D-DAY

by William H. Benson

June 3, 2004

     It was 60 years ago this Sunday—on June 6, 1944—that D-Day for Operation Overlord began.  From 600 warships and 4000 smaller vessels poured 176,000 troops onto the beaches at Normandy called Utah and Omaha.  Like a bell gonging, that day sent a loud message all the way to Berlin to Hitler and his gang of imbeciles and thugs that the hours and minutes and seconds were ticking away and that soon his vision of reconstructing Germany in tune with the Nazi party platform would end, forever.

     From a distance of sixty years, there seems now to be a return to the idea of military romanticism, that war is a good thing because it brings out certain virtues among the soldiers—the ability to focus on the job, learning to trust your fellow soldiers, and accomplishing together worthwhile goals.  The reality of what happened after D-Day was different, messier.

     In a new book, The Boys Crusade, Paul Fussell describes what it was really like to be in the U.S. Army from June of 1944 until May of 1945 when the war in Europe ended.  These infantrymen endured “bad planning, inadequate training, poor weapons, uninspiring superiors, desertions, self-inflicted wounds, and ever-present fear.”

     Many of these boy soldiers, still in their late teens, suffered from culture shock because they knew little about France, other than the wine and the women.  And then they were not told why they were fighting.  To them it was just another European war that chewed up young men.  One soldier said, “A thousand years of unending quarrels behind them, and they are still fighting.”

     Much went wrong.  On July 25, 1944 Allied troops were pinned down at Normandy, and then American bombers bombed and killed 111 American G.I.’s, wounding almost 500 more, by mistake.  Then, 40,000 of the 100,000 German soldiers at Normandy somehow escaped deeper into Europe through the Falaise Pocket in northern Normandy, even though the accompanying battle was especially vicious.

     General Eisenhower surveyed the damage afterwards at that Pocket and said, “It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but the dead.”  Many were German soldiers, but many were American boys.

     Even worse was the November of 1944 Battle of Hurtgen Forest where 120,000 American soldiers fought, and 33,000 were killed or wounded or went mad.  Fussell described the “unmanly” battle scene: “unordered flight and even rout; flagrant disobedience; bursting into tears; faking illness; and self-inflicted wounds.”

     Then, the dreadful winter of 1944-1945 meant one thing for 45,000 American soldiers—trench foot.  If they recovered from that, they then faced Germany’s counteroffensive—the Battle of the Bulge—which claimed an additional 19,000 American lives.

     But to be most pitied were the troop replacements—bright, young, college students who were dumped onto the front lines into battle-hardened platoons.  “In their infantry companies, they were buddy-less and shunned as almost dangerous strangers.  These embittered replacements were a pitiable group, lonely, despised and untrained, deeply shocked by the unexpected brutalities of the front line and often virtually useless.”  Frightened, friendless, and unprepared, they were often killed in their first battle.

     From the ground, the war looked hopeless, pointless, never-ending, a comedy of errors, without any justifiable reasons for fighting.  And then those boy soldiers from points all across America walked into the Nazi slave camps and stared at the scrawny people and the ovens, and suddenly they knew the significance of their mission.  They were on the side of right, of justice and morality.  An American major said, “Now I know why I am here.”

     D-Day is now synonymous with righting wrongs, with a change in the tide of affairs, and with a correcting swing of the pendulum.  But to get from D-Day to Hitler’s suicide meant a year of death, carnage, overpowering fear, and human sacrifice for thousands of American boys.

AUGUSTINE ON MEMORY

by William H. Benson

May 20, 2004

     So much of what we know and do depends upon our memories.  We are so accustomed to having at our fingertips the extraordinary power of memory that without it our lives as humans would not be livable as they are.  Augustine, the fourth century Bishop in North Africa, devoted the tenth book of his Confessions to memory, suggesting that to be a human in large part means having the ability to remember.

     He described our memory as a gigantic storehouse with myriads of details filed away.  He wrote,  “All these doth that great harbour of the memory receive in her numberless secret and inexpressible windings, to be forthcoming and brought out at need; each entering in by its own gate, and there laid up. . . .  For these things are not transmitted into the memory, but their images only are with an admirable swiftness caught and stored as it were in wondrous cabinets and thence wonderfully by the act of remembering, brought forth.”

