U.S. Sen. Hollings makes atomic bomb joke.

“You should draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it ‘Made in America by lazy and illiterate workers and tested in Japan.’”

Former Senator Ernest Hollings (SC) speaking in early March 1992 to workers at the Roller Bearing Co. in Hartsville, S.C. and responding to comments made two months earlier by Japanese Parliament Speaker Yohso Sakurachi who, the Associated Press reported, “said U.S. workers were lazy, unproductive and illiterate.” Further, AP wrote, “Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa fueled the controversy two weeks later when he suggested that Americans lack a work ethic.”

Reported in the New York Times under the headline “U.S. Sen. Hollings makes atomic bomb joke.”.

I came across the quote in a little day calendar of political quotes. The calendar did not report the NY Times headline, and I was shocked at the callousness of the statement. Then I Googled for some reference to the quote, and found this editorial where the columnist, a journalism teacher, said he was similarly shocked, then satisfied after learning of the NY Times headline that gave the quote “Context. Context. Context.”

What satisfaction comes from that context? Calling a people lazy and illiterate is one thing. Telling a people they better hush because we killed 200,000 civilians in two swift attacks, thus inferring we could do it just as easily again, is quite another.