Someone should probably remind the prime minister of Papua New Guinea that false memories are a symptom of dementia, and neither he nor his countrymen should take offense at President Joe Biden’s incoherent ramblings.
Last week, Biden concocted yet another tall tale. This time, he said cannibals consumed his uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, a member of the Army Air Corps who crashed in the Pacific near the island.
Upset that Biden had besmirched the noble islanders, PM James Marape said that perhaps the United States should search for the remains of men killed during the war in the Pacific.
The Cannibals Got Him!
Biden delivered his latest gaffe while speaking off the cuff as he departed hometown Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he had visited the Scranton Veterans Memorial Park to see his uncle’s name. At the airport before boarding Air Force One, Biden spun the yarn … with the obligatory shot at GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“I wanted to see where my uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, was memorialized,” he told the worthies of his adoring press:
And there was a World War Two memorial built for those who lost their lives in World War Two.
And when D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military. And four of them — three of them made it. One was 4-F — couldn’t go.
And Ambrose Finnegan — we called him “Uncle Bosie” — he — he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.
They never recovered his body. But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.
And what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they were a bunch of “suckers” and “losers.”
The story unraveled immediately. Spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre was twice left answering questions about the cannibals as hungry for Uncle Bosie as Joe is for Graeter’s chocolate chip ice cream. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency revealed the truth:
For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.
PM Perplexed; False Memories
Marape was none too happy, saying Biden implied that cannibals are running wild in PNG, as it’s called.
“President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such,” Marape said. “World War II was not the doing of my people; however, they were needlessly dragged into a conflict that was not their doing.”
He continued:
The remains of WWII lie scattered all over PNG, including the plane that carried President Biden’s uncle. Perhaps, given President Biden’s comments and the strong reaction from PNG and other parts of the world, it is time for the USA to find as many remains of World War II in PNG as possible, including those of servicemen who lost their lives like Ambrose Finnegan.
Finnegan likely won’t be found, although personal items might be in the wreckage of the Douglas A-20 Havoc in which he went down.
But Biden’s story wasn’t likely a slip of the tongue and was, instead, almost certainly one of the false memories associated with dementia.
In the past, Biden has repeatedly claimed his son, Beau, died in Iraq. In fact, he died of brain cancer at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
Just weeks ago, he falsely claimed that he crossed the recently-destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on a train.
Biden has also falsely said he was a civil rights activist, and that he began his legal career in a liability lawsuit over an explosion in which a man lost his penis.
The 81-year-old president also falsely said he was a long-haul truck driver.
Cannibals in New Guinea
Biden was right about one thing. New Guinea was home to at least one tribe of cannibals, called the Fore people. Their “funerary cannibalism,” which ended in the 1960s, led to the spread of what the tribe called Kuru, a disease marked by tremors and shaking and actually called transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.
Another tribe often suspected of cannibalism is the Korowai people of Western New Guinea.
One American who might well have wound up as an item on the cannibals’ menu is Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson, President Gerald Ford’s vice president. He disappeared on an anthropological trip to Dutch New Guinea in 1961.
Smithsonian magazine writer Carl Hoffman reported that the Otsjanep people, seeking revenge for the killing of several leaders by the Dutch, almost certainly murdered and ate Michael Rockefeller. Hoffman also wrote a book about Rockefeller’s disappearance, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art.