     He suggested that that process of remembering is like a person stepping into that storehouse and trying to find the proper file.  Augustine wrote, “When I enter there, I require what I will to be brought forth, and something instantly comes; others must be longer sought after, which are fetched, as it were, out of some inner receptacle; other rush out in troops, and while one thing is desired and required, they start forth, as who should say, ‘Is it perchance I?’”

     Yes, Augustine argued, we can receive information through our senses, and we can then recollect it, but with memory’s help we can learn and intuit things not immediately presented through our senses.  In other words we can experience things without actually sensing them.

     Augustine said, “Yea, I discern the breath of lilies from violets, though smelling nothing; and I prefer honey to sweet wine, smooth before rugged, at the time neither tasting nor handling, but remembering only.”

     He then pointed out certain paradoxes associated with memory.  We can remember the ugly sensation of feeling pain without actually feeling that pain.  We can remember those things which we had once forgotten, and about that he wonders what it really means to remember that we have forgotten something, calling it a paradox.  Then, we can lose objects and then suddenly find them and remember that we once had them.

     Most human beings are trying to better themselves by searching for happiness, and Augustine, understanding that human want, thought that happiness is something we might already have, lying within our memories.  We could not search for happiness unless, to some degree, we know what it is, and by extension it therefore must be a function of memory.  He poses the question: “Does the life of happiness exist, therefore, only in memory?”  And he does not provide a clear answer.

     With the help of memory, people and events can mean more to us than without.  We can feel them deeper and appreciate them better than we did at the outset, at the point they happened or we met them.

     Augustine wonders about memory’s ability to consider itself.  “Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself.  And where should that be, which it containeth not of itself.  Is it without it, and not within?  How then doth it comprehend itself?”  Once again no clear answer.

     Memorial Day—the one day each year dedicated to remembering, a day when we dig deep into that rag bag of collected memories and think about people who we once knew and who once lived.  We remember that that person made us smile.  She made me sad.  He made me angry.  That situation was so funny.  That deal was the worst.  And we drag each thought out, lay it down for a while, examine it, and then put it back into that bag where it will reside until next year.

     “Great is this force of memory, excessive great; a large and boundless chamber!  Who ever sounded the bottom thereof?”

SIGMUND FREUD

by William H. Benson

May 6, 2004

     Born May 6, 1856, Sigmund Freud was the medical doctor of Jewish descent in Vienna, Austria who sought to understand the riddle of how and why the human mind worked as it did.  His ideas are today dismissed by most of the general public as well as many of the psychologists who chime in together and say that Freud’s “psychoanalysis is itself the illness of which it purports to be the cure,” considering it little more than a modern form of ancient shamanism, mere speculation, not even hypothesis, useless as medical science.

     In some regards Freud’s critics may be right, but “throwing him out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us.”  Freud is inescapable in that his terminology—such as repression, narcissism, Freudian slips, and the Oedipal complex—pervade modern ways of thinking.

     If he is now appreciated at all, it is by the literary critics who recognize him for what they say he truly was—a brilliant essayist, a master of exposition, and an unsurpassed persuader who had a very good prose style and whose works are very readable today.  These critics understand that his powerful mythology and his metaphors supersede what little science he created.

     Consider the universe of Freud’s inventions: the unconscious, the libido or the drive, the psychic functions of the id and the ego and the superego, the defense mechanisms of repression and regression and projection, and the consequences of a derailed infantile development.  Together these mental tools gave rise to Freud’s claim to his own science, that of psychoanalysis.      He had a portrait of men and women as insatiable beings who are pushed and pulled by unrespectable and unconscious inner drives and desires, and it was by psychoanalysis that he wished to determine those drives.  His map of the mind placed the unconscious in the central role which then created an inescapable inner and very recognizable human conflict.

     When one thinks of Sigmund Freud, one sees a bald head, a well-trimmed beard, a suit and a tie, a notepad and pen, a cigar, a chair, and above all else a couch.  Few people in humankind’s history had devoted their very life to listening to people’s stories of their memories of their infancy and childhood and of their dreams, all while they reclined on that couch.  Freud would offer some leading question, and then in free association they would talk while he took notes.

