If you haven’t listened to Mike Rowe’s The Way I Heard It podcast, give it a try. What originally started as short stories in the vein of Paul Harvey turned into much longer episodes a while back and now it’s one of my go-to listens when I’m trying to sleep. It does the job (and that’s not a bad thing), so I usually have to go back and listen later, especially when I wake up and hear something that piques my interest.
Like the latest episode.
The title itself catches your attention: “Han Shot First.” Rowe begins with a great illustration of something I’ve been talking about here for a while. In short — in 1977’s original Star Wars, Han Solo shoots a bounty hunter with a blaster concealed under the table at which they’re sitting. When Lucas re-released the movies in 1997 as special editions, he changes the scene to the bounty hunter shooting first.
In 1977, neither Lucas, nor most of the other people on the planet who saw the movie thought anything of it. This is what Han Solo did. No big deal. But 20 years later, apparently that’s too much for people to handle. Maybe Lucas mellowed and (thought he) matured over time, but really, he was just rewriting history to make it more palatable to those of fainter courage.
And that’s what we do when we deny the truth of history. That’s what we get when we think dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a crime against humanity.
And this particular episode goes into that too. Rowe and Bill Whittle talk about Whittle’s response to Jon Stewart calling Harry Truman a war criminal. It’s an excellent example of how those ignorant of our history and its context try to change it as some sort of appeasement to their view of how things should really be. But again, from the comfort of the very freedom bought by those who…dropped the bomb.
I recommend all of Rowe’s stuff — some more than others — and this one was well worth the listening.
Watching Gunsmoke, I see Matt Dillon pretty quick to shoot, too
I’m a believer in being as sensitive to that which could offend someone as much as practical (not “possible”). There comes a point where we just have to accept that there are things that happen in a general society, and the few that cannot stomach these things should probably just choose not to engage within those areas. Hard, yes. But as I’ve tried to say so many times in so many ways, we live in an imperfect world. We have to be ready for it.
So yeah. An awful lot of us can accept that Matt Dillon did what he had to do at times. And while Han Solo did his actions as a scoundrel, this is what scoundrels are. And most people are able to make that distinction. We all have our flaws, but that doesn’t mean we can’t go off and save the galaxy either.