The content on this webpage contains paid/affiliate links. When you click on any of our affiliate link, we/I may get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our affiliate disclosure for more info -----------------------
Last updated on August 9th, 2017 at 12:40 pm
The University of Washington declines to honour former student and WWII flying ace Col. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington. Among those who opposed:
Jill Edwards questioned whether it was appropriate to honor a person who killed other people.
Over in Canada, plans proceed to honour draft dodgers with a creepy hippie statue:
The proposal calls for a sculpture of two Americans, a male and a female, crossing an imaginary border where a Canadian figure is waiting to welcome them.
As Clear and Present Danger reports: “They’re so liberal they even felt they had to create a female draft dodger.”
(Via J. F. Beck)
UPDATE. Commenter Blue Hen recalls a college moment:
The head genius in the class, a fellow graduate student, decided that intelligence was not only not a primary quality, but a detriment for a job like “being a Sergeant in the infantry”. The class agreed heartily, including the professor. At that, I decided to rise, walked up to his desk, and placed my military ID on his desk, which stated my rank (sergeant) and I noted that I had been in the infantry, but was currently a Combat Engineer. I then asked him if he would like to repeat his assertion. Strangely, he declined. The rest of the class was also oddly quiet.
- Though she is only a Junior in Mathematics, with views as asinine as this, Jill Edwards is clearly one to watch.Posted by rexie on 2006 02 17 at 02:06 PM • permalink
- Those Canadians are so unenlightened. I mean, where’s the draft dodger in the wheel chair? Or the openly gay draft dodger? Bigots!Posted by lil varmint on 2006 02 17 at 02:30 PM • permalink
- Is the female draft dodger depicted with the yokes of male dominance and oppression like a bra, skirt and heels?Posted by perfectsense on 2006 02 17 at 02:35 PM • permalink
- The proposal calls for a sculpture of two Americans, a male and a female, crossing an imaginary border where a Canadian figure is waiting to welcome them.
Doesn’t Reuters have that backward? According to the BBC in 2004 it is supposed to be a “bronze statue of two Canadians reaching out to a US draft dodger.”
Posted by Bruce Rheinstein on 2006 02 17 at 02:39 PM • permalink
- Jill Edwards, and her kind, seek to dishonor people like my father and my uncles who fought in Europe and the Pacific, so she would have the freedom to spew her stupid, half-baked ideas. But it’s not possible to dishonor them, because they were upright men who risked their lives to do their duty. Young Jill (and her kind) are too small and petty to dishonor anyone but themselves.
- BTW, I live in the Seattle area and this “Pappy” Boyington controversy is rightfully a big deal here. One of my favorite quotes was from UW student Ashley Miller: “We don’t need to honor any more rich white males,” Pappy was Sioux indian and came from a poor dysfunctional family. The ignorance of these politically correct twits is stunning.
More about Pappy here.
Posted by lil varmint on 2006 02 17 at 02:44 PM • permalink
- I’ll bet the draft-dodgers are both white, aren’t they?Posted by Jim Treacher on 2006 02 17 at 02:49 PM • permalink
Ashley Miller commented that many monuments at UW already commemorate rich white men.
Hey Ashley, you overeducated dope, Boyington’s background was decidedly working-class and he was also part Sioux Indian.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 02 17 at 02:49 PM • permalink
- Oops. I got distracted looking up Boyington links and lil varmint beats me to the point.
Drat!
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 02 17 at 02:53 PM • permalink
- More Seattle bullshit. Sometimes it’s extremely hard to live here.
I’m sure that Ashley Miller, socialist stooge and UW senate member supports “Affirmative Action”. Ironic being that Pappy is of Sioux Indian heritage and would qualify for it if he were alive today.
“Rich White Man” you say?
Posted by swassociates on 2006 02 17 at 02:59 PM • permalink
- I’m sure these politically correct twits attending the UW don’t mind the endowments provided by rich white males though.
In the interest of fairness, however, I would like to let everyone know that Jill Edwards has apologized. I heard an interview with one of the men to whom she apologized and he felt it was sincere. I hope she takes this life experience to heart and learns a profound lesson from Pappy’s story.
Posted by lil varmint on 2006 02 17 at 03:14 PM • permalink
I’d suspect that the people who disapprove of this have no problem at all with the Lenin statue over in Fremont…
It’s definitely the same mindset. I used to work in Freemont—the hippyesque Seattle community whose motto is “The Center of the Universe” .. no kidding. I passed by that Lennon statue often. While I appreciated it for it’s historical and artistic value (it’s one of few without military armaments), it cheesed me off that there was no historical context with it. It was erected as if to be admired instead of to provoke thought and solemn remembrance.
It is hard to live in this area sometimes.
Posted by lil varmint on 2006 02 17 at 03:28 PM • permalink
- When I was at college they taught us to research. So I would have known: Boyington wasn’t born rich and didn’t die rich; had as much as 50 pct Indian (yes, I said Indian) blood in his veins. And when I was in college it was a hell of a lot harder to do research than typing Boyington into Google. What a waste of perfectly good endowments!
