THOMAS PAINE

by William H. Benson

July 3, 2003

     Thomas Paine has never received a place equal among the other Revolutionary leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, even though Paine’s assistance may have made the difference in the War for Independence.

     But Paine had some serious detractions.  He was filthy.  He bathed infrequently and as a result smelled badly.  Most days food stains covered his shirts.  His clothes were cheap-looking and out of style.  He drank heavily all of his adult life.

     Besides being physically repulsive, he was usually penniless and often failed to pay his bills.  He refused to accept any royalties for his written works, such as Common Sense and The American Crisis, but then after the war he begged Congress for a house and land, which Congress grudgingly gave him.  But all of his adult life he moved from one room to another, dependent upon the generosity of others, who ended up often evicting him, causing a big fight.  Visitors found his room always dirty.

     He married twice when still a young man in England.  He buried his first wife just months after their wedding, and his second wife he abandoned when he came to America.  He never pursued a divorce from her and never remarried, preferring young French harlots.

     The British despised him during the Revolutionary War, and then later convicted him of treason when he tried to foment a Revolution against the King in Britain.  He encouraged the French Revolution which threw out their King, but then the Reign of Terror swept him up and tossed him into prison, where he narrowly missed facing the guillotine.

     Once released from prison he finished his The Age of Reason, a diatribe against Christian beliefs, pointed and blunt.  Whatever fame he had enjoyed as a writer during the war he lost due to this work which detailed his deistic beliefs.  A hundred years later Theodore Roosevelt referred to Thomas Paine as “that dirty little atheist,” which he was not, but is still misunderstood today.

     Still in France Paine wrote a vicious letter to President George Washington, accusing him of trying to become a King in America as well as deliberately keeping Paine locked in a French prison, both untrue accusations.  Paine went so far as to have the letter printed in a Philadelphia newspaper.  Washington wisely shrunk back in a reserved and dignified silence, preferring not to get into a public fight with a former friend.

     In casual conversations, usually at a tavern, he came across as a know-it-all, who would not listen to others opinions.  People soon learned to steer around Thomas Paine.

     On a more positive note, Thomas believed in revolution, because as he saw it, the status quo was always wrong.  As for government, he believed that people should rule themselves because the idea of a monarchy was an injustice.  Also, he hated the slave trade in the colonies, and pushed a law through Pennsylvania’s Assembly outlawing it there.  He favored a social welfare system with care for the poor and the elderly, but above all he believed in independence for the thirteen colonies.  “There is something absurd,” Paine wrote, “in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

     Paine’s personal habits, his behavior, his attitude, and his bearing all combined to prevent him from ever achieving anything more than that of a controversial and indeed influential writer who stirred up his readers with novel ideas.  One reads his biographies and is struck less by the genius of his thoughts and words than by the missed opportunities.  He could have remained in America after the war and helped with the new government, serving as President, or Vice-President, or as a Secretary in the Cabinet.  Instead he chose to live fifteen years in France where he did not ever learn to speak French.

     Is Thomas Paine a Founding Father?  Perhaps yes.  Perhaps no.  One could say that in 1776 it took all kinds of characters to stand up to the British.  It took the likes of an oddball like Thomas Paine who wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country.”

STONEHENGE

by William H. Benson

June 19, 2003

     The ancient British built Stonehenge almost 4000 years ago, beginning around 1850 B.C. and completing it in 4 phases over some 300 years.  Originally, 30 blocks of gray sandstone, each about 13 1/2 feet, stood above the ground in a circle 97 feet in diameter.  The later builders then created a rectangle within the circle, with arched circles, and horseshoe-shapes, all of massive stones standing upright.  It still is quite an impressive accomplishment for those early people.

     Yet the oldest orientation of all, the axis alignment to summer solstice sunrise, was never lost; rather it was maintained, duplicated, and emphasized.  On a certain day each year for centuries a 6-foot man standing in the center of the monument-temple could watch as the sun first broke the horizon and touched the heel-stone and then soon climbed up and stood for a moment atop that heel-stone.

     For ancient man this was an annual moment of admiration and awe, but also a point to begin marking the days until he should plant crops.

