THE BEATLES

by William H. Benson

February 10, 2000

     In early February of 1964 I was in the fourth grade.  One evening I was sitting in the chair at Don’s Barbershop getting my hair cut and watching television when I heard Walter Cronkite announce that the Beatles had just arrived in New York City.  “What are the Beatles?” I asked.  No one, including the barber, seemed to know because they did not answer.  I watched and noticed that their hair was longer than normal for 1964, and here I was getting a crew cut.  Little did I realize it at the time, but sitting in that barber chair, I was witnessing a revolution; the English were invading America.

     Later I learned that their names were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr and that they were from Liverpool, England.  That Sunday night they were on the “Ed Sullivan Show” singing “She Loves You, Yea! Yea!”.   What was amazing was the effect those four had upon the crowds of girls who were either sobbing or shouting or both.

     In August of that year the Beatles returned to San Francisco for a 23-city tour of America which solidified their complete hold upon America’s music.  At one time five of their songs held the top slots on the charts.  Their songs initiated a new direction in rock music with a sense of melody rather than just a strong beat, and the imaginative lyrics were much more meaningful.

     Who growing up in the 1960’s could ever get those Beatles’ tunes out of their heads?  “Love Me Do”, “Please, Please Me”, “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Eight Days a Week”, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, “Nowhere Man”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Michelle”, “Yesterday”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Hey Jude!”, “Come Together”, “Something”, “Get Back”, “Revolution”, and “Let it Be”.  Each of them brings on a flood of memories that cannot ever be stamped out.  Vastly influential and wildly innovative, the group achieved unimaginable fame and wealth.

     By 1970 John and Ringo were thirty, and Paul and George were twenty-eight.  It was Paul who decided to end the group.  He said the split was the result of “personal differences, business differences, musical differences–but most of all because I have a better time with my family.”

     John deteriorated into weirdness–Indian mysticism, fad diets, drink, cigarettes, and drugs, all done alongside Yoko Ono.  Then, in December of 1980 a guy from Hawaii, Mark David Chapman, shot and killed the very strange John Lennon in front of his Manhattan apartment.

     Meanwhile, Paul married Linda Eastman and carved out a respectable life.  Their marriage lasted twenty-nine years, and they raised four children.  The Queen thought he was exceptional when she knighted him “Sir” Paul McCartney.  Absent from that event though was Linda who was battling breast cancer.  She died on April 17, 1998 at their private ranch near Tucson.  Paul’s statement said it best, “We will never get over it, but I think we will come to accept it.”

     Then, on the night of December 30, 1999 Michael Abram broke a window in George Harrison’s home (thirty miles west of London on the Thames), crawled in, and stabbed the former Beatle in the chest.  Just the month before the attacker had been released from a hospital psychiatric ward.  His mother said, “He has been running in pubs shouting about the Beatles.  He hates them and even believes they are witches and takes their lyrics seriously.  He started to wear a Walkman to play music to stop the voices in his head.”  Harrison suffered a punctured lung but will, no doubt, redouble his home’s security.

     Thirty-six years ago the Beatles arrived and ushered in new music, new lyrics, a new hair-style, and even new clothes.  It was a successful and bloodless Revolution;  America was ready for it.  But, as it always does, life marches on, and the Beatles lived long enough to share in its tragedies.  However, the songs just do not change;  they still bubble with that Liverpoolian vision of youth and life and love.  “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.  Now it seems they’re here to stay.  Oh, I believe in Yesterday. . . . Nowhere man please listen. . . . and strawberry fields– forever.”

SYSTEMS

by William H. Benson

January 27, 2000

     All parts of a system must work for the life form/organization/machine to function, to thrive, to win.  Building a tried-and-true winning system is not easy.  It is the part of the system ignored or forgotten about that causes the losses, the crashes, and the system breakdowns. 

     For example, an airplane is a system of systems–fuel, hydraulics, electronics, etc.  A failure in one of those systems can cause loss of flight and a potential crash.  That is why engineers design dual and triple backup systems.  When one hydraulic system fails, the pilot reaches for another.

     The human body is also a system of systems.  The heart, lungs, blood, nerves, kidneys all do their duty and serve a crucial purpose.  Damage or disruption in one system brings on sickness.

     Football is a game also composed of systems: offense, defense, the line, the middle linebacker, the safety, special teams, passing game, running game, blocking, tackling, punting, and kicking.  To win the Super Bowl, all of a team’s systems must work a measure better than the opposing team’s.  The winner is not necessarily the team with the best record but the team that makes it to the playoffs and then wins there.  The team’s systems must perform at a peak and at full throttle.

     The family is a system in which parents and children both can thrive given the right qualities: optimistic attitudes, truthfulness, kindliness, acceptance, gentility, firmness, a refusal to choose nothing but the best, compliments, self-esteem boosters, punctuality, respect for authority and learning, and orderliness.  Without a healthy dose of at least some of those attributes, the individual members lose heart and then look elsewhere for sustenance.