     His schedule was tight.  From 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. he would listen to patients, each for 55 minutes with a five minute break between.  Then, after lunch and a walk he would again meet patients beginning at 3:00 p.m. and work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m.  In other words, he would see eleven or twelve people every day, each for an hour, and he would do so six days a week.

     And he held to that schedule for four plus decades, gathering an immense number of human stories from which he then worked out his theories.  Freud’s originality remains so impressive mainly because it rested upon so much serious and determined and dedicated hard work.

     And he did not stop with just psychology, but in a daring venture argued that psychoanalysis is universal and that it should be expanded and applied to every aspect of human culture: to the arts, literature, biography, mythology, religion, politics, education, the law, history, and even prehistory.  Whether one can and should do so is debatable.

     His most original and profound work is The Interpretation of Dreams in which he suggested that “fulfillment of a hidden wish” is the essence of a dream.  He noted that normal human dreams that happen when asleep display a striking resemblance to the hallucinations that the psychotics described to him.  He said that even though dreams often appear to be quite senseless, “dreams contain the psychology of the neuroses in a nutshell.”

     By boring deep into people’s dreams, Freud believed that he was tapping into the unconscious.  Indeed, it was those dreams that provided a secure basis for his theory that humans possess an unconscious.

     In early June of 1938 at the urging of his friends and even though he did not fully believe in the German Nazi threat, Freud and his family fled Vienna for London where he resumed his practice. But then that steady stream of cigars took their toll, and there in London on September 23, 1939 he passed away.

THE MARCH OF FOLLY

by William H. Benson

April 22, 2004

     In her book The March of Folly, the historian Barbara Tuchman, identified four types of misgovernment: tyranny, excessive ambition, incompetence, and folly.  The latter type she defined as the pursuit of a policy contrary to the self-interest of the electorate or the state, a policy that is counter-productive.  She listed as examples of folly the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s, but first and foremost was the British loss of the American colonies.

     The major issue between England and her North American colonies was over Parliament’s right to tax.  King George III and Parliament believed that they had the right to enforce taxation, but the colonists disagreed because each of the thirteen colonies had its own elected assembly, who had the right to tax its citizens.

     Edmund Burke, a perceptive thinker and politician in England, said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically, and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the British Constitution.”  And yet King George sacrificed possession of a vast territorial empire of incalculable wealth for the principle.

     War against the colonies was not unanimously supported by all the British in England.  Some spoke out against the use of armed forces.  William Pitt stood before Parliament and warned of French intervention and the use of German Hessian soldiers in fighting the war.  He said, “My lords, if I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I never would lay down my arms—never, never, never.”

     Instead of pursuing conciliation, King George sent in the British redcoats, and on April 19, 1775 at Lexington and Concord, shots were exchanged and the war for independence had begun.  It would last for seven years—years that severely tested Americans’ dedication to the ideal of independence, but at the same time it tested the resolve of Parliament and the King.

    About George III, Winston Churchill centuries later wrote, “But his mind was Hanoverian, with an infinite capacity for mastering detail, and limited success in dealing with large issues and main principles. . . . His stubbornness lent weight to the stiffening attitude of his Government.  His responsibility for the final breach is a high one. . . .

     “George III grew stubborn and even more intent. . . . Rarely has British strategy fallen into such a multitude of errors.  Every maxim and principle of war was either violated or disregarded.  The British forces were now dispersed and divided over five hundred miles of country.”

     The war ended in October of 1781 with Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown.  Lord North, the British Prime Minister who had the distinction of presiding over the loss of the colonies, heard the news and cried out in anguish, “Oh, my, it is all over!”  And King George, in the agony of defeat and humiliation, talked of abdicating the throne and returning to Hanover.

     The British lost America.  America lost in Vietnam.  And now we have an Iraq freed of Sadaam Hussein’s grip, and suddenly the political and religious factions are now vying for power.

     Folly can also be defined as acting and talking as if we know when we do not know.

