THE GHOST DANCE

by William H. Benson

December 30, 1999

     Fifty years ago anthropologists believed that the number of Native Americans living in North America, north of the Rio Grande, in 1492 was somewhere between one and three million.  In recent years researchers have pushed those numbers up much higher, perhaps to tweny-five million, with probably the best estimate coming in at about twelve million.  Whatever the number at Columbus’s arrival, it is well-documented that by 1850 the Native American population had plummetted drastically–to an all-time low of about 250,000.

     How had this happened?  The obvious answers include: disease, murder, warfare, and starvation.  The less obvious answer was the physical and emotional stress that accelerated this decline.  The Native Americans were herded onto crowded reservations, torn from their families and their sacred lands, and submitted to egregious indignities.  Disillusioned, death was aggreable.

     Their alternatives were few; they could fight, run away, give in to liquor, passively accomodate, or occasionally reach out for a false hope.  One example of this latter option was the Ghost Dance religion craze that swept like a prairie fire through the Sioux reservations in1890.

     Bewildered and humiliated by the dissolution of their cultural identity, the Sioux clutched wildly at this religion that taught that a messiah was coming who would deliver their people from bondage.  If the people danced the Ghost Dance that winter, they would be taken up and suspended in the air.  The next spring, when the grass greened, new soil would bury the white people.  Herds of buffalo and wild horses would return.  The ghosts of the Indians’s anscestors would resurrect and join the living Indians then permitted to return to Earth. 

     In October of 1890 Kicking Bear, the major proponent of the new religion, explained to Sitting Bull at Standing Rock that if they wore sacred garments of the messiah–Ghost shirts painted with magic symbols–no harm could come to them.  The bullets would not penetrate. 

     By mid-November all activity on the reservations had halted, except for the Ghost Dance.  Indians danced in the snow daily.  The U.S. government was alarmed, and soon official word came down, “Stop the Ghost Dance!”

     On December 15th U.S. Army officers arrested Sitting Bull, and in the fracas he was shot in the head and killed.  The grieving Sioux were completely distraught.  Then, late in December Big Foot’s tribe of 120 men and 230 women were herded toward Wounded Knee Creek, for the Army had orders to transport this tribe by railroad to a military prison at Omaha.

     On December 29th at Wounded Knee the soldiers requested that Big Foot and his men turn in their guns.  They dutifully obeyed, dumping their guns into a pile, and while doing so they danced and chanted repeatedly in Sioux, “The bullets will not go toward you.”  Unfortunately, one crazed Indian, Black Coyote, fired upon the white soldiers, and in a frenzy they hotly returned the fire, opening up with big Hotchkiss guns.    

     Almost 300 of the 350 tribe members were killed that day, including Big Foot.  (The white soldiers lost 25 dead and 39 wounded, struck by their own bullets and shrapnel.)  The few living Sioux, torn and bleeding, were permitted sanctuary in the Episcopal mission at Pine Ridge.  Those still conscious lay on hay on the floor and stared up at the Christmas greenery hanging from the rafters, and above the pulpit was strung a crudely-lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.

     This Wounded Knee Massacre effectively ended the Ghost Dance religion.  The Native American had lost his faith in its message, for he had learned too late that the Ghost shirt did not stop the bullets.  And when the grass greened in the spring, the white people were not buried under Mother Earth.

     By December of 1890 the few living Native Americans realized that they were the remnants of–a Holocaust.  They understood what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a merciless juggernaut, and for them Armageddon was not some future event in the by and by, but had already happened to them–at places like Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

EBENEZER SCROOGE

by William H. Benson

December 16, 1999

     “You fear the world too much,” a woman tells Ebenezer Scrooge.  “All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.”

     And so he had poured himself totally into his work.  A hard-driving workaholic, he froze all other human pursuits.  Even the death of his parter, Jacob Marley, seven years before had not softened him.  His work was his passion.  “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.  Mine occupies me constantly,” he said.

