FLAGS

by William H. Benson

April 13, 2000

     Last week the two major news items continued to puzzle.  Elian Gonzalez’s father arrived on Thursday in Miami demanding his son’s return to Cuba with him.  And then, the Confederate flag is still popping in the wind high atop South Carolina’s capitol dome.  Neither issue comes with a ready-made answer.

     The battle over Elian underscores the forty years of hostility between Castro’s Cuba and the United States.  Elian’s Cuban relatives who live in Little Havana in Miami want him to stay with them and enjoy America’s opportunities, for they have nothing but scorn for Castro’s poverty-stricken experiment with socialism in Cuba.  The father simply wants his son, and Janet Reno agrees that they should be together.  The hostility simmers for a season and then boils.

     In mid-April of 1961 the Cuban anti-Castro forces in the U.S. were so unhappy with the situation in Cuba that they landed on Cuban soil at the Bay of Pigs with the naive intention of overthrowing Castro, all done with the Kennedy Administration’s backing.  The forces shouted, “We must conquer or we shall die choked by slavery.”  Castro easily routed the invading forces; hence the phrase–the Bay of Pigs Fiasco.  Castro vowed defiance.  “The organizers of the aggression against Cuba are encroaching on the inalienable right of the Cuban people to live free and independently.”  The resulting suspicion and rancor between the two governments has marred their diplomatic relationship ever since.

     As for the other news item, the NAACP wants the Confederate flag removed, and to force the issue, the organization sanctioned a boycott against South Carolina until the flag comes down.  The Confederate flag represents a government, defeated and destroyed 135 years ago, that supported the enslavement of entire families–men, women, and children, from birth until death.

     This boycott underscores the hostility between the North and the South.  On April 12, 1861 the Confederate forces fired upon the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War began.  Four years later on April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, and the next day he died.  Those four years sapped the nation’s resources, turned villages into blood baths, and scarred innumerable families.  Thousands of children lost their dads.

     April 13, 1743 was Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.  Last Saturday a thirteen-member panel at the University of Richmond agreed that results from a DNA test link the Jefferson family to Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, verifying the claim that Sally was indeed Jefferson’s mistress.  One person in the audience argued against the conclusion:  “This is not the truth.  This is a man’s reputation.  If (Jefferson) said there was no relationship, there was no relationship.”

     It is difficult to get into another person’s head and understand his or her thought processes, especially a Southern plantation owner in the the latter half of the the eighteenth century.  What Jefferson read, said, and wrote was one thing, for he set forth “inalienable rights” and included “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” among them.  But what he did was quite another thing.  He bought slaves to work his fields, even expanded his farming enterprise to include more slaves, and probably took for himself Sally Hemings.

     Flags represent an allegiance to a government that is attached at a point in time to a geographical region.  We say the words, “We pledge allegiance to the flag . . . ”  Apparantly, Elian Gonzalez’s father pledges his allegiance to Castro’s flag, a socialistic government.  Then, that Confederate flag atop South Carolina’s capitol dome represents a diminishing of Thomas Jefferson’s principles for the children of future generations.

     In these two issues we have seen battle lines drawn, people taking positions, and each side is convinced that they are on the right side, and that the opposing side is wrong.  And the issue is really about what to do with the children.  When we finally come around to face the issues of family (children) and of country (flags), we find that they can be inextricably woven together, joined at the elbow, and to pull on one pulls at the other.  What is best for Elian?  What is best for the children of South Carolina?  Rhetorical questions such as those do not yield simple answers, but I return again and again to Jefferson’s words: “. . .  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  We cannot go too far wrong if we stick with those inalienable rights.  

ELECTIONS

by William H. Benson

March 30, 2000

     Vladimir Putin is Russia’s newest President, officially elected last Sunday.  He has been the acting President since last December 31st when Boris Yeltsin had had enough of the job and resigned and appointed Putin.  A former KGB officer who never quit the Communist Party, Putin is 47 years old, and unlike the typical robust Russian, he is thin.  He makes a striking counterpart to America’s Bill Clinton and Great Britain’s Tony Blair.

     Free elections in Russia are a cause for celebration.  After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 Lenin had disbanded freely-held elections.  It was just eleven years ago on March 26, 1989 that Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the first free election in the Soviet Union.  Boris Yeltsin was the biggest winner that year, and that election opened the flood gates of change and of revolution.

