Archive for October 9th, 2010

Paper Hat Heroes

Philippe Rushton is one of the tiny band of psychologists, like Arthur Jensen, who bucks the Party Line on racial IQ. He talked to me because I have personally known the people he quotes like Henry Garret and Wesley George and Carleton Coon when he was in Junior High..

If I can’t impress them with my intelligence I can wow ’em with my longevity.

Rushton told me that Carleton Coon, already about middle-aged, did parachute jumps for American Intelligence in World War II. It was too bad I never knew that, because I could have looked at his file in a couple of my old jobs.

I talked with Coon a number of times and corresponded with him. He never told me a thing about jumping in WWII.

But this is not surprising. Here is a man who was a Harvard professor, Curator of the Museum of Natural History, head of the committee which set up the anthropology exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, and president of the American Society of Anthropology until he was forced out because he would not subscribe to a resolution which repeated the “Modern anthropology has proven that all races are equal in innate abilities” which was then required, as “Race is a myth” is today.

That phrase was in Almanacs and even comic books, “Modern anthropology has proven that all races are equal in innate abilities.” The president of the Society and certainly the world’s top physical anthropologist said that was nonsense.

You can see why he didn’t mention his WWII experiences to me. He had had a hell of a life before and after.

On the other end of the scale, I remember one of Mike Hammers or the fifty other Bulldog Drummonds and other Tough Detectives that were popular in the 50s describing himself at the beginning, the usual tough, big, non-nonsense and so forth and this sentence, and a broken nose I got in the War, not in the police action.”

At our recovery club, a group of full-time World War II vets expressed the same belittling attitude to Korean vets.

They were the opposite of Carleton Coon. They were lifetime drunks for whom the War was the only highpoint of their lives.

I noted that they poo-pooed people who fought in Korea, but they never said one word of the kind about the equally undeclared war in Vietnam.

Why? Because there were no Korean War vets there and there were a lot of Nam vets.

This was typical Paper Hat Bravery, the bravery of the guys who ran around in paper army hats and bragged about how they had fought a War Against Racism.

I read an article lately that talked about something it made me remember. Those who fought in the Pacific, like my uncles, did not talk about it. They fought longer and with a lot more casualties, but they also seem to REMEMBER it.

The Paper Hat Heroes all think of themselves as John Wayne portrayed them. For decades all they heard was how they had ended the Holocaust and Saved the World.

The Pacific fighters are reminded that, in its racial fury, America used the A-Bomb twice in Japan. Until I read that article, it hadn’t occurred to me what a total, chiasmic difference that made in veterans of the same war.

The full time vets have had no lives since and their idea of their own history is a pure product of the media.

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