Story of uncle Joe's non-veg uncle Bosie

Everybody loves their uncles. They’re the X sauce in the family mix, raconteuring away and making comments so non-PC that you have to pinch yourself to see if you’re woke. Earlier this week, Uncle Joe – Biden when he’s playing Oval House – said his uncle, Ambrose J Finnegan Jr a.k.a. Uncle Bosie, ‘got shot down in [Papua] New Guinea’ during World War 2. Chacha Biden went on about how his body was never found because ‘there used to be a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea’. Just for the record, the White House is not vegan.

Pentagon‘s records of Uncle Bosie have a bone to pick with Joe’s version. Officially, he was one of three men lost when the plane they were in crashed off the PNG coast. Explaining that some communities did practise cannibalism in the past in specific contexts, PNG authorities said, ‘They wouldn’t just eat any White men who fell from the sky.’ Whether Joe-ing around or not, this could be King Biden in his Prince Philip mode. In 1988, during a visit to the Oceanic country, Philip a.k.a. Mr Queen Elizabeth had asked a Brit student trekking in PNG, ‘You managed not to get eaten, then?’ Yes, it was a quip, but a classic Philip one suggesting there were still people-eating people in the region. So, was the nephew, with his history of occasionally lapsing into ‘unreason’, having his Hannibal Lecter moment?