- I was still in the Marine Corps Reserves when I was in College. I experienced the joys of listerning to the beautiful people waxing eloquently about defense policy and the military. Most of the faculty was what you’d expect. One fascinating experience came during a public policy class, during a discussion on leadership. While discussing leadership qualities, this pack of geniuses decided that certain leadership roles called for different qualities. The head genius in the class, a fellow graduate student, decided that intelligence was not only not a primary quality, but a detriment for a job like “being a Sergeant in the infantry”. The class agreed heartily, including the professor. At that, I decided to rise, walked up to his desk, and placed my military ID on his desk, which stated my rank (sergeant) and I noted that I had been in the infantry, but was currently a Combat Engineer. I then asked him if he would like to repeat his assertion. Strangely, he declined. The rest of the class was also oddly quiet.
- Is the Canadian figure a bear?Posted by chinesearithmetic on 2006 02 17 at 05:05 PM • permalink
- ‘Pappy’ was a boyhood hero of mine and I still have a copy of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, which I highly recommend to anyone. Not only is it a great read about the war in our ‘backyard’, but in parts, Boyington was as good as describing the magnificent South Pacific as Michener in ‘Tales of the South Pacific’. I have visited Espiritu Santo, where Boyington and his squadron VMF 214 were based. It was also where Michener was said to have first thought about writing his famous book.
As a current serving soldier, I am in awe of the men and women who fought under such amazingly harsh conditions as Pappy just so arseholes like Ashley Miller and Jill Edwards can live in the land of the free. I RebeccaH (#6) says it best – they can’t dishonour these legends, statues or not!
As to the Canadian draft dodger memorial, I thought that was shelved last year when even the barmy federal Liberal Government and would not lend its support. Their certainly will not be any support for it from the new Steven Harper government.Posted by AlphaMikeFoxtrot on 2006 02 17 at 05:35 PM • permalink
- That statue sounds like it could also double for a monument to all those terrorized American liberals who loudly promised to flee Bushitler’s tyranny after the last election. Alec Baldwin could model for the male figure, though the way his waistline is headed, there may not be enough bronze in Canada to make a complete cast.
- #21, Blue Hen—Thanks for your comment and thanks for what you did. When you stood up to those people, you were standing up for for all of us.
A Sergeant of MarinesPosted by Frank the Yank on 2006 02 17 at 09:34 PM • permalink
- #21 Blue Hen,
Outstanding! I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that classroom.Easy for the priveliged to disparage the character of the military from their academic ivory towers.
They have never done the hard yards.
Posted by Pedro the Ignorant on 2006 02 17 at 10:25 PM • permalink
- Rexie #1,
I’ll watch her only if she’s in a bikini.Boyington almost ended up in the Army Air Force. Before Pearl Harbor he “resigned” from the USMC to join the Flying Tigers in China. When the American Volunteer Group (official title) was mustered into the USAAF the Navy and Marine members had to scramble to get back to their services if they didn’t want to go Army.
Boyington is an example of Puller’s comment that the best fighters often come out of the brig when a war starts. When he joined the AVG he was on the verge of being kicked out of the Marines for his drinking problem. During the war he preformed excellently, but with peace he went to pieces again. It took him a long time to recover.
The shallow PC opinions of these sophomoric students dishoner them. The memory of Colonel Boyington, ace fighter pilot, Medal of Honor winner, Marine, is far above their small spitefulness, statue or no statue.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 02 17 at 11:21 PM • permalink
- You think it’s hard living in Seattle sometimes? Well, I graduated from that particular university. It had just as many idiots per square mile in the mid-1980’s (when I attended) as it does today. That’s why I limited my contact with my fellow students as much as I could. Basically spent all my time in either the School of Business, or in music lounge at the Hub.
I get regular requests for donations from the alumni association. Those I trash unread. I do donate to the School of Business, usually splitting it 50/50 between the biz school and the accounting program.
Posted by David Crawford on 2006 02 18 at 12:26 AM • permalink
- #21, good on ya, Blue Hen!Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 02 18 at 01:24 AM • permalink
- Canada serves a valuable service.
Without them there’d be no place for our spineless, unfit, unwilling, unable and craven cowards (every culture spawns such folk from time to time) to go to get themselves out of the way.
Without Canada, those detrimentals would be constantly underfoot.
Besided, with them running off north like they do, that’s just that much less strain on our welfare system since they do tend to end up on the “sick, lame or lazy” roster.
- Do the Canadians realize that most of the draft dodgers were “rich white males”? Don’t they already have enough statues commemorating rich white males? How about this for a saying on the draft-dodger plaque: “In honor of those who fled in fear of serving their land of birth; while others, poor and black, died in their place”.
- Just a late comment regarding Pappy Boyington and those like him – I’m young enough that many of those who served in (and survived) WWII were dead before I was even born, and my parents were only children when that great conflict ended. In fact I don’t even personally know anyone who served in WWII. But the memory of their service and sacrifice is NOT forgotten, and it makes no difference if there is a statue to them, or a memorial plaque, or whatever…I’m damned grateful that they gave up years of their lives, many of them their health or sanity, and many of them their lives. I feel privileged just to observe a minute’s silence for them each year, and I offer up a silent prayer for them all. It shames me that my generation is known as the ungrateful generation who has forgotten these magnificent men and women. I wish someone would give some publicity to those of us who feel humbled and honoured to be the beneficiaries of their sacrifice. Pity it’s only the fools who get the coverage…Posted by Mr Snuffalupagus on 2006 02 19 at 09:35 AM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
