The Thomas Chronicles

I’ve been listening to vintage radio broadcasts for most of this week. Being a child of the visual age, television and mind-mesmerizing internet, I didn’t grow up listening to these broadcasts. I was much more acquainted with the antics of drug-addled movie stars and rockstars, with angry grunge music and Japanimation than I was with sightless faces and unfamiliar voices drifting through radio speakers.

I think what first drew me toward radio broadcast shows were audiobooks. Since I have this love of the written word and I couldn’t possibly read all the books I wanted to read, I thought I’d do it vicariously through audiotapes. Luckily for me, the public libraries are stacked to the gills with free, readily available audiobooks. Some of my favorite authors sat the library shelves just waiting to be heard.

Here again I was lucky, for instead of the authors reading their own works, these publishing houses hired actors and voice actors to read it in dramatic form. I found out later that authors usually have dull, monotone voices that could put you to sleep about just was well as they can write.

I languished there for about a few months, listening to stories being read by actors. I didn’t make the leap, or slide, into radio broadcast shows until one day when I picked a curious audiobook with the words “Don’t Panic” on it in large friendly letters. I’m referring to, of course, the infamous “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams with Peter Jones as “The Book”. Then I was hooked.

But enough of this piece of personal history. I wanted to write to you about this radio broadcast I just finished listening to yesterday with the great Orson Welles. He had the perfect voice for radio, you know. Deep, rich, sonorous as though everything he pronounced contained the profundity of Socrates, Cicero and all the Romantic poets put together. The man can hiccup on the air and make you rub your chin lost in reverie.

The particular one I listened to was the Orson Welles Radio Almanac 1. It aired during World War II, when our soldiers were slogging it out with the Third Reich in Europe. War permeated the airwaves and the mood of the country turned to the war effort in grim determination to win— at any cost.

And in this backdrop, Orson Welles thought he’d quote a few lines from Thomas Paine written in 1776 when we conducted our Revolution to sever our ties with monarchic tyranny. He didn’t read from a single, continuous piece from Paine, rather the made choice selections, snippets here and there, and he delivered it with all the gravity and weight he could muster.

This is my transcript of what he read:

I call not upon a few but upon all. Not on this state or that state but on every state; up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home countries and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now, is dead: The blood of his children shall curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy.

Look on this picture and weep over it. And if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes this not, let him suffer it unlamented. Where was there ever a war on which a world was staked till now.

When we view our world as it is and not as we would like it to be, and though what we see may frighten us, these words ring back to us and through us and becomes a kind of solace. These words have lost none of its potency but have grown through the annals of time; words passed down studiously from one generation to the next, and it carries with it the torch, bright and brilliant, of our American Freedom. May we forever keep it.

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