      The following June Solidarity swept to victory in Poland.  In November the Berlin Wall crumbled, and then in October of 1990 the two Germany’s reunited.  On March 31, 1991 the Warsaw pact dissolved, and thereafter the various republics broke away from the Soviet Union.  Finally, on Christmas Day of 1991 Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.  In less than three years after that 1989 election, the people said, “No more!”

     Vladimir Putin inherits a mess.  Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and the Communist Part had abused and bruised the people.  Stalin’s regime deliberately slaughtered the nation’s citizens–an estimated 25 million.  (That figure does not count all those lost in the war.)  Robert Conquest in his book, “Reflections on a Ravaged Century” concluded that Stalin was motivated by “a savage desire to remake society according to a preconceived model.  Human variety had to be pulverized into a malleable and unresisting mass.”  Stalin had drilled round holes and saw people as square pegs who needed cut up. 

     We, the citizens of the early twenty-first century, know fully well that governments can sponsor deliberate killing of their citizens.  Hitler’s Nazi regime, Mussolini’s Facist regime, and the Japanese imperialist leaders required a massive second World War before their frenzied killing stopped.  Then, just a year ago Slobodon Milosevic practiced his own version of ethnic cleansing, extricating people from their homes and then killing those who chose to stay.   The Western powers watched and finally responded, bombing Milosevic into submission.

     Evil can work this way.  A sides with B and convinces B to injure, abuse, and then kill C.  B feels great to be especially chosen by A and does what all good henchmen have always done–B kills C.  Then, once C is eliminated, surprise!  A pushes B into the empty C position, and then finds a new B to attack the newly-designated C.  The pattern is repeated again and again.  Hitler and Stalin both played this game on a national scale.

     Fortunately, the fifty-year Cold War of West against East finally ended with a whimper when the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, totally discredited, dissolved under its own weight.  Ronald Reagan’s U.S. military buildup overwhelmed the Soviet leaders and eventually bankrupted the nation.  The planned economy could not feed and clothe the people and also support a modern military arsenal at the same time.

     And then the Soviet people heard whispers of Reagan’s rhetoric that America was a “shining city on a hill” and that the Soviet Union was “an evil empire”.  But they did not need Reagan to tell them, for they instinctively knew that the American system was vastly superior to theirs.

     “We the people”, says so much.  The Constitution assures its citizens that power resides with them–the people, with their vote, with their election ballot.  Individual differences of gender, race, and ethnic heritage are allowed and even protected by the law, as a matter of national policy.  The law accomodates all shapes of pegs–square, triangle, and odd-formed.

     The slick demogouges can misled the people in the short run, but in the long run they can see the truth–who it is that ultimately benefits from a policy.  Is it the leaders or the people?

     Vladimir Putin faces enormous challenges and obstacles.  Will he come down hard on those who disagree with him?  Will he allow different opinions?  Or will he pull out a saw and cut off the pegs’ squared corners?  How will he treat the people?  The answers will soon be forthcoming. 

INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL CLASS

by William H. Benson

March 16, 2000

     Recently, I came across The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in which they argued most forcefully that intelligence is the decisive dividing force in social statification.  They point to the elite who work their way clear to the right on the Bell Curve and enjoy the benefits of American society.  Those then with increasingly low intelligence find themselves clear to the left on that same Bell Curve and reap lesser rewards.  Intelligence, Herrnstein and Murray propose, is the engine that pulls the train of social mobility.

      Those are interesting thoughts; however, I would argue that this is not such a recent phenomenon.  Two centuries ago America concluded that our society’s best rewards should belong to those with the intelligence, or, a better word–brainpower.  Our society then set up a series of chutes and gates that herd the best and the brightest students through high school, into the best colleges, and then into the best jobs where they can climb the ladder.  Social mobility, and to a certain degree even social justice, in America is predicated upon IQ.

     And yet, the difficulty is that the gates are continually getting narrower and narrower.  Colleges demand higher and higher grades, SAT/ACT scores, and class ranks, and then they expect almost superhuman achievements in extra-curricular activities.  Add in the hyper-accelerating costs required once through the gate, and you can have a frustrating, even a pressure-cooker, situation.  The less-driven students just exit the chute, opting for an easier path.  They give up.  And then the disappointment if not allowed through the gate is most severe.

