THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

by William H. Benson

December 17, 1998

     Their father was a bishop in the United Brethern Church, and they owned a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio.  They were Orville and Wilbur Wright, and they dreamed of flying.  Told that the winds along the Atlantic coast were consistent, perfect for testing wings, they devoted a half dozen seasons on the sandy beaches at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  And there, finally, on December 17, 1903 their Wright Flyer flew four times.  A camera snapped the picture of Orville lying prone on the wing, face forward, and Wilbur running alonside on the sand.

      What the Wright Brothers did where so many others had failed was to master the three essentials of flight.  First, they designed wings with sufficient lifting power to sustain their machine in the air.  Next, they built themselves a power plant consisting of engine and propeller capable of moving the craft through the air fast enough so that air rushing over the wings generated enough lift to keep the machine airbore.  Finally, they developed a system of controlling the movement of their machine so that one it was off the ground, they could keep it off the ground and direct its movement.

      Each of those steps were painstakingly taken in that order.  Designing the wing came first.  At Kitty Hawk atop those sandy hills, they glided the wing to the bottom, and by trial and error they came upon the warped-wing design.  Then, they fashioned and mounted a lightweight engine on the wing, hacked out two wooden propellers, and with bicycle chains connected the engine to the propellers.  They came upon control by designing ailerons, and a tail assembly equipped with rudder and elevators.

     The resemblance between the Wright Flyer and today’s sleek modern aircraft is somewhat vague and indistince, but resemblance is real enough;  for the underlying principles of flight discovered by the Wrights and applied to the design of their aircraft are the same immutable principles that apply today.

     Technological advances have appeared so frequent and at such a dizzy pace during the 20th century that their wonder becomes dimmed.  Once the breakthrough in knowledge has occurred, it becomes “achievement” which yields to “accomplishment”, and finally it is added to humankind’s wealth of ideas simply as new “technology”.  Somewhere in the process the inspiring awe and the eye-popping amazement at witnessing a human miracle is lost.  For example, the computer has become ho-hum, another office and household tool.

      For eons of ages humankind lived without three crucial elements of civilization: the alphabet, the wheel, and the base ten number system, which even school children today can understand and use.  Today we take them for granted, and yet someone (or some people) in the distant past thought of them when no else had.  No one in the Western Hemisphere prior to 1492 A.D. had thought of them, and there was no shortage of intelligent people here.  But, lacking the alphabet, the wheel, and the base ten number system had seriously undermined the progress and advancement of the major cultures in the Western Hemisphere such as the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas.  They were tools sorely needed and yet, never thought of.

     It makes me wonder what technological tools are we still missing today that happen to lie just beyond our knowledge horizon waiting to be found by people a lot like Orville and Wilbur Wright.

JACK KEVORKIAN

by William H. Benson

December 3, 1998

     Western Civilization, more or less, since the ancient Greeks has agreed that life is valued thing, precious, to be extended to as great a length as possible.  Quantity over quality.  Eastern Civilization has not always prized life this way.  For example, when the Spanish under Cortez marched into Tenochitlan, the Aztec’s capital, they witnessed the gruesome extrication of a live and beating heart from a sacrificed slave that was then offered up to the Aztec’s gods.  Horrified the Spanish were at the cheapness placed upon human life by the Aztecs.

     Four and a half centuries later on December 3, 1967 in South Africa,  Dr. Christiian Barnard stood in amazement and watched as a living human heart from a dead 25-year-old woman killed in an accident began beating inside the chest of a 53-year-old grocer, Louis Washkansky.  This, the first human heart transplant, furthered Washkansky’s sojourn until lung complications ended his life on the 21st.  Still it was18 days.

     Now, three decades later Western Civilization’s assumption that life is to be lengthened no matter the cost in terms of pain is being challenged by Jack Kevorkian.  (He cannot be referred to as a doctor because he lost his medical license in 1991 and now only prescribes poisons.)  A week ago Sunday evening “60 Minutes” played a video in which Kevorkian lethally injected Tom Yount, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, with potassium chloride and ended his life.  This time Kevorkian did not assist in a suicide, because Yount did not flip any switch nor pull any plug.

      Fascinated by death, the 70-year-old Kevorkian demonstrates a self-destructive attitude, issuing a blatant and face-slapping challenge to the legal authorities to force a debate and to change the law.  He acts as if he cares not what happens to him personally, and not a few have wondered at his sanity.

     “Our morality is based upon mythology. . . . Either I will go to jail and starve myself to death or my attackers will change their thinking about life and about death.”

     The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates argued that through proper and careful reasoning right and wrong can be known, that truth can be distinguished from falsehood, and that people can determine what is good and best for them–a fundamental tenant of Western Civilization.  But, after a judicial ruling convicted Socrates of misleading the young men, his pupils, away from the gods, instead of escaping, the 70-year-old Socrates willingly drank his hemlock, his poison saying,  “And you too, judges, must face death with a good courage, and believe this is a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”

     Jack Kevorkian deliberately jumped into the middle of an ethical dilemma forcing the authorities to act, and, of course, they did, serving him legal papers last week. 

      Here we are swimming in “out of bounds” territory and wandering in an ethical wilderness created by a medical pariah, a maverick. Certainly, a Jack Kevorkian should not be the one to lead us through, nor to even formulate the questions around which we must grapple.  I cannot consider him the “hero” the Mike Wallace’s have made of him, for I find his idea to concentrate power into the hands of physicians who will decide who lives and who dies an abhorrent thought.  But, in Kovorkian’s ideal world, doctors would decide when your life is no longer worth living.            

     If given a choice between Dr. Christiian Barnard or Jack Kevorkian for personal medical help, schedule my appointments with the heart surgeon and not the so-called “doctor” of death.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD

by William H. Benson

November 19, 1998

     At 12:30 p.m. the first bullet struck the pavement near the right rear of the the big automobile and then angled toward the curb.  From the shattered concrete a burst of sand hit James Tague’s face, who was standing beyond that same curb.  The second bullet penetrated President John F. Kennedy’s back, exited his throat, entered the Texas Governor John Connally’s back, exited his chest, and struck his wrist.  The wounds for either man were not fatal.

     Another bystander at Dealy Plaza that day, Howard Brennan, looked up to the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository to see the assassin take aim for a third bullet.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five. . . . In those five seconds of dumbfounded immobility on the ground, President Kennedy lost his life, for the third shell entered the right rear of the skull.

     “This one the President did not feel.  The light had gone out with no memories, no regrets.  After forty-six and a half years, he was again engulfed by the dark eternity from which he had come.  For good or evil, his work, his joys, his responsibilities were complete. . . . The heart would stop in a few moments, when blood pressure dropped to zero,”  wrote the author Jim Bishop.

     At exactly 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy  was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital.

     The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, dropped the rifle, bought a pop at a machine, took the steps to the ground floor, walked some blocks away from the building, caught a bus, and then caught a taxi.  At home he grabbed a snub-nosed revolver and walked along the Dallas streets.  Patrolman J. D. Tippit, cruising the streets, happened to see Oswald who matched the description of a 25 to 30-year-old male wearing a work jacket and slacks.  Tippit got out on the driver’s side, and immediately Oswald fired five shots hitting Tippit four times and killing him.

      Oswald ran off, pistol in the air, and ducked into a movie house where minutes later he was arrested and eventually charged for the murder of John F. Kennedy and of J. D. Tippit.

      On Sunday November 24 at 11:21 a.m. at police headquarters, Jack Ruby, an unstable Dallas nightclub owner, then shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. 

      Since those horrible days of 35 years ago, the American public has wanted to believe in a conspiracy.  Just a week afterword, a poll showed that only 29% believed that Oswald acted alone.  All the factors were there to create suspicion and mystery.  Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to Russia and then returned.  He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and pro-Cuban.  Jack Ruby, a minor thug, had ties to the Mafia.  Fingers pointed at the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, and Jimmy Hoffa.  Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, “JFK”, built and elaborated on the conspiracy theory to a degree that virtually many government institutions were guilty.

      Walter Cronkite recently in his book dismissed all these theories as “pure bunk”.

       The Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes and all 10,400,000 words concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, without help, without coercion, nor at anyone’s suggestion.  That conclusion has been backed up and confirmed by numerous investigative journalists and has never been effectively challenged.

     This efflorescence of rumor and surmise, of speculation and hypothesis, of falsehood and distortion, of fantasy and fabrication, and of hallucinogenic colors has only now begun to fade after 35 dizzy years.

FATHER CHARLES COUGHLIN

by William H. Benson

November 5, 1998 

    The election is now behind us, and the results are known.  No matter the outcome, Rush Limbaugh, I am sure, is peeved.  The king of day-time radio, Rush hates the liberals and especially Bill Clinton and will not rest until Clinton is booted out of the Oval office.  On any given day some 20 million listeners tune in to Rush’s Excellence in Broadcasting (EIB) Network to hear him bash the President and throw out his opinions.  “Entertaining” it might be; “wise in its approach” is another story.

     “This is just another example of the left’s stereotype of the conservative party in our nation. . . . This is a battle for the very soul of democracy. . . . Prepare your minds to be challenged as they have never been challenged before. . . . Megadittoes, dittoheads! . . . My show works because people are tired of having their intelligence insulted.  They enjoy a show which respects their intelligence. . . . A quick break and then back to the phones.”

     Recently, I read a book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, in which the author, Al Franken, pokes fun at this 300-pound opinionated radio personality.  Franken points out some obvious inconsistencies in Rush’s bold statements.

     For example, Rush could not have voted for Ronald Reagen, because he never even bothered to register to vote until in the 1990’s when someone shamed him into doing so.  Rush says the feminist (which he pronounces “feminazi”) movement was designed only to give unattractive women a position in our society.  And yet, Franken reveals that Rush has been married three times.  His last wife he supposedly met through e-mail.  And Rush, who hates all government programs designed to help the downtrodden, once collected unemployment insurance.

     Franken ends up labelling Limbaugh the world’s biggest hypocrite.

     But other Presidents have had their critics.  For example, Franklin Roosevelt had Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Detroit, Michigan.  Father Coughlin vented his bitter opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs through a radio show which, like Rush, quickly caught on and was heard by millions.  A self-proclaimed champion of the poor, Coughlin believed that FDR was doing too little for the disadvantaged.

     In the 1936 election, which Roosevelt won by a landslide, Coughlin helped form the Union Party and support its candidate for President, William Lemke, who received about 2% of the popular vote.  Through his radio show and magazine, Social Justice, the radio priest bitterly denounced Roosevelt.  In fact, the accusations went so far that, just prior to the vote, Coughlin received a severe criticism from the Italian newspaper, the “Obsservatore Romano”, which usually reflected the Vatican’s opinion.

     “Father Coughlin had violated proprieties in his harsh attacks on President Roosevelt’s efforts to aid the poor.”

     On November 7, 1936, just days after the election Father Coughlin said good-bye to his radio audience, stating that his Union party was thoroughly discredited by the recent election.  “The Union is not dead; it merely sleeps,” he said.  From now on his Union Party would adopt a “policy of silence”.  But his extremist views continued in his magazine, going so far as to accuse Jews and Communists for the nation’s problems.

     Father Charles Coughlin continued as a priest, retiring in 1966, and passing away on October 27, 1979.  Today, he remains a footnote in history books as one of FDR’s opponents, known and remembered by only a few, which is probably more lasting notoriety than Rush Limbaugh will ever have.

     Who is Rush Limbaugh?  Who is Father Charles Coughlin?  In sixty years the answers will be the same, “I don’t know.  I never heard of them.” 

NIKITA KHRUSHCEV and the UNITED NATIONS

 by William H. Benson

October 22, 1998

     United Nations Day is Saturday, October 24.  My awareness of a meeting place in New York City for representatives from all the world’s nations dawned on October 12, 1960 when I (stuck in the first grade) was told how the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had taken off his right shoe and pounded the table.  “Because he was mad,” was the answer I got to the question, “Why?”

     Later, I learned that what had enraged him was a speech by a Phillippine diplomat who accused the Soviet Union of depriving the Eastern European nations of “political and civil rights”, warning that they would be soon “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.”  Then later, Khrushchev banged his fist when the Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold spoke up, and finally he topped things off by shouting at the dignified British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

     The American public, the journalists, and even the comedians never forgot this outrageous display of public behavior by the Soviet Union’s leader;  Nikita became the focal point of a lot of jokes.  Gauche, inappropriate, rude, inpolite his behavior was, like arguing with the minister during a sermon on Sunday morning at church.  Adults just do not do such things. 

     Khrushchev was short, red-faced, balding, with a wide smile that revealed gapped teeth.  It was he who had denounced Stalin in a 50-page speech in February 1956 to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.  Khrushchev admitted the truth finally to the Soviet citizens that Stalin was a brutal, psychologically deranged torturer, who committed atrocious acts of mass murder creating a powerful reign of terror. 

      Then, it was Khrushchev who met his match in Vice-President Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.  At the “model kitchen display” sharp exchages between the two men escalated into an argument over capitalism and communism.  Each seemed unwilling to back down in this verbal confrontation of one-upmanship.

      At one point during his public posturing Khrushchev boasted that “we will bury you.”

      Exactly two years after the shoe-pounding display, in October of 1962 the United Nations found itself in the middle of an eyeball to eyeball showdown between Khrushchev and the 45-year-old U. S. President, John F. Kennedy, over certain missiles on Fidel Castro’s Communistic Cuba.  Khrushchev blinked.  He agreed to a United Nations proposal that the Soviet Union would stop sending missiles to Cuba and ship all the weapons back to the Soviet Union if the U.S. would end its blockade of Cuba.  Once again, the Soviet Union’s citizens felt the stings of this public humiliation.

      (Thirteen months later police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with murdering President Kennedy.  The 24-year-old Oswald once had defected to the Soviet Union and had been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  Sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s cause and to Communism, he was angered and troubled by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missiles.)

      Exactly two years after the missile crisis, on October 17, 1964, the Kremlin’s bosses kicked Nikita Khrushchev out.  Pravda called his leadership one of “harebrained scheming, immature conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality.”  Seven years later on September 11, 1971, Khrushchev died a nonperson in Moscow and was not permitted a state funeral, far removed from the powerful at the Kremlin as well as at the United Nations, where he had embarrassed himself and his country