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.

O. J. SIMPSON

by William H. Benson

October 7, 1999

     The evidence all pointed to him.  The LAPD found drops of Simpson’s blood at the murder scene.  A stocking cap with hairs matching his was found next to Ron and Nicole’s dead bodies.  One of Simpson’s leather gloves was lying between them.  The other matching glove was found outside his house stained with the victims’ hair and blood.  His shoe prints were stamped in the victims’ blood at the scene.  His own blood dripped up his driveway and into his house.  He had cuts on his hand the day after the murders but offered no adequate explanation.  His socks in his home were spattered with his and Nicole’s blood.  The evidence piled upon itself.

     Daniel Petocelli, the prosecuting attorney in the later civil trial wrote, “His blood, his cuts, his clothing, his gloves, his shoes, his car, his house, his ex-wife’s blood, Ron Goldman’s blood . . . all pointed to O. J. Simpson and to no one else.”

     And yet, on October 3, 1995 at the conclusion of the criminal trial, the jury acquitted him of double murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.  How could this be?

     Called the Trial of the Decade, or perhaps of the Century, it had immediately turned into a carnival-like atmosphere, much like another celebrated trial earlier in the century–the Scopes Monkey Trial.

     But the O. J. Simpson criminal case is a study in deceptions.  All those involved–Judge Lance Ito, the Dream Team of defense lawyers, the prosecution team, and Simpson himself–were primarily interested in their own well-being, their own cause, and how they looked to the millions who eagerly watched on television.  In such an atmosphere, a patsy must be sacrificed, and that, as it turned out, was the LAPD police detective Mark Fuhrman.

     Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, the Dream Team of defense attorneys, viciously pounced upon Fuhrman until the jury believed that the LAPD was so filled with incompetencies that none of the evidence could be trusted.  And then they accused Fuhrman of distorted attitudes and of deliberately trying to frame Simpson for the murders by tampering and even planting evidence.

     Also, the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, repeatedly flubbed, at the best a D- performance.  At the trial Simpson couldn’t put on the glove.  Christopher Darden in his summation to the jury said, “Nobody wants to do anything to this man.  We don’t.  There is nothing personal about this, but the law is the law.”  (Can you imagine being almost apologetic to a jury when you believe the person you’re prosecuting committed a brutal double murder?)

     The theory is that by applying the facts to the known rule justice will be found.  But the practical reality is that at various times juries do not want to base their decision solely upon a general law, thinking that in all fairness it is better to decide each individual case upon strictly its own merits.

     An old judge at a different time once remarked, “A jury has its uses.  It is like a cylinder head gasket.  Between two things [law and facts] that don’t give any, you have to have something that does give a little, something to seal the law to the facts.  There’s no focal point with a jury; the jury is the public itself.  That’s why a jury can say what a judge couldn’t.”

      In the O. J. Simpson case, the law was the law, and the facts were the facts.  But in between those solid and implacable iron plates stood the jury members who saw only a loveable and famous football player who ran and jumped through airports on television.  They did not perceive that he was a raging cold-blooded and calculating killer capable of slashing his ex-wife’s throat seven times and stabbing her protector thirty times.

     Before her death Nicole Brown Simpson prophetically and truthfully saw, perceived, and summed up the situation better than anyone at the trial when she told her close female friends, “O.J. is going to kill me someday and he’s going to get by with it.”  

RONALD REAGAN

by William H. Benson

October 21, 1999

     Ronald Reagan’s enemies called him the Teflon President–slick, without substance.  Walter Cronkite said that of all the Presidents he knew, the most knowledgeable by far was Jimmy Carter who had a profound grasp of all the issues.  But of Ronald Reagan, Cronkite’s assessment was the exact opposite.

     Late in October of 1980 Reagan and Carter met in a final debate before the 1980 Presidential election.  President Carter came across as petulant, defensive, and accusatory;  he called for arms control to reduce the risk of war and characterized Reagan’s stated nuclear policy as “extremely dangerous and belligerant”.  Reagan, on the other hand, hammered on Carter’s dismal economic record, and asked the American public, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” 

     Carter bantered back, and Reagan with a genial toss of his head, chuckled, and said, “Now there you go again.”  Calm and reassurring, Reagan completely disarmed Carter.

     Only those who are over twenty-five years of age today can remember the Carter years.  The economy was rife with problems.  The military was being dismantled despite the threat of overwhelming worldwide Soviet superiority.  The rest of the world looked on the United States as a “has-been”.  Even though President Carter fully understood the issues, he seemed unable or was ill-equipped to overcome and solve them.  He appeared on national television and talked about a “national malaise”;  the American public reacted as if they had been slapped in the face.

     Ronald Reagan seemed to know that what the American people needed at that moment was leadership, confidence, and pride in themselves.  He gave all that and more.  Frequently during those fall days of the campaign, he said that America’s best days were not over but just about to begin.  In retrospect, Reagan was clearly right, for he set the stage for America’s prosperity today.

      He was divorced.  He was a former movie star.  At age 69 he was the oldest man ever elected to the Presidency.  But with his simple stack of 3 x 5 index cards, he prepared for the role of his life, and  the American people believed him.  He won 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.

      Critics have ripped apart the new Reagan biography entitled Dutch just published three weeks ago.  Its author, Edmund Morris, after fourteen years of research and writing, puts himself into the biography.  He is there alongside Reagan growing up in Iowa and then in the early days in California.  Morris claims that the literary device gives the biography a more immediate and personal focus for someone such as Reagan who, he says, is so mysterious and inscrutable.

     Jeffrey Hart, the columnist, blasts Morris’s biography, “This isn’t history or biography.  It’s anti-history, anti-biography.”  And to the charge that Reagan was so mysterious, Hart disagrees.

     “Reagan believed certain things, and it was obvious to everyone what they were.  He had confidence in himself.  He knew where he wanted to go, and he knew what he would try to do when he got there.  The surprising thing is that he succeeded to such a degree.”

     Reagan served two terms and then retired back to his home in California.  Diagnosed several years ago with Alzheimer’s, the horrible disease has wiped clean his personal history of what he achieved and who he is.  Two weeks ago Ronald Reagan Jr. admitted on “60 Minutes” that his father has not known him for at least five years.

     We hear from the background noise that we are about to start another campaign race.  The thoroughbreds such as Al Gore, Bill Bradley, George W. Bush, are gathering at the starting gates ready to sprint, at first in Iowa and then in New Hampshire.  Circling in a not- so-shy manner behind them are the Wild Bunch:  Warren Beatty, Jesse Ventura, Donald Trump, Patrick Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Who among this race of stallions will assume the White House in January 2001?  That history is yet to be lived, but he or she would be wise to draw from Reagan’s playbook.  Focus upon the one or two really big issues and ride them into the Oval Office.