     In 1963 the astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins with the help of a computer determined that the stones when paired formed 16 alignments on 10 of the 12 unique sun or moon points when rising or setting.  Later builders then duplicated 8 of those earlier, two-position alignments in arch-wayed vistas.  Hawkins concluded that in essence Stonehenge was a calendar, a first attempt to map time.  Still, man needed a machine to measure his days; he needed a clock.

     The Earth’s year is composed of 365 1/4 days, with four recurring seasons, and a 28-day lunar cycle–nature’s methods of dividing time.  But it was human beings, our forefathers, who then created the 12-month calendar, the 30- or 31-day month, the 7-day week, the 24-hour day, the 60-minute hour, and the 60-second minute, and a leap year with an extra day.

     Each of those so-called “inventions” was a way of harnessing time, of fixing events and people to agreed-upon points in the past, say to July 4, 1776, or to setting goals or appointments or dreams in the future.

     But why is it a 7-day week?  The ancient Romans started with an 8-day week; they worked 7 days in the field and then went to market the 8th.  But then they switched to a 7-day week, and we of the modern Western world have inherited their arbitrary 7-day week, which simply became a way of clustering the continuing procession of days into measurable portions.

     And then why is it a 24-hour day?  Searching the records of the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, historians have surmised that an ancient man or woman must have thought it a convenient way of dividing each day’s time into segments that they could number, the same for each day.

     For without those inventions, early man suffered the tyranny of the cycle.  The historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “[Early man] tended to see the passage of time, not as a series of unique, irreversible moments of change, but rather as a recurrence of familiar moments. . . . And, in that age of cyclical time, before the discovery of history, the repetition of the familiar provided the framework for all the most significant and dramatic occasions in human experience.”

     Today modern man has a different conception of time.  He divides it into the past, the present, and the future.  He recognizes the past for what it is–a record of the follies and tragedies and triumphs and achievements of human beings.  The present is today, and the future is open, not just  for the new, but for the possibility of the new.  Life is not trapped in a perpetural recyle of what has gone before.     

     We who live in the Northern Hemisphere will experience a summer solstice on Saturday, June 21, 2003, a day that we can label and number and distinguish among all other days before and after.  And certainly men and women at Stonehenge will watch in astonishment as the sun crests that heel-stone.  We differ from those ancient British in that we have a calendar and a watch and a clock and a history.

THE SIX DAY WAR

by William H. Benson

June 5, 2003

     It began at 7:10 a.m., Monday morning, June 5, 1967 when the first of the Israeli fighter jets lifted off and headed toward Egypt, and by 7:30 a.m. some 200 aircraft were aloft.  Their only goal was to destroy Gamal Nasser’s Egyptian military power.

     It ended on Saturday, June 10th, one hundred and thirty two hours later, or six days; hence, the name the Six Day War.  Because that name conjures up an image of a lightning conquest, the Arabs ever since have refused to call it that, referring to it instead as the June War or the Setback.

     I recently picked up Michael B. Oren’s new book, Six Days of War–June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, in which he listed a series of aftershocks of those six days.

     The Egyptians lost between 10,000 and 15,000 soldiers, including 1500 officers and forty pilots.  Jordan lost 700 soldiers, with another 6000 wounded or missing.  Syria counted 450 dead.  And yet, Israel reported losing 679 soldiers, but actually it may have been closer to 800.

     All but a small percentage of Egypt’s military hardware, some $2 billion worth, was destroyed; all of Egypt’s bombers and 85% percent of Nasser’s combat aircraft were eliminated.

     Somewhere between 175,000 and 250,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank of Jordan during the war and ended in the desperate refugee camps where they suffered horrible conditions.  Israel did little to cause that unfortunate human flood, but then Israel did little to stop it nor to encourage the refugees to return to Israel after the fighting had ended.

     The angry, shocked, and deeply hurt Arabs lashed out at the Jews living elsewhere in Arab countries; mobs burnt down Jewish synagogues and assaulted Jewish residents.  And yet, some 1.2 million Palestinians who now were living under Israeli rule were spared much persecution

     During those six days the Israeli military had conquered 42,000 square miles of new territory, and had increased the size of Israel by three and a half times.  Jerusalem was then reunited into a single city, and the Jewish state, once vulnerable to attack, was afterwords within striking distance of the major Arab cities of Damascus, Cairo, and Amman.

     Israel’s military had earned the solid respect of the United States, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Israel.  Harry McPherson, an LBJ White House Counsel, reported, “The spirit of the army, indeed of all the people, has to be experienced to be believed. . . . It was deeply moving to see people whose commitment is total and unquestioning.”  

     Moshe Dayan, with his black eyepatch, and Yitzhak Rabin were elevated to icon-status.

     But not all the Israelis were pleased about the win.  One Israeli soldier named Shai said, “We weren’t especially excited or happy about killing Arabs or knowing that we’d won.  We just felt that we’d done what we had to do.  But there’s a big difference between that and feeling happy.” 

     The Arab intellectuals came away from those six days with an intense disillusionment with Arab nationalism.  Some stressed the need for modernization and democracy.  Others suggested a militant radicalism like in Vietnam and Cuba.  Still others called for a return to the fundamentals of Islam.  Michael Oren wrote, “Painful examinations would be made of Arab society, its inherent propensities and weaknesses, and of the Arab personality and psyche.”

     The Arab politicians refused to accept responsibility for the defeat.  Nasser blamed his insubordinate Egyptian officers for the loss and put them on trial.  Jordan’s King Hussein talked fatalistic, “If you were not rewarded with glory it was not because you lacked courage, but because it is Allah’s will.”   After Nasser’s death in 1970 the Egyptian Salah al-Hadidi, wrote that, “I can state that Egypt’s political leadership called Israel to war.  It clearly provoked Israel and forced it into a confrontation.”

     Michael Oren concluded his book with the comment that in a larger sense the Six Days War has never ended, even after thirty-six years, for basic truths still persist–Israel is still incapable of imposing a lasting peace, the Arabs can still wage a military campaign, suicide bombers can rip apart a peaceful morning, and Israel’s right to exist still hangs in suspension as does the Palestinians’ right to repatriation and statehood.  Today it is sadly true that the Middle East is once more in the grip of turmoil. 

FIRST, BEST, AND GREATEST

by William H. Benson

May 22, 2003

     On May 21, 1927 Charles Lindbergh landed his aircraft, The Spirit of St. Louis, near Paris, France, where crowds mobbed his arrival, for his was the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean.  The thinkers of that day understood that travel by air across oceans was now a real possiblity, and Lindbergh’s historic flight hinted at greater things, an opening up of potential.

     Fifty years ago on May 29, 1953 at 11:30 a.m. Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper, along with Tenzing Norgay, stepped on to the summit of Mount Everest.  Queen Elizabeth later knighted him Sir Edmund Hillary, for he was the first to stand on the top of the tallest mountain.

     Elvis Presley’s promoter proclaimed him the King of Rock and Roll, and so he was, the first and the only King of entertainment..  Muhammed Ali shouted to the world, “I am the greatest!”, and so he thought he was.  Commentators now rank Tiger Woods as the greatest all-time golf champion, and he probably is.  Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever, has now retired once again.

     Being the first, the best, or the greatest is of utmost importance in our culture which prizes the champion, the winner, the news-maker, and then disregards the loser, the failure, the also-ran, or the second-rate.  And we know that the sequel is never quite as good as the original.  So say the critics of Matrix Reloaded.

     The person who first achieves some remarkable feat is now held up as an example of greatness because being first means assuming risks and conquering them.  The competition is fierce.  But Lindbergh could just as easily have plunged into the ocean, and Hillary could have fallen off the mountain.  But they both lived thereafter under the public glare of fame and adulation.

     A mind-boggling mountain of minutia called statistics ranks performers, sports personalities, and politicians, sorting people into world-record holders for a dizzying array of endless athletic and political and social and cultural contests.  And the point of all that compilation is that if your name is listed there, you are great, and if your name is not there, you are less than great.

     About statistics Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman turned philosopher, said, “Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainity about the future.  Even when the forecasts are proven wrong, we still go on asking for them.  We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken.”

     Numbers applied inappropriately often can be converted into lies. Statistics can point out a trend that suddenly reverses itself.  And the forecasters can be just as easily mistaken because the public has a habit of making up its own mind about what is great and what is fifth-rate.  And individuals can decide for themselves about themselves and formulate their own definition of personal greatness.  This we label self-esteem.

     A better definition of personal greatness revolves around the twin concepts of potential and influence:  how much personal potential does an individual actually achieve, and how positive an influence does that person direct upon other people?  By that definition personal greatness means knowing who you are, living out your key purpose in life, and influencing as many people as you can for good by activity and giving.

     It is now the season for high school and college graduations.  Class rank, GPA, grades, and the list of accomplishments are now in the record books, for what was attempted the past four years has now been sorted into varying degrees of achievement.  And the great thing about graduation is that it is a levelling experience; each graduate, no matter his class rank or how many basketball points he or she scored last season, wears a cap and a gown and sports a tassel.  All are equal.  For an hour or two each graduate is the first, the best, and the greatest.

     Charles Lindbergh once wrote, “Life is like a landscape.  You live in the midst of it, but you can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.”  To experience graduation is to step up higher, on to a distant point that allows a better view of what can be achieved.

“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE?”

by William H. Benson

May 8, 2003

     Recently I read the new bestseller, What Should I Do With My Life?, by the young author Po Bronson.  He let the word out that he wanted to meet people who had redirected their lives; he wanted to listen to their stories.  He criss-crossed the nation, heard some nine hundred stories, came to know some seventy people closely, and included about fifty stories in his book, including his own story of how he decided to become a writer.

     There was the story of Kurt, the great-great-grandson of a founder of a major American manufacturing company, who, following his divorce, gave up being groomed for the top position in the company and decided to pursue his dream of becoming, of all things, a policeman.

     In so doing he admitted that he had violated the Monkey Law, something he had learned at Harvard Business School.  The monkey swinging through the jungle must never let go of an old vine until he has a firm grip on the new one.  It took him two years of struggle and of working as a volunteer without pay before he landed a job as a policeman on the night shift in El Monte, California, east of East Los Angeles.  Kurt had discovered that he needed to serve people directly.

     There was the story of Katt who had to give up her dream of competing in the 1988 Seoul Olympics in the shotput and discus when she discovered she was pregnant.  Years later she returned to college and to track and was pushing herself toward the 2004 Olympic trials when her daughter began to complain that she needed help with her homework.  A second time Katt gave up the dream of going to the Olympics.

     There was Rick, a corporate lawyer, who was playing ice hockey and ended up breaking his ankle in eleven places, as well as his leg, and sheering off his heel.  And yet he laughed because he was finally free to quit his job, for now he had an excuse.  When healed he found a job as a long haul truck driver and loves it.

     He said, “I have autonomy.  I have a window seat, with a view that changes every mile.  Nobody ever comes into my office without asking.  I enjoy this job. . . . I’m doing this because it doesn’t eat me alive.”

     There was the story of Sidney, a chemistry professor at a college in England who late in life decided that what he really wanted to do was return to law school.  He detested his work in the college, a life he considered not fit for a human being.  “I hit the point where I knew I ought to do something while my faculties were still reasonably intact, and not waste the rest of my life.” 

     He went to law school and found a position as a solicitor.  “He loves the law.  He has a mind that loves puzzles, and cases are puzzles–timelines, cross-references, stories with motives.”

     There was the story of an arbitrage executive who decided to become a psychiatrist, the story of a ferocious criminal attorney who chose to become a minister in the Unity Church, the Asian-American who chose to become a high school teacher rather than pursue his father’s dream of becoming a doctor or lawyer or businessman, and the doctor’s daughter who became a doctor herself and then discovered that she could not put in the long hours any longer.

     And then there is the story of Po Bronson himself, and how he tried numerous career paths before plunging ahead and writing his first book.

     Why did these people change directions?  Po decided that it required more than just a vague sense of dissatisfaction.  Something personal had to surface: children’s needs, the need for intellectual stimulation, the need to be away from people, the need to be around people, the need to help people.  He decided that often people will catch only a glimmer of what they truly want to do, and then they either act or they don’t.

     Po ends his book.  “I used to think life presented a five-page menu of choices.  Now I think the choice is in whether to be honest, to ourselves and others, and the rest is more of an uncovering, a peeling away of layers, discovering talents we assumed we didn’t have.”