     But because it was Christmas, some tried bravely to divert his mind and behavior in a more wholesome direction.  His nephew, Fred, asked him over for Christmas the next day.  “Bah!  Humbug!” was his reply.  Two men raising funds for charity he sent rudely packing down the street, and when a Christmas caroler sang at his door through the keyhole, Ebenzer seized a ruler.  The singer fled in terror.  Finally, a ghost (that of Jacob Marley) brought the message that dented and then demolished Ebenezer Scrooges’s protective and frozen bulwark against human kindness.

     Most people do not require such drastic measures to experience a change and a softening of the heart, but the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world do.  The mountain between them and the exalted virtues of mercy, generosity, consideration, love, gentility, and kindness is simply too high for them to climb.  They lack the capacity and the will to even try;  they miss so much.

     The spirit of Christmas Past permitted Ebenezer to see himself as a boy–happy, full of life, dancing at an office Christmas party, enjoying his days.  The scene stood in sharp contrast to the cold and melancholy life he had chosen to live as an adult at the office and at home.  Regrets jumped up.  The missed opportunities stomped in.  When young, Ebenezer had refused to grab for that fleeting chance for happiness, and it had slipped him by.

     The spirit of Christmas Present pulled back the curtain so that Scrooge could see into the Bob Cratchit family.  Even though they were living in a humble situation, they were happy and were eating a Christmas dinner–roasted goose, applesause, mashed potatoes, and pudding.  Tiny Tim walked in with a crutch, and pity for the lad overwhelmed Ebenezer.

     The last of the spirits delivered Scrooge to a churchyard, through an iron gate, into the graveyard, and up to a tombstone.  Emblazoned across it was the name “Ebenezer Scrooge”.  Terror flooded Scrooge’s cold heart.  He pleaded for another chance, and in so doing his transformation from hard to soft was completed.

     Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in about six weeks throughout all of November and into December of 1843.  He then published it on December 19th, and it has remained the Christmas classic.  Dickens unabashedly played upon his readers’ sentiments–bitter regrets, pity, a family’s joy, and then the fear of death.  The reader feels all those emotions, as did Scrooge.  The biographers tell us that due to childhood experiences, Dickens had an acute sense of “home”.

     His main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, exemplified the contrast between warmth and cold, between the domestic interior and the noisome streets, between the well and the ill, between the need for comfort and the desperate anxiety about homelessness.  Early in his life Ebenzer had apparantly answered this ambivalent dilemma by chosing a ferocious version of privacy, a hostile segregation from the masses, and a shelter that excluded any contact with those gentler virtues.  He had shut off the outside world and its people and its charms, and only a ghost on Christmas Eve could unlock him.

     “You fear the world too much,” the woman had told Ebenezer.

THE CHRISTMAS PARTY

by William H. Benson

December 2, 1999

     The annual Christmas party season has arrived, a ritual as interwoven into the Christmas fabric as is singing “Silent Night”.  The “party” predominates in some people’s lives.  For example, I once read that Andy Warhol, the one-time New York City popular artist, attended parties about New York City virtually every night of the week and did so for years.  No wonder he died at age 56.  Please put me at the opposite end of that spectrum, for the “party” involves so much.

     Slip into the formal attire–suits and ties for men and party formal dresses for the ladies.  The baby sitter arrives.  Drive and park the car.  Hand the coats to the cloak room attendant in exchange for a ticket.  Stand in line, pick up a plate and cup, fill both, and then hope you can find an empty chair and table in a respectable spot with conversant people.  As when in a foxhole or on a sinking boat you rediscover the need to utter a silent prayer.  Avoid the gauche remark and steer clear of the faux paus.

     The meal is so-so, and then it’s time for the entertainment.  Some years it’s comedians gushing with raunchy jokes; other years it’s more sedate with the high school show choir singing Christmas carols.  Meanwhile, the sparkling beverages everywhere tinkle in the ice, and soon the light dims.  The band cranks up, the dancers take to the floor, and the party hits a high.  The hour approaches because the kids back home with the baby sitter are never too far out of mind.  Remember to retrieve the ticket for the coats.  Drive home, pay the baby sitter, and relax.  The party is over for another year.

     The sociologist would tell us that the Christmas party serves a legitimate social function–to pull people out of their aloneness and permit them to converse in a setting filled with Yuletide cheer.  Humans are frequently asked to choose between solitude and the party.  Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, wrote, “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. . . . But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth.  For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love”, no warmth, and no companionship.

     And social styles differ at the party.  For example, when the Andy Warhol-type walks into a social gathering, his eyes fix instinctively on the center of the densest social activity, and hones right in on it–the true social animal.  The opposite style is to look to the farthermost edges of the gathering and head softly in that direction.

     This all raises the question of one’s querencia.  The Spanish word describes a tiny area in the bullring, maybe fifty feet square, within which the bull fancies himself entirely safe.  By the bull’s movements the matador learns where that bull’s querencia is located, and then stays well clear of it when executing his critical phases.  A perplexed bull will head for his querencia and jerk his head and horns in an unpredictable fashion that may catch the matador unprepared.

     Every human has an undefined querencia in any social situation, and he or she immediately seeks it out upon entering a crowded room.  Most usually, it is beside one’s spouse, but it can be perhaps socially backward to glue yourself to your spouse all evening.  So you look elsewhere for your querencia, perhaps with some other person who has tons to tell you.

     Ah!  ‘Tis the season to be jolly!  And it only happens once a year.  But let me be the first to wish you a merry time at your Christmas party, and I hope you quickly find there your own querencia.

TOM SUTHERLAND

by William H. Benson

November 18, 1999

     “‘The eyes.  The eyes.  Cover the eyes!'”  And immediately one of them produced a regular blindfold and tied it around my head.  Another young man then produced what turned out to be, when I examined it later, the cover from a front seat headrest of a car.  He pulled this too over my head for good measure–and, though I blessedly didn’t know it then, that was the last time I would see the sun for the next six and a half years.” 

     So wrote Tom Sutherland in his account of his kidnapping in Beirut, Lebanon on June 9, 1985.  He was a Colorado State University professor in the Agriculture Department who had been teaching at the American University there since 1983.  He had returned to the U.S. for a short visit, and then the day that he returned to Beirut, he was kidnapped while driving from the airport.

     On November 18, 1991, his captors released him.  He was immediately flown to Wiesbaden, West Germany where he was tearfully reunited with his wife Jean and their daughter Kit.  They then flew to San Francisco where they celebrated Thanksgiving at their daughter’s home.  Finally, on December 1st, a Sunday, they flew back to Fort Collins.  He called the view of the Rockies as they landed “absolutely spectacular”.

     Hundreds of yellow signs with “Welcome Home Tom” converged upon him.  Thousands of well-wishers lined the road from the Fort Collins/Loveland airport to the CSU campus and to the crowd gathered in Moby Gym.  There, he met Senator Hank Brown and Governor Roy Romer and CSU’s President, Dr. Al Yates.  He then spoke to the crowd.  Finally, he and Jean drove back to 812 Garfield Street, to their two-story wood-and-brick home, with fully-grown trees, to the place he had dreamed of seeing thousands of times.

     I heard Tom Sutherland speak earlier this year.  One comment stuck.  “Here in America things kind of work.  We get along.  Things work out.  Problems get solved.  But in many places in the world things don’t work.  The problems are incredible and can’t be solved.  People hate each other and have done so for generations.  The young people in such countries don’t have educations, jobs, money, nor hope.  Instead of being in school learning, they spend their days getting even, causing trouble, and hurting others.”

     The columnist George Will recently wrote of  “the cohesive power of the American experiment.  In spite of endless talk of differences, American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people.  Its citizens are absorbed into a culture of consumption. Immigrants quickly fit into this common culture which may not be altogether elevating but is hardly poisonous.”

