A kinder, gentler Rush Limbaugh?

March 3, 2009 by Pastor Dan.

Did you catch the obituary for Paul Harvey?—the famous radio commentator for half a century, who died Saturday at the age of 90.

I used to hear Harvey’s Noon broadcast years ago because he was taken seriously then by news radio as if he really had something important to say. Of course, it was important to his conservative following, so in our funny American way of making heroes and stars out of people who draw a crowd, Harvey was a “great” broadcaster. Tim Graham has a third-hand quote that Paul Harvey was “the Norman Rockwell of radio,” a pleasant image which is hardly true, since Rockwell’s paintings never disparaged people the way Harvey’s broad strokes with the conservative brush did.

In my view, Harvey was a kinder, gentler, naive and (non-drug-taking) version of Rush Limbaugh. He held knee-jerk conservative views about many things in society which were seldom tempered by testing, listening and discernment. The L.A. Times obituary mentioned something I am too young to have remembered: that Harvey supported Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt in the 1950s. Later he ranted against moral decay in general and homosexuality in particular. Harvey spoke to a particular audience that he could safely assume shared his narrow cultural and political persuasions and would not be troubled by his lack of in-depth analysis of unfolding events.

All the usual suspects:  the colorless, humorless, righteous political leadership of America.

I am not the first to connect the dots between Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh, according to Tim Graham, although his link to the Wonkette blog is no help in tracing the original.

Some people are deeply conservative to the core, and it’s not always a matter of aging brain cells getting hardened and brittle. Harvey was only 34 years old when he sided with McCarthy. Something deep within made him distrustful, so it was easy to buy into the anti-communist rhetoric of the 1950s. But McCarthy was one of the early adopters of conspiracy theories, believing and manipulating the American people into believing that there were Marxist sympathizers—plotting to overthrow the American government— who had infiltrated our entire society.

The Paul Harvey broadcasts (of 2-3 minutes’ length) I remember did not so much report facts as to broadcast a distinct “ain’t it awful” editorial remark about the current events. So it is likely that Harvey simply swallowed McCarthyism whole, the way he did anti-gay views.

Rabid anti-communism continued to fuel conservative America for decades and certainly propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. I never gave more than a nod to Marxist rhetoric about class struggle in those years, but I roll my eyes to this day that Reagan took so much credit for bringing down the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union. In fact, it mostly collapsed of its own weight — a broken and flawed system that had so little to offer the huge portion of the world it controlled that it could not keep that control in perpetuity. Fear, alienation and negativity only have power when free-thinking people remain weak or intimidated.

That is why I believe that North Korea will eventually crack, and that Rush Limbaugh will eventually lose his grip on the conservative mind. Whatever is false and useless cannot sustain itself forever if there is no strong reality behind it. Ultimately, that is why homophobia is dwindling and collapsing now. There is no reality to the irrational fears which Harvey in his time and others in our time continue to promote that lesbian and gay people are trying to destroy American families and marriages, and should be compared to terrorists.

As many of us remarked after the May 2007 death of Jerry Falwell (who blamed pagans, abortionists, feminists and homosexuals for bringing on the 911 terrorist attacks), Paul Harvey too is “in a better place.”

– P.D.

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