RIP
R.I.P. Daniel Inouye, 1924-2012
(via Dave Weigel)
Dave Weigel, at Slate:
Tonight, for the first time, the state of Hawaii is not represented by Daniel Inuoye. The 88-year old senator entered politics in the 1950s, joining the territorial legislature, and waiting for statehood. When Hawaii became the 50th state, Inuoye ran for, and won, its sole seat in Congress. He was representing the state when a kid named Barack Hussein Obama II was born.
But these are among the least interesting details about Inuoye. At age 17, he was a medical volunteer at Pearl Harbor. At 19, he joined the army…
The NYTimes describes his military career:
…In 1943, when the United States Army lifted its ban on Japanese-Americans, Mr. Inouye joined the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the first all-nisei volunteer unit. It became the most decorated unit in American military history. In 1944, fighting in Italy and France, he won a battlefield commission to second lieutenant. He was shot in the chest, but the bullet was stopped by two silver dollars in his pocket.
On April 21, 1945, weeks before the end of the war in Europe, he led an assault near San Terenzo, Italy. His platoon was pinned down by three machine guns. Although shot in the stomach, he ran forward and destroyed one emplacement with a hand grenade and another with his submachine gun. He was crawling toward the third when enemy fire nearly severed his right arm, leaving a grenade, in his words, “clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to me anymore.” He pried it loose, threw it with his left hand and destroyed the bunker.
Heroism
The awful events in Newtown give us another chance to contrast the rhetoric of gun-toting imaginary heroism with the real heroism demonstrated by some of the wonderful people who’ve been lost in mass shootings in the past few years. This time, it’s the principal, school psychologist and vice-principal at Sandy Hook Elementary. When I was watching the coverage yesterday, one of the producers at CNN interviewed a parent who was at the school for a conference at the time of the shooting. As soon as the shots were fired, those three school officials, who were in the conference, went into the hall to see what they could do. All three were immediately shot, and only the vice-principal was able to crawl back into the room.
Today we can read friends, parents and former students remembrances of Dawn Hochsprung, the principal, and Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist. It sounds like the students at Sandy Hook were lucky to have both of them. The picture of Ms. Hochsprung in particular is heartbreaking–she’s so full of life and excitement.
Like Judge John Roll, or the boyfriends in Aurora, who shielded others with their bodies and were killed, these two women did what little they could do in the face of overwhelming force. They acted instinctively with the goal of protecting their students, and their reward was a brutal, quick murder. That’s how heroism works in mass shootings.
McGovern
Betty’s post points out one of the ironies of George McGovern’s life–a war hero whose patriotism was attacked for opposing the Vietnam War. Another of the great ironies is that someone as skilled in politics as McGovern lost as badly as he did in 1972. Before McGovern, there was no Democratic Party in South Dakota. When he became Executive Secretary of the party in the early 50s, no Democrat had been elected to Congress or the Senate since well before World War II. McGovern traveled the state for years building up a grassroots organization, maintaining a card index of the Democrats he met and encouraged in every little town in the state. The organization he built paved the way for years of Democratic success in a state that, by the numbers, should never have elected a Democrat to federal office.
People looking at McGovern for a legacy see his pacifism, and his work in the fight against hunger around the world. But I wish people would look at the way he won elections. The formula is fairly simple to lay out, but difficult to execute. It begins with keeping track of every individual who ever marked “Democrat” when they registered to vote, and by energizing local party organizations by paying attention to the hard workers there, and giving them encouragement that elections won’t, since there are a lot of places in states like South Dakota where no Democrat will ever get elected to the state legislature.
The McGovern formula for policy is that you have to cut loose what local residents just won’t accept–for example, even the liberal George McGovern never advocated gun control as an elected official. You become the number one advocate for policies that benefit your region (in his case, farm subsidies). You find new places where the interests of your region and the policies you advocate can work together: McGovern’s lifelong devotion to feeding the world is a great example of that. It opened a new market for South Dakota corn and wheat, while advancing the cause of peace, and avoiding the isolationism that was the default position of a lot of politicians of the era prior to McGovern’s. And then you vote as a liberal on everything that isn’t a dealbreaker.
The difference between McGovern and the Blue Dogs is that Blue Dogs spend their time telling you how much they aren’t liberals, while the McGovern pitch is “I’m a liberal but I’m also a better advocate for the things we both value.” Perhaps the word “liberal” is so devauled that this approach no longer works, but I don’t see a lot of Blue Dogs left, so maybe some kind of modified McGovern approach is worth a shot.
Also, too: the Sioux Falls Argus Leader has a great McGovern package this morning.
RIP, Mongo
Alex Karras, dead at the age of 77:
When I bought a blu-ray, the very first movie I purchased was Blazing Saddles.
Phyllis Diller, RIP
She was 95 so the obit writers had plenty of time to prepare, and the Times doesn’t disappoint. When I was a little kid, I remember thinking she was the funniest person on TV, probably because she had a bit of the clown in her (her outfits just kept getting more over-the-top) and because her humor was a little transgressive by the button-down standards that were still in operation on network TV of the late 60’s and early 70’s.
David Rakoff, RIP
You might know him from his books, essays or his contributions to This American Life, but perhaps you didn’t know that he was a remarkably talented and generous artist. And goddam was he funny: