PALESTINIAN VS. ISRAELI

by William H. Benson

October 26, 2000

     James Michener in his 1955 article on Islam pointed out a crucial point about this religion that most Americans do not realize.  Michener wrote, “Islam differs from most other religions in one respect.  It is not only a religion, but it is also a body of law called the Shariat, which is binding upon Muslims and is indeed a part of their faith.  This melting together of law and religion makes a Muslim’s religion more important to him that it would be in a western community.”

     In other words, the western world distinguishes between law and religion.  An American pigeon-holes secular life and the law into one compartment and religion into another, and he or she instinctively knows that the law takes precedence over the religion.  Only the extremest of the extreme forms of religion in America would encourage a member to break the law to obey the dictates of the religion.

     Not all Muslims are Fundamentalists, but those who are Fundamentalists subscribe to the idea that their religion is superior to that of the west and it is their duty to do everything possible, even go to war and terrorize, to convert all people in the Middle East to Islam or annihilate them.

     The columnist Cal Thomas wrote, “Islamic radicals perceive the West, and particularly the United States, as militarily strong but morally weak.  They correctly diagnose the shallowness of our lives and our preoccupation with material things.  And they believe they have a divine mandate to destroy the West with its pretenses and secularized ways.” 

     Ever since the creation of Israel in May of 1949, the grand design and the policy of the neighboring nations and peoples has always been to push Israel out of existence.  They believe the world would be a better place if Israel were to disappear.  To them Israel is a slice of the western world placed smack dab onto one of Islam’s most holy of places–Jerusalem.  This for a Moslem is an absolutely unacceptable situation.

     In June of 1967 during the Six Day War the neighboring nations attacked Israel, but instead of being pushed into the sea, Israel captured the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Negev, and the Gaza Strip.  Then, in October of 1973 the Yom Kippur War broke out, and a dozen years ago the Palestinians took to throwing rocks at the armed Israeli soldiers in an uprising called the Intifada.

     During the last eight years Israel has struggled to see things from the Palestinian perspective and has even yielded to the sympathetic notion that peace would happen if the Palestinians were given land, a flag, a government, and a country of their own.  At the Camp David Summit weeks ago, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to withdraw from Lebanon, give up 90% of captured lands, and grant some sovereignty over East Jerusalem.  Arafat refused.

     According to the columnist Mona Charen, “After Camp David, Yassir Arafat shut down the schools, instructed Palestinian TV to show nothing but pictures of the Intifada and stoked the fires of hatred.”  Barak said that Arafat also released from prison the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists and refused to stop Palestinian police from shooting at Israelis.  Over a hundred people have died, most of them Palestinians, since Arafat chose this course.

     This issue is so muddled.  All we know and believe to be true is what we read and are told, for there are always two sides to every conflict.  However, it is obvious that the the Palestinians and the neighboring nations still hold fast to the dream of pushing Israel off the map.  Despite repeated promises, the PLO has never amended its covenant calling for the destruction of Israel.   Instead, they have escalated their dream with a terrorist attack against a U.S. Naval vessel killing 17 innocent American sailors in Yemen.  Cal Thomas wrote, “The U.S. had better declare war on radical Islam.”

     Yet,  the Israelis are determined to preserve themselves and their country.  Mona Charen wrote, “And so Israel is forced to reckon with the unpleasant truth:  There will be no peace; at best, armed truce.  It’s a terrible reality, but pretending your enemies want peace when they quite plainly do not is foolish beyond measure.”  Last week Ehud Barak told Newsweek that he would prefer a peaceful settlement.  However, if that fails, he said,  “Then, we know what to do.”

CARL SAGAN AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 12, 2000

     Carl Sagan was a bona fide scientist, but to fill in his gaps of what science could offer humanity in the future, he could also write fiction.  Recently, I read his book Contact, a tale of a superior civilization from another planet that sends a radio signal, a Message, to Earth, complete with instructions on how to build a Machine capable of intergalactic travel, which its builders call a dodecahedron. 

     In the movie version of the book, Jodie Foster played the part of Ellie, one of the space travelers who steps into the Machine and flips the switch.  Inside the dodecahedron she and the others stare at the stars rushing up at them, and then they slip into a series of black holes and tunnels that transport them to a new sun and a new planet and then back.

     The people on Earth are astonished at Ellie’s and the others’ stories of what they experienced, for actually on Earth the space travelers were only in the Machine for about twenty minutes, and it never left the Earth.  In fact, the authorities are convinced it was all a gigantic hoax and a shared delusion.  As a science fiction writer, Carl Sagan is a bit of a letdown, for when Ellie and her fellow space travelers met the alien civilization nothing terribly dramatic really happened. 

     Turning from science fiction, January’s edition of National Geographic discussed the possibility of life on other planets and the work of exobiologists.  Forty years ago the astronomer Frank Drake wrote an equation that gauged the potential number of planets with technologically advanced life, and he arrived at about 10,000 in our galaxy alone.  But, “the power of our search system is a hundred trillion times what it was forty years ago,” he said.

     In 1950 Enrico Fermi asked a question:  “Where is everybody?  Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same.  So why haven’t they come to Earth?”  This is known as the Fermi paradox.

     Someday perhaps in the future a contact may be made.  Then again, maybe it will never happen.  National Geographic asked,  “Or could it be possible that, at least in our part of the galaxy, the most technologically advanced species is the one right here on Earth?”

     Turning from futuristic thought to the past, October 12, 1492 was the day that Columbus’s men sighted land, an island in the Caribbean.  For the native North Americans who stared in amazement at Columbus wading ashore, this was their own science fiction moment–come to life.  They were astonished at Columbus’s ships capable of crossing oceans, at men with beards, and their weapons.  It was as if these European explorers were from another planet.

     However, should those first native North Americans been perceptive enough to see very far into the future, they would have been terrified, for the immediate future for those natives meant enslavement, a total disruption of their lives, and death by both violent means and also biological means–through disease.  Technologically advanced in a way different than the natives and filled with an all-consuming need for power and glory, Columbus quickly overwhelmed the simple natives on that island.  The natives’ warm welcome turned to wariness that then yielded to terror.

     Mark Twain said, “The past does not always exactly repeat itself, but occasionally it does rhyme.”  If there is a truism, it is that when two cultures meet, the lesser advanced invariably succumbs to the greater advanced to a degree that wholly depends upon the depth of pity and compassion of the greater.

     How will the distant future play out?  Like the Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian stories?  Or like the intricate plots from the master story-tellers, such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein?  Or will it play out like a low-budget Hollywood science fiction movie with gigantic ants equipped with weapons?  Or will it revolve around a rather benign meeting between Earthling and alien that is dismissed as a hoax, such as Carl Sagan’s story?  Should a “contact” ever happen, I suspect that Columbus’s experience may hit closer to the way it would actually work out.

SURVIVOR

by William H. Benson

September 28, 2000

     Marooned on a deserted tropical island seems to be a favorite theme for writers and other story creators.  These stories promise adventure but do not always deliver.

     The first survivor story I read was The Black Stallion by Walter Farley.  Eleven-year-old Alec Ramsey finds himself on an Atlantic island with a wild black Arabian horse.  They work together, survive, and eventually Alec learns to ride the Black.  After two weeks they are rescued, and Alec takes the Black to his home in New York and rides him in the races.  It is a good juvenile story and was made into a movie in 1980 starring Mickey Rooney, as the horse trainer.

     The grandfather of all survivor stories though is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, written two plus centuries ago.  It has all the ingredients of an adventure story.  A shipwrecked young sailor is tossed onto the shores of a desert island in the Caribbean, and there he lives for more than 27 years until he is in his fifties.  He marks the years one by one, celebrating on September 30th, the anniversary of his arrival on, what he calls, the Isle of Despair.

     After many years, a native from another neighboring island joins him on his deserted island, and Robinson names him Friday.  The two are eventually rescued, and Robinson travels back to his home in England and marries and has children.  It is a great classic, well-worth reading again.

     Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe was loosely based upon a real life story–that of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor in the South Seas who quarrelled with the ship’s captain about the seaworthiness of the ship.  The captain promptly dumped Alexander off, at his own request, on one of the Juan Fernandez islands, 400 miles west of Chile.  He lived there alone for 52 months until another captain rescued him.

     Then, in the 1960’s there was Gilligan’s Island on television.  The captain and his first mate, Gilligan, aboard their boat, the Minnow, take a cruise with a professor, a movie star named Ginger, a millionaire and his wife, and Mary Ann.  A storm blows up, and they end up on a deserted tropical island.  The weekly thirty-minute shows were typical sit-com humor, but none of the cast seemed overly concerned about getting off the island.  In fact, they all got along.  Looking back at those shows, the adventure seemed lacking.

     Recently, I read that Tom Hanks has completed a new movie that will open in December.  In it he plays Chuck Noland who flys a plane that crashes in the Pacific leaving him stranded alone for four years on a tropical island.  Tom Hanks lost fifty pounds to play the role.

     Weeks ago some 40 million Americans tuned in to watch who would be the final survivor on Cutthroat Island.  One by one the participants were voted off the island until only Richard Hatch remained, and for this daring feat, he won $1 million.  Unfortunately, I was one among a select group of Americans who did not glue myself to the television to watch an episode from beginning to end.  Staring at scantily clothed Americans parade around in water on a tropical island did not catch my attention, for where was the Robinson Crusoe-like adventure?

     Despite the show’s popularity some dared to speak out against it, calling it “the basest form of human voyeurism” and evidence of “the inanity and emptiness of American television.”  One guy commented in Newsweek that “it was just a dumb game with a ludicrous prize that fundamentally was about strangers exhibiting bad manners and bad behavior toward each other.”

     A lady said, “Does anyone else have a bad taste in her mouth after watching the much-heralded Survivor finale? . . . watching the prize awarded to that smirking, arrogant Machiavellian antihero by the very people he despised and manipulated was a bitter pill.  Survivor II?  Think I’ll pass.”

     Fred Friendly, a former television executive, years ago commented on the quality of American entertainment.  “The television and movie industry makes so much money at their very worst; why would they ever want to be their very best?”

     For Alec Ramsey, Robinson Crusoe, and Alexander Selkirk, survival was about finding food, water, shelter, and a way back to civilization, but for Richard, Rudy, Kelly, and Susan, it was about shrewdness and duplicity and winning at a hokey version of office politics played out in knee-deep water on their own Isle of Despair.  And where was the adventure in that?

LABOR

by William H. Benson

August 31, 2000

     A hundred years ago management and labor fought a bitter war.  The workers struggled for a measure of collective power to ease their individual burdens.  They wanted safer and better working conditions, a shorter working day, the right to strike, and the right to create unions which could then collectively bargain for the individual members.

     On the other hand the robber barons–Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and the other owners of industrial America, feared a loss of their power.  Motivated by a prejudicial fear, management feared the foreigners who had just recently immigrated into the United States and had assumed the industrial jobs available.  After the Haymarket Square riot in Chicago in 1893, management was convinced that anarchists and communists had infiltrated the labor movement.

     This internal war unleashed extreme emotions and deep suspicions on both sides;  a flood of wild charges and counter charges erupted.  And it was a brutal war.  Strikes quickly deteriorated into aggressive battles.  Many strikers were killed, and many others were wounded.  The casualties were far in excess of those experienced in England or France or Germany.

     A hundred years removed from the labor strife, we can safely conclude that labor won that war.  Management eventually and over time relented and yielded to the workers.  Labor achieved most of their goals.  When the dust settled, people realized that management’s fears proved to be largely unfounded.  Civilization did not end.  The United States did not revert to anarchy nor communism.  Nothing disastrous happened.  In fact, productivity actually multiplied.  The war ended with scarcely a whimper. 

     Today management faces other problems, such as finding quality workers–those educated and trainable with good attitudes towards work.  For jobs are one of the measures of the success of any society.  When there is not enough work for everybody who wants to work, there are problems; and there are also problems when there is work enough but not reward enough.

     On the other hand, the workers, especially those with ambition, are constantly and justifiably pursuing better and better jobs, for work is not the curse, but drudgery is.

     I know it is a rhetorical question, but consider this.  Throughout the history of humanity, how many millions of men and women have been completely ill-suited for the jobs that they were forced into doing.  Surely among the workers of those Egyptian pyramids five millennium ago, there were men or women who would have preferred intellectual or office work, but unfortunately they never were given the chance.

     And how many since have groaned under boring and mentally-dulling physical work throughout their entire lifetimes when they would have thrived if thrown even a handful of mental challenges?  Or, for that matter, who has clung to the office or to the classroom when clearly their talent was working with their hands in the garage or the shop?  This all means “choice”.  It means matching human talent and natural-given ability with the job and approaches what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness”.

     Some time ago James Michener wrote, “For in American life, the average person can expect to work in three radically different fields before he retires.  The trained lawyer is dragged into a business reorganization and winds up a college president.  The engineer uses his slide rule for a short time, finds himself a sales expert and ends his career in labor relations.  The schoolteacher becomes a principal and later on heads the town’s car dealership. . . . Adults who are unwilling to reeducate themselves periodically are doomed to mediocrity.”

     Teddy Roosevelt said, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”  And Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “The right to work, I had assumed, was the most precious liberty that man possesses.”

     And so we pause and reflect on Labor Day, and think about a war fought a hundred years ago; labor won that war, but nobody really lost.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
by William H. Benson
August 17, 2000

He was born Napoleon Bonaparte on August 15, 1769 to Italian-speaking parents living in Corsica, an island in the Mediterranean, but it was in and through France that he achieved control of all of Europe. And he did that by the time he was 35 years old, and in so doing he became without a doubt the greatest military genius of all time.
At the military academy in Paris he attended while a teenager, he learned that he could be rebellious to authority and indifferent to the feelings of the other students and still “win”, for he could not stand to lose. Sure, he ended up friendless and alone, but relationships did not matter to him. Power was what he wanted. He admitted, “There is only one thing to do in this world and that is to keep acquiring more and more power.”

As a young general he lived life at full throttle in a hypomania frenzy, working 16 hours every day, riding horses until they dropped dead under him, hustling his armies at breakneck speed to battle after battle. While others fell away from fatigue, he kept charging on and on.

Napoleon saw the whole battle in his mind before he actually entered into it; his particular genius was to find his opponent’s weak point and then throw his entire army’s strength at that point until the opponent broke. The equilibrium was then tipped in his favor, and at that point he took complete advantage of the enemy’s relapse. Again and again he did this, and soon controlled all of Europe.
He was the first person diagnosed with a Napoleon complex–an egomaniac with a deluded opinion of himself. When he wanted something, he was extremely charming, convincing, and hypnotically captivating, and then people would give him whatever he requested.

At his own coronation as Emperor of France in 1804, he took the crown from the Pope’s hands and placed it upon his own head and then forced the Pope to fall to his knees and kiss Napoleon’s ring. Then, the 35-year-od Napoleon placed another crown upon Josephine’s head.

He took his armies wherever he wanted–to the pyramids of Egypt and even to Moscow. The world belonged to him.
But it was the British led by the Duke of Wellington who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, and they immediately placed him in exile on an island, St. Helena, off the coast of West Africa where he lived for six years until dying from cancer at age 51. And all of Europe breathed a sigh of relief.

Prince Talleyrand said of Napoleon, “His career is the most extraordinary that has occurred for one thousand years. He was certainly great, an extraordinary man. He was clearly the most extraordinary man I ever saw and I believe the most extraordinary man that has lived in our age, or for many ages.”

Could humanity endure another Napoleon this century? Probably not. The world’s nuclear arsenal in the hands of a neo-Napoleon would doom millions, perhaps billions, of people. Personality and character often turn the course of human events, and the legal safeguards in place today which prevent a Napoleon from grabbing power could quickly crumble before someone so charming and so powerful. The tyrant, that larger than life person who promises everything, can convince the masses to follow him and that is usually into battle or a fenced-in camp.

Two weeks ago Anna Quindlen, the Newsweek columnist, suggested a trend. “Voters use their impressions of a candidate’s personality to choose a president.” ‘I don’t know why, I just like the guy’ is their reason for voting for him, rather than his voting-record, his achievements, or even his political philosophy. The cult of the personality dictates who gathers voter approval. Charm wins elections these days. She may be right.
The danger in all this so-called personality cult is apparant. If you combine this fixation on personality by the masses with a neo-Napoleon upstart, then conditions are extremely ripe for a demagogue to grasp for power, disregard the conventions of law, and soon he will be crowning himself emperor. It has happened before.