, to starve or to win a potful.

The Indian was secure. There was no reason for him to educate himself or to learn to manage his own affairs or to be productive. It's not his fault, it's ours.

Just as it is going to be our fault if we let our leaders repeat this tragic error on us.

There are those today who think Americans are too ignorant or too worthless to be trusted with our own destiny. They are convinced that they would starve in the streets unless Government looked after our welfare.

Welfare! Man this is what American blacks were freed from a hundred years ago.

When the politicians guarantee "free gifts" and we rise to the bait...

When the politicians write laws "for your own good" whether you like them or not...

They are offering the rewards of 1862!

A free meal, a free roof, free medicine, a guaranteed job--and we're trapped into being somebody's slaves again!"

Good Day!

Absurd Texts of American History (V, a): Paul Harvey

The next few posts in the Absurd Texts series come from the book You Said It, Paul Harvey. Complied by Mrs. Paul Harvey. It has no publication date but I think it is about 1974 or so. The first post comes from "If Every Black Turned White Tonight"

If Every Black Turned White Tonight

"If every black turned white tonight, tomorrow morning we would find most of our problems unresolved.

Statistically, we would have less crime--but we would still have too much. The percentage of whites committing crimes is about five times greater than the white population increase.

We would still have unemployment in the midst of plentiful jobs, because 40% of the unemployed are white.

We would still have mothers bearing illegitimate children to make themselves eligible for increasing welfare handouts.

We would still have unwon wars overseas and resultant domestic restiveness.

Many Americans have been allowing themselves to adopt the ancient scapegoat concept, imagining that we can absolve ourselves of our own sins by blaming everything on the blacks. We can't.

Indeed, the black-white relationship in the United States, in perspective, amounts to a very commendable amalgamation.

Historically, many of the world's diverse cultures have not been able to pull so close together in 2,000 years as our black-white cultures have in 200 years.

Britain, for all her centuries of involvement with African and Asiatics, is less close to them than we Americans are to one another.

That we have domestic black-white strife involving factions of our black-white populations should not be nearly so surprising as the larger fact that we have come so far so fast in providing equality of opportunity and mutual social acceptance.

I do not intend to try to defend the so-called black "militants."

It is too obvious that many of them have a chip on their shoulders, resenting their own blackness--and that they use blackness as a catalyst for mobilizing resentment, restiveness and rebellion.

They are as wrong to blame all their troubles on their color as we are to blame all our troubles on them.

That's why I say every black could turn white tonight and tomorrow morning we would still have legions of lazy Americans demanding more for working less.

We would still have large segments of our college and university populations going to "pot."

We would still have young Americans burning our flag because they resent the maladministration of some of our foreign affairs and foolishly blame our ism.

We would still have rebellious youths growing long hair and wearing dirty clothes in rebellion against a generation of parents who drink and say "don't" and smoke and say "don't" and who denounce misusing sex while they do.

If every black should turn white tonight, we'd still have too many hungry and unenlightened Mexicans, Indians, and shantytown whites.

We'd still have public nudity, lurid movies and putrid magazines feeding carnal appetites of corruptible Caucasians.

So most of what ails us is not so simply dismissed as a matter of black and white.

If every black turned white tonight, tomorrow morning we would still have most of our problems...

And so would they!"

Good Day!