Finneran: The Real Oscar, An American Soldier
Friday, March 09, 2018
Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™
Did you watch the Oscars the other night?
No?
Good for you. You made a wise decision.
The only decision which could surpass in wisdom your decision to skip the Hollywood hypocrisy show would be a decision to never watch the idiotic degrading show “The Bachelor”.
By my calculation of the past twenty years, I have saved myself a few hundred hours of what would have been totally wasted brain-deadening time. That’s like getting six weeks of vacation, along with the preservation of my allotment of functioning brain cells.
In addition, I spare myself the nauseating lectures from frauds who, in a rational world, would be deemed moral outcasts. Of course America gave up on the idea of moral outcasts long ago. You know how it goes these days---no one is allowed to “impose” their sense of right and wrong or good and evil on anyone else’s self-perception of the universe. Thus the lunatic tails wag the intimidated dogs. Thank you, academia. You given us a nation of fools.
We need some new, more accurately titled awards for future shows. I suggest the following categories for your consideration: Biggest Fool, Biggest Fraud, Biggest Phony, Biggest Hypocrite, Most Pious Claptrap. You can fill in the names as you see fit, but I warn you that there is some very serious competition. After all, consider the immense number of idiots who parade across the red carpet.
Having skipped the annual disgrace once more, I offer a different Oscar for your consideration. He was a real Oscar, a real person, and a real American hero.
His name was Oscar Koch and he was a brilliant American soldier. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin into a German-Jewish family on January 10th, 1897. He needed his widowed mother’s permission to join the National Guard in 1915 because he was only eighteen years old. Kids grew up fast back then.........
Having fought in France in World War I, Oscar Koch’s soldier story became very interesting when he was assigned to U.S. Army Cavalry School. It was there that he met George Patton. And it was there that they began a relationship that saved the lives of countless young American soldiers and which burnished Patton’s reputation as a foremost fighting general. For you see, Oscar Koch was George Patton’s chief intelligence officer for the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, and France.
The German people, in Churchill’s own words, are a gifted, resourceful, innovative, and scientific people. They also have demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for war, having twice fought--virtually all alone--the rest of the world to within an inch of victory. German soldiers and the German Army were widely seen as the best soldiers and the best army in the world.
Yet in the cold and snowy winter of 1944-1945 the Germans were considered a totally demoralized enemy, utterly incapable of stopping the Allied forces marching forward in Europe. Enter Oscar Koch who made a brilliant career in studying and knowing the enemy. Oscar discerned a clever German trap--the disguised assembly of German forces preparing a deadly counterstroke, now known as the Battle of the Bulge. Koch’s intelligence analysis and warnings were dismissed by Eisenhower and his generals. They were dismissed by British military brass as well. Happily, they were not dismissed by Patton whose previous reliance on Oscar Koch’s genius had paid handsome rewards.
Thus, Patton was prepared with contingency plans, so that when the Germans struck with ferocious and deadly force, he was able to turn his entire Third Army ninety degrees North, deemed a “logistical impossibility” by military experts, and save countless American forces from annihilation. Patton himself, never modest, and possessing a boisterous and swaggering personality, gave enormous credit to the quiet and unassuming Oscar Koch.
Here was an Oscar worthy of the name---Oscar Koch, a man’s man, a cool quiet red-blooded American soldier who served his country and his comrades with honor and insight, shortening a savage and deadly war. Many young American boys made it back home in one piece because of Oscar Koch.
Yet somehow we just know that Hollywood has no room for our Oscar, a soldier and a true hero of the civilized world.
For shame.
Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio
