Andy Rooney's obituary in The New York Times has made us think of how we felt when Charlton Heston died.
Honest, there's a connection, so please bear with us.
You may recall that National Rifle Association president Heston gave a despicable but revealing interview to Michael Moore in "Bowling for Columbine" — basically saying that America had to arm itself because of all the blacks.
We cats wondered then — as we wonder now — how Heston ended up saying that when, back in the day, he marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King.
We hadn't expected a similar mood to strike us when we approached Rooney's obit. We remembered on our own that he'd made unseemly remarks about gay people ("Many of the ills which kill us are self-induced...[like] homosexual unions"), women, and Hispanics (“I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me"). So when we heard he'd died, we weren't exactly broken up.
But then we read that as an Army sergeant and reporter for The Stars & Stripes, he covered the U.S. liberation of Buchenwald.
So. How do you go from being one of the first guys to march into a Nazi death camp — and then later hurl slurs at people solely on the basis of who they are?
Perhaps we should add a sidebar to this blog: "Human Beings We Don't Miss."
(PHOTO: U.S. Army soldiers liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, April 1945. From the Mayor Robert F. Wagner Collection of the LaGuardia & Wagner Libraries.)
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