     In last week’s Newsweek a U.S. Department of Education employee, Clifford Adelman, suggested that the strongest predictor of college completion/success is determined by how rigorous and challenging the students’ high school courses are, no matter what grades they received.  He pushes hard for the nationwide adoption of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

     “When well taught,” he says, “such courses put students in the position of setting up their own experiments, searching for their own specialized materials.  You don’t necessarily learn that in a regular high-school course.”

     If intelligence is truly the determining factor in social advancement, then is it “fair” that Mother Nature dictates where any of us fall along that Bell Curve?  Philosophers have endlessly debated this question–the fairness issue;  Karl Marx answered the question, “No, it wasn’t fair.”  He yearned for social equality–a narrow rectangle or even a single point rather than the smooth Bell Curve.  To him it just did not seem right that those with the brains should, generation after generation, run off with all the marbles.

     And what about the other factors besides intelligence that contribute to social standing, such as work habits, persistence, luck, risk tolerance, or initial economic position?  Of course, these attributes play a role, but all of them stacked together would probably not exceed the crucial part that IQ plays.

     On this day, March 16, in 1802 President Thomas Jefferson signed the law that established West Point–the U. S. Military Academy on the banks of the Hudson River.  This was one of those first steps the nation took in democratizing education and establishing a meritocracy; only those with the ability were allowed to attend West Point.  Up until then higher education was only offered to those who could afford it.

     The story of higher education in the U.S. during the twentieth-century is one of the great American success stories.  The U.S. has led the world in opening colleges to a mass population of young people who have the ability–regardless of creed, gender, financial resources, or other restrictive requirements.  College is the place where people with high intellect excel and people with low intellect fail.  When America opened itself to higher education, it opened up as well a revolution in the way the American population sorted and divided itself.

LINDBERGH & CHILDREN

by William H. Benson

March 2, 2000

     The newborn are helpless, innocent, without the physical, emotional, or psychological arsenal needed to play the adult games;  so, humankind concluded ages ago that protecting the child is of crucial importance.  In mankind’s slow crawl into the flickering light of civilization, this moral attitude was a great step forward away from infanticide–the abandonment and outright killing of children.  This abominable practice was sometimes done for religious reasons–the gods demand the unblemished, but more often, it was done to escape the burden of rearing offspring.  Motherhood demands much.

     After a hundred centuries and a billion minds have thought on this issue, Western Civilization wisely came down on the side of the child.  We build and support schools.  The government constructs programs to assist and protect the child.  The society encourages homes and parenting.  Charles Dickens wrote, “Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.”  Children are our lives extended afar, into the next centuries.  The pro-child arguments are obvious.

     And yet, last week, the columnist Mona Charens pointed out a disturbing trend that is occurring across the nation–mothers are abandoning their newborns.  This amoral behavior drags us all back to a previous and darker age, to a time before the wise wrote the moral codes.  The level-headed frequently ask, “How could any mother do such a thing?”  The answer is the same as it has been for millennium–the burdens of motherhood are crushing.

     Women consume themselves in caring for children, and the men in providing for the wife and children back at home.  When the youngest child is finally reared, the parents are worn out, with little space remaining for an individual life at the end as at the beginning.  But if there is no man in the equation, (as is all too often the case today), the entire weight falls upon the mother.  She is overwhelmed, hopeless.  Both the “civilized” of today, and the “savage” of yesteryear find a similar motivation to just walk away.

     Recently, I read the new biography on Charles Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg, and without a doubt, the saddest and most heart-wrenching chapter is about the kidnapping of 22-month-old Charles Jr.  On the evening of March 1, 1932 he was snatched from his crib in the family’s home while his parents were at dinner.  Investigators found muddy footprints in the nursery, a homemade ladder tossed aside, and a note pinned to the windowsill demanding $50,000.  A massive hunt for the child and the perpetrator ensued.

     Then, on May 12, the child’s body was found in the woods, less than five miles from the Lindbergh’s home near Princeton, New Jersey.  The theory evolved that the kidnapper broke a rung on the crudely built ladder when crawling out and then dropped the child.  If so, it was a diabolical crime and a very badly executed one at that.