     The Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter admitted, “We don’t know the answers to the scary questions (“What if the Sunnis and Shiites team up against us?”) and no one has a good idea of what the government should do. . . . Maybe the Senate could help by holding hearings where the best experts on the region toss in their best ideas. . . . But that would mean admitting that the Know-It-All-ism isn’t working. . . . Uncertainty is the only certainty now—in politics and terror.”

     President George Bush II went into his war convinced of the rightness of certain ideas about Iraq and that the war would vindicate all those ideas. But then, “as events unfolded, the administration proved stubbornly unwilling to look at facts on the ground, at the new evidence, and the need for shifts in its basic approach.  It was more important to prove that it was right than to get Iraq right.”  The march of folly.

ROGER WILLIAMS

by William H. Benson

April 8, 2004

     By the New Style calendar he was born April 5, 1604, four hundred years ago this week.  Scholars since have considered Roger Williams, the Puritan minister in early New England, a champion of freedom and of liberty, a precursor to Jefferson, and a prophet who established a person’s right to worship as she or he pleases.

     Those who listened to his ranting, such as Jonathan Winthrop and John Cotton, would find our estimate of him bewildering because to them Williams was odd.  He took the Bible with a foolish literalness, a pedantic and boorish man without a sense of perspective, a perfectionist who took his dogmas to the nth degree.  They did not see that his ideas were so much subversive as they were a nuisance, with little merit other than their novelty.

     The scholar Edmund Morgan said, “His thinking progressed not by opposing accepted ideas, but by pursuing them through their implications to conclusions that his contemporaries could not or would not accept.”

     Above all else, Roger Williams wanted to purify the Christian church of any taint of worldliness.  Utterly opposed to promiscuous membership, he argued that only the truly regenerated, those who had experienced all the stages of salvation, should be permitted to attend a worship service.  If the unregenerated were in attendance, it would blemish the act of worship.

     Furthermore, he expected all church members to repent of ever having associated with the Church of England, and if they refused to do so, he felt their worship services were marred.

     His restrictive membership requirements left him alone with only his wife Mary with whom he could worship and pray, and then the day came when he refused to say grace at mealtime with her because she had been friendly with some whom Roger felt had compromised their beliefs.

     Finally, he arrived at the conclusion that the true Christian church did not exist, that it had ceased to exist after the reign of Constantine in the fourth century.  Because of this, he concluded that there were then no true preachers and had not been since the time of the apostles.  Today’s clergymen, he argued, were nothing more than self-appointed saints without any authority to preach and teach because the chain from the apostles to them had been broken.

     In addition, he violently disagreed with the civil authorities’ interference in any religious matters; and so he opposed a law that would require the unsaved to swear an oath of loyalty in God’s name to the civil powers.  To Williams, each part and act of worship was sacred.

     He pointed to the flagpole and cried out that it was wrong to have St. George’s cross on the British flag because the government was using religion to justify itself.  One man in colonial New England, John Endecott, acted on Williams’s argument, pulled down the flag, and cut out the cross—an act that the governor, Jonathan Winthrop, thought may be construed as treasonous.  He knew that Roger Williams and his crazed ideas had to go.

     Winthrop had him arrested, put on trial, and found guilty of sowing dissent.  His punishment was banishment, but before the sheriff could apprehend him, he fled into the wilderness about Narragansett Bay, to what would become Rhode Island, arriving there in early April of 1636.

     He welcomed anybody and any theology.  In 1638 a group of Anabaptists arrived, and they convinced him that he needed to be rebaptized as an adult.  He agreed and was baptized, something that so utterly astonished Winthrop that he wrote Roger a letter, and asked him, “From what spirit and to what end do you drive?” 

     But then after four months as a Baptist, Roger found fault with them and drifted away.  Some scholars today consider him the father of the Baptist faith in America, but few if any Baptist today would claim him as such, so liberal and radical was he. 

     But by pursuing his ideas to their final end, he had worked his way to the principle of separating the church from the state—a monumental intellectual achievement, but it was not for the same reason that James Madison had in mind when he wrote the First Amendment.  It was that Roger Williams was so determined to purify the Christian church that he ended up alone, solitary, in a sect with just one person, himself, but then later generations looked back and gave him a halo, calling him the American pioneer of religious freedom.