RUSH: Charlton Heston passed away over the weekend, as everybody knows, of complications from Alzheimer’s. Again, I was fortunate to be able to get to know Charlton Heston — actually, because of my friendship with Mr. Buckley. The first time I met Charlton Heston, he had never heard of me. My show was on the air in Los Angeles in 1989 or 1990. National Review did a lot of seminars all over the country and he was a board member of National Review, Mr. Heston was, and I was invited to attend one in Los Angeles when I was out there for a Rush to Excellence Tour stop as well as promote our relationship with KFI AM 640 and was introduced to Mr. Heston. He was fascinated, he had no idea who I was. He was fascinated about what was going on. He said he was going to listen, and he did, and he became a somewhat regular contributor here to the program on occasion. He was honored by National Review some years later (also, out in California), and I was asked to be the emcee. This would have been 1994 or ’95, and I’ll tell you, he was exactly… When you think of celebrities, it was exactly what you would hope he would be if you didn’t know him and were going to meet him. No airs whatsoever about him, just genuinely authentic, and he was committed to his beliefs. He was married to the same woman over 50 years, Lydia, and he told me once, ‘Yeah, the secret to this, Rush, is I’ve learned four words: ‘Honey, I was wrong.’ That’s the secret.’ Yep, Dawn’s in there nodding her head in agreement. He called the program on February 3rd, 1995, he wanted to read from Michael Crichton’s prologue of Jurassic Park. When Moses calls, you let him on the program. This was 1995. Listen to this as it relates to global warming today.
HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
RUSH: That’s Charlton Heston, reading from the prologue of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park on this program all the way back February 3rd, 1995. He spoke of hundreds of years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers, or vaccines. I found something fascinating over the weekend from the Heritage Foundation. The number of years it took for major technologies to reach 50% of American homes. Now, what’s interesting about this is this. When I get to this after the break, when you hear the number of years it took for major technologies to reach 50% of American homes, meaning they could afford it, you will see how fast our country has progressed and has grown, as opposed to a hundred years ago, as Mr. Heston was reading there from Michael Crichton.
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RUSH: One more thing about Charlton Heston — known as Chuck to his good friends. Here was an actor, here was a man who fought for all that America stood for at its founding. Charlton Heston worked to uphold the Bill of Rights when he marched with Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as when he stood up for the Second Amendment. Charlton Heston cut a figure of authenticity and credibility that Hollywood actors today can only dream of when they apply themselves to causes. Ted Danson, Leonardo DiCaprio, all these people, they’re just pure pretenders. They carry no credibility, no authenticity, whatsoever. But Charlton Heston cut a figure of authenticity and credibility — and like many conservatives, he eventually was shunned in Hollywood, although it was tougher for them to shun him. He was not shunned from work. He got the gigs, but he was still looked down upon eventually.