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["Shea Tisdale" <shea AT sheatisdale.com>]

This is a great Editorial, but it isn't recent.  

> Claim: Canadian radio commentator Gordon Sinclair delivered a stirring,
> pro-American editorial.
> Status: True.
> Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]
>         Good reading, from a Toronto newspaper's editorial page!
>         Widespread, but only partial news coverage was given recently to a
> remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian
> television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant
> remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
>         This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as
> most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.
>         Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were
> lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of
> dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is
> today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
>         When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the
> Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and
> swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it. When distant cities
> are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries in to help.
> This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody
> helped.
>         The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars
> into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing
> about the decadent, warmongering Americans. I'd like to see just one of
> those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States
> Dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a
> plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar, or the Douglas
> 10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines
> except Russia fly American planes?
>         Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman
> on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You
> talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about
> American technocracy, and you find men on the moon - - not once, but several
> times - and safely home again.
>         You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the
> store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not
> pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless
> they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa
> at home to spend here.
>         When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down
> through age, it was the American who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania
> Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old
> caboose. Both are still broke.
>         I can name you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of
> other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else
> raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even
> during the San Francisco earthquake.
>         Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is
> damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this
> thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb
> their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I
> hope Canada is not one of those.


> Origins: On June 5 1973, Canadian radio commentator Gordon Sinclair decided
> he'd had enough of the stream of criticism and negative press recently
> directed at the United States of America by foreign journalists (primarily
> over America's long military involvement in Vietnam, which had ended with
> the signing of the Paris Peace Accords six months earlier). When he arrived
> at radio station CFRB in Toronto that morning, he spent twenty minutes
> dashing off a two-page editorial defending the USA against its carping
> critics which he then delivered in a defiant, indignant tone during his
> "Let's Be Personal" spot at 11:45 AM that day.
> The unusualness of any foreign correspondent -- even one from a country with
> such close ties to the USA as Canada -- delivering such a caustic commentary
> about those who would dare to criticize the USA is best demonstrated by the
> fact that even thirty years later, many Americans doubt that this piece
> (which has been circulating on the Internet in the slightly-altered form
> quoted above as something "recently" printed in a Toronto newspaper) is
> real. It is real, and it received a great deal of attention in its day.
> After Sinclair's editorial was rebroadcast by a few American radio stations,
> it spread like wildfire all over the country. It was played again and again
> (often superimposed over a piece of inspirational music such as "Battle Hymn
> of the Republic" or "Bridge Over Troubled Waters"), read into the Congress
> Record multiple times, and finally released on a record (titled "The
> Americans"), with all royalties donated to the American Red Cross. (A
> Detroit radio broadcaster named Byron MacGregor recorded and released an
> unauthorized version of the piece that hit the record stores before
> Sinclair's official version; an infringement suit was avoided when MacGregor
> agreed to donate his profits to the Red Cross as well).
> Sinclair passed away in 1984, but he will long be remembered on both sides
> of the U.S.-Canadian border -- both for his contributions to journalism, and
> for his loudly proclaiming what no one else at the time would stand up and
> say.