     On April 3, 1936 a German immigrant named Bruno Hauptman, was executed for the crime.  Despite Hauptman’s protestations of innocence, the evidence against him was overpowering, and it was concluded that he had broken the law, the moral code of the nation.

     Anatole France said, “Morality is sum of the prejudices of a community.”  Wisdom is found in that moral code, and the unanimity with which it is practiced is as important as the contents of that code.  We must not conclude that morals are worthless because they differ according to time and place, but instead, we are warranted to decide that morals are indispensable for our society’s well-being.  That which happens to the child happens to the nation.

     Children–girls and boys, how do we protect them?  How do we shield them from disease, from broken bones and bodies, from the horrific traffic accidents that plague our nation, or, even worse, from the gruesome ravages of the Bruno Hauptman’s of the world or of ill-fated parents?  Do we just do the best we can?  Yes, but both wisdom and the children cry out for a better answer.

THE PRESIDENT

by William H. Benson

February 24, 2000

     George Washington’s successful revolution against King George in 1776 eradicated the British crown and the trappings of royalty from the colonies, but in their place the Founding Fathers instituted a quasi-royalty called the President.  Forty-two men have served our nation in that role, and the armchair historian can attach every descriptive adjective imaginable to at least one or more of them–stubborn, good, bad, awful, dull, slick, misguided, insincere, great, flawed, devious, inconsistent, enlightened, intelligent, statesman-like, lazy, diligent, touchy, moral, unethical, studious, and deceitful.  Still, given the choice between an inherited royal throne and an elected President, the Founding Fathers chose the better of the two.

     The best of the lot include, of course, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, perhaps both Roosevelts, and Truman.  The worst of the lot include James Buchanan, Lincoln’s predecessor.  From the time Lincoln was elected in November of 1860 and the handover to Lincoln in March of 1861, Buchanan dawdled while the Southern nations concluded their plans to leave the United States.  It then fell to Lincoln to put back together what Buchanan had allowed to rip apart.  Then, Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870’s and Warren G. Harding in the 1920’s achieved the distinction of looking the other way while their deputies in the inner circle plundered the Treasury.  Scandals ensued.

     Andrew Jackson, the face on the Twenty Dollar bill was the general at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.  He was a heartless Indian fighter and a frontiersman who was the first to bring the Presidency down to the common folks’ level.  Not above smoking a corn cob pipe and looking unshaven and unkempt at times, Jackson could then spiff up when he wanted, brush back his white hair, and dazzle his guests.  An Enlishwoman once exclaimed, “Your republican President is the royal model of a gentleman!”

     When Vice-President Harry Truman became President, wiseacres commented that if he could become President then anybody could, even the guy next door.  That he came from common roots was true, but intelligent, well-read, and implacable (perhaps stubborn is the better word) he was.  Just a common man from Missouri he saw himself, but he understood well the dignity and power of the office he held.

     Jack Kennedy came the closest to royalty.  Richard Burton and Julie Andrews were on Broadway in the early 60’s in Camelot, and Jackie wanted to turn the White House into an updated version of King Arthur’s mythic castle.  She was allowed to do so.  But, it was Jack’s father, Joe, the immensely wealthy and powerful and corrupt Irish-American, who pushed his son, Jack, into politics and then paid for the Presidency.  Paul Johnson, the historian, wrote that it was like “handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu, with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American ethic.”

     At least one President was downright dull–Calvin Coolidge.  He said little, and did even less.  His best known comment was “The business of America is business.”  (Many would argue that it is actually about liberty and securing the blessings of freedom.)  Alice Longworth Roosevelt, TR’s daughter, commented about Silent Cal, “He reminds me of the little man who stands on top of the wedding cake.”

     Some Presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, worked very hard and mastered all the issues, and yet, was largely ineffective in getting the job done.  Reagan, on the other hand, conserved his energy with frequent afternoon naps, joked about it, and somehow got things done.  Bud McFarlane said, “He knows so little and accomplishes so much.”

     Clinton is now in his final and eighth year as President, and four new faces (Bradley, Gore, McCain, and George W.) are appearing in the wings driving hard to win that desk in the Oval Office in January of 2001.  Our choices include a former NBA basketball player, a Vice-President, a former POW, and the Texas Governor.  Not much shining royalty can we find among them, but then again that was the Founding Fathers’ intentions.