     But systems do disintegrate.  Airplanes occasionally crash.  Human bodies eventually give up.  A football team’s leading rusher suffers a season-ending injury.  The winning quarterback retires.  The replacements are not quite of the same calibre, and the winning edge is lost.  The system grinds down.  The team loses another chance at the Super Bowl.

     And even families drift and then fall apart.  For example, a family that is marked by a fault-finding attitude, disrespect for authority, laziness, unfaithfulness, lack of consideration, or a refusal to spend time with each other leads to disruption.  Children suffer when the system is topsy-turvy.  What is truly “right” becomes, amazingly enough, the wrong thing to do, and what is truly “wrong” is suddenly the best choice.  What is black is now white, and what is white is black.  In a word, the system is messed up.

     Lewis Carroll, who happened to be born on January 27, 1832, wrote about Alice in Wonderland at a tea party.  She listened to guests talking strange and doing weird things.  The Walrus said, “The time has come to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”

     Like Alice, human beings can quite innocently find themselves in situations where they feel like they are the only sober person at a party filled with drunks.  The system has disintegrated.  The trick is learning how to keep your own head on when all those around you are losing theirs.

     National Geographic‘s latest edition discusses the possiblity of life on other planets–in other solar systems.  The writers suppose that the life forms there will have sufficient size to support a head with sensory organs and a brain and have a skeleton with limbs.  However, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in California cautions,  “Nature is probably much more inventive than we are.”

     Whatever their physical dimensions may be, I suspect that, should life arise on those planets, a certain “system”, similar to Earth’s, will also arise there.  Exceptional physical talent will still be highly regarded.  Beauty in all its forms will be highly esteemed.  The powerful will win the games and the thrones but will be invariably replaced over time by others yet more powerful.  Intelligence and reasoning skills will, like cream, rise to the very top.  Thoughtful planning and the execution of those plans will still win the ball games.  Patience, perseverance, and optimism will be their own reward.  Some things, some “systems”, even if on other planets, will not change.

STEPHEN FOSTER & JEFFERSON DAVIS

by William H. Benson

January 13, 2000

     Thursday of this week, the thirteenth, is noted as Stephen Foster Memorial Day.  Composer and lyricist, he died on that day in 1864 at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital at the age of 38.  During his short life he wrote some 200 songs–musical images of American life, especially of the South.

     “Oh! Susanna!  Oh won’t you cry for me,  for I’ve come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”  This Foster song became the favorite at the California mining camps during the Forty-Nine gold rush.  Popular song books still include his other remembered songs:  “Camptown Races”, “Swanee River”, “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”, and “My Old Kentucky Home”. 

     Although he wrote Southern songs that captured the plantation’s spirit, albeit in an idyllic sense, Stephen Foster actually lived most of his life in the North–at Pittsburgh.  Still, he had a great gift for melody and could pick up any tune by ear.  He played the clarinet and the piano when still a child, and he wrote both the words and the music to his songs.

     With war clouds threatening between North and South, Foster moved to New York City in 1860 where he lived the rest of his life.  His wife and children soon abandoned him when his heavy drinking had reduced them to squalor.

     Although Stephen Foster had little actual experience living on a Southern plantation, someone who did and believed wholeheartedly in its way of life was Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy.  He grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation, and he often spoke of the benevolence of the slave-system.  On his father’s cotton plantation, the slaves were never flogged.  The slaves judged and punished themselves.  Families were kept together.  Davis falsely assumed that slaves were treated the same across the South; he refused to believe any stories of cruelty.

     When the Northerners questioned Davis’s assumptions, he, like so many other Southerners, responded as if insulted and personally assaulted.  He told his wife, Varina, “I cannot bear to be suspected or complained of, or misconstrued after explanation.”  Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin commented on Jefferson Davis: “He speaks with an air which seems to say ‘Nothing more can be said, I know it all, it must be as I think.'”  Reading this helps to explain why the Civil War occurred and, still more, why it lasted so long.

     The best of Stephen Foster’s music had encouraged sympathy for the slaves’ suffering on the plantation, and that music is our link back to those pre-Civil War days before the Great National Divorce, back to those simpler but not necessarily better ideas.

     Despite his genius for song, Stephen Foster died alone, penniless, in a drunken stupor in January of 1864.  Fifteen months later the Confederacy died, its back completely broken.

     Exactly a century would pass before a descendent of a former slave would stand next to the Lincoln Memorial and dare to say:  “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ . . . I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. . . . And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.  So let freedom ring.”

     Those words sound so much more sincere and nobler than, “Camptown Races five miles long, doo-dah, doo-dah,” or “Way down upon the Swanee River, far, far away.  That’s where my heart is turning ever.  That’s where the old foks stay.  All up and down the whole creation, sadly I roam.  Still longing for the old plantation, and for the old folks at home.”

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.