      It has not always been so.  Throughout much of our nation’s past, labor and racial and class strife bitterly divided America’s citizens. Hundreds died.  It was as if someone was invariably shouting, “The eyes.  The eyes.  Cover the eyes!”  Today America has never been less divided by bitterness about the differences among the people.  For example, regardless of a citizen’s birthplace elsewhere, either he or she or their children soon come to enjoy and appreciate the annual ritual of pausing to Give Thanks.

     Those Separatist Pilgrims from seventeenth-century England led the way.  To leave the Old World, to come to the New, to celebrate the harvest irrespective of the yield, to sit at the table with family, to eat turkey and sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie on a Thursday in November–those are the true American tradition, a point in time when we “get along”.  I suspect that no family in 1991 celebrated a happier Thanksgiving than did the Tom Sutherland family.

TY COBB

by William H. Benson

November 4, 1999

     Thirty men were named to the All Century Team.  Lou Gehrig was named Player of the Century beating out both Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, but it was Pete Rose who received the longest ovation on Sunday night at the beginning of the 1999 World Series.  Despite his lifetime ban from baseball for gambling, Pete Rose holds one distinct record; he broke Ty Cobb’s record career hits of 4191.  And who is this guy named Ty Cobb?

     He was an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers who played in the majors from 1905 until 1928, and he also made the All Century Team.  Ty Cobb never received the fame that Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio achieved, and that was probably because he was the meanest man to ever play baseball.

     The story is quite true that Cobb filed his spikes to razor sharpness to gore his opponents when sliding into base, and then to utterly intimidate them from then on.  Fear was all on his side.

      One ex-teammate said, “A few of us who really knew him well realized that he was wrong in the head–unbalanced.  He played like a demon and had everybody hating him. . . . He was always in a brawl, on the field, in the clubhouse, behind the stands, in the stands, on the street.  He carried a gun and scared all of us.  He was mean, tricky, and dangerous.”

     Babe Ruth said, “Cobb’s the meanest, toughest player who ever walked out onto a field.  He couldn’t stand to lose.  All he wanted was to beat you on Saturday and twice on Sunday.  Otherwise, he was miserable.”

     He was one of baseball’s greatest.  Some of Ty Cobb’s records stood for decades.  It was finally Pete Rose who exceeded Cobb’s 4191 career hits but not until 61 years later.  Cobb was the professional hitter with a lifetime batting average of .367, the best ever recorded.  Two seasons he hit over .400, something only Ted Williams has done since.  He scored 2244 runs, won 12 batting titles, and stole 892 bases.  Who was named first to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936?  Not Babe Ruth, but Ty Cobb, by a landslide vote.  Joe DiMaggio said, “Everytime I hear of this guy again, I wonder how he was possible.”

     Cobb was just 18 years old when the Detroit Tigers called him up midseason from the Georgia bush league to play outfielder.  A few months later his mother accidently shot his father at their home in Royston, Georgia.  Ty never got over the loss, for his father never saw Ty play one game of baseball.  The accident warped and twisted his young spirit into something ugly and vicious.  All those around him hated him.  He played and did things on the field that it seemed no human could possibly do.

     In 1928 he retired from baseball, but he did not retire his mean streak.  He got in a terrible fight with Ted Williams and refused to ever talk with him again.  Rude, ingrateful, and hateful, he swore and cursed and brutalized everybody who got in his way.  Long ago estranged from his former wives and children, he died in July 1961 in a hospital bed alone.  His gun lay on top of a paper bag filled with money on the table beside him.  He was worth $12 million and owned two mansions, (one in San Francisco and the other at Lake Tahoe), but neither had electricity because he had refused to pay the bill.  He, a dying old man, had stumbled and fumbled around with candles.

     Babe Ruth had died in 1948, and a quarter of a million distraught people filed by his coffin placed in the center of Yankee Stadium.  At Ty Cobb’s funeral three men showed up.