Defection by Aircraft

by William H. Benson

October 5, 2017

     No matter how powerful a dictatorial regime, certain people will want to escape, and they may try to escape by aircraft. Once a rogue government entrusts an airplane, a jet, or a helicopter to a pilot, he or she can steer that aircraft to wherever he or she wants. During the Cold War dozens of pilots flew their Soviet Union-built MiG’s to the West and begged for asylum. They defected.

     In March and May of 1953, two Polish Air Force pilots flew their MiG-15’s to Denmark. That same year, during the Korean War, a North Korean pilot, No Kom Sok, flew his MiG-15 to an American air base in South Korea. It is housed now at the National Museum of the U. S. Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.

     On October 15, 1969, a Cuban pilot, Lieutenant Edwardo Guerra Jimenez, entered U.S. airspace undetected and landed his MiG-17 at Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami. His defection embarrassed American military officials. On that day, Air Force One was at Homestead, waiting to fly President Richard Nixon back to Washington D. C.

     The United States government returned the aircraft to the Cubans, but then ten years later, on June 12, 1979, Jimenez high-jacked Delta Airlines Flight 1061, and directed the pilot to fly to Havana. Jimenez missed his homeland, his family, and friends.

     On September 6, 1976, Viktor Belenko, a pilot based at Chuguyevka Air Base in Siberia, flew his MiG-25 to Hakodate, Japan. The Japanese allowed the Americans to examine the aircraft, and even dismantle it, but the Soviets insisted that the Japanese must return the MiG to them. They did, in thirty crates that arrived on a ship at Vladivostok’s port on November 18.

     President Gerald Ford granted Belenko asylum in the United States, and in 1980, he received United States citizenship. Even though still married to his wife back in Russia, he married a music teacher from North Dakota. They had two sons, but later divorced. Belenko found work as a consultant.

     Why did he defect? He said he was fed up with the lies. The Soviets said that “the U.S.S.R. was a wondrous paradise,” but he knew that “its citizens were poor, that the economy was depressed, and that hopelessness stalked the land.” The first time he walked into a U.S. grocery store, he suspected that officials had staged it for him, but then he learned the truth.

     Another Soviet Union pilot, Aleksandr Zuyev, a Soviet Union pilot, baked a cake laced with sleeping pills on May 20, 1989, and served a slice to all of his support staff. When all were asleep, he walked out to his MiG-29, overpowered a single mechanic there, but was shot in the arm during the scuffle. Still, he managed to fly the MiG to Trabzon, Turkey.

     On March 20, 1991, another Cuban, Orestes Lorenzo Pérez, defected when he flew his MiG-23 to the Naval Air Station at Key West. He then begged Cuban officials to allow his wife and children to migrate to Florida to join him there, but the Cuban government refused.

     On December 19, 1992, near sunset, Pérez flew a twin-engine Cessna 310 from Marathon, Florida back to Cuba, and landed on a small coastal highway near El Mamey beach, where his wife and children waited for him. They jumped in. He took off and flew the Cessna back to Marathon that night.

     The strangest flight though during the Cold War was a reverse flight, from West to East. Mathias Rust lived in West Germany, was eighteen years old in 1987, and was an inexperienced pilot.

     On May 13, 1987, he flew his Cessna 172 from Hamburg, West Germany, northwest to Iceland in the North Atlantic. From there, he flew due east, to Bergen in Norway, then to Helsinki in Finland, and then he crossed into Soviet Union airspace. Surface-to-Air Missiles were poised, ready to shoot him out of the sky, but no military official ever ordered an attack.

     On May 28, 1987, he flew over Moscow, buzzed low over Red Square and the Kremlin, but then landed on a bridge near St. Basil’s Cathedral. The authorities showed up an hour later and arrested him. He received four years in prison, but served fourteen months before officials released him.

     Why had he flown to Moscow? He said that he wanted to create an “imaginary bridge” and “reduce tensions between the two Cold War sides.” He indicated that the breakdown at the Reykjavík summit in Iceland the previous October had disturbed him. There, Reagan had met Gorbachev to discuss banning nuclear missiles, but Gorbachev refused to agree to Reagan’s proposals.

     Gorbachev called Rust’s unhindered flight to Moscow an issue of “national shame,” and he purged from the military those officials who opposed his reform policies. In December of 1987, at the Washington Summit, he and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

     The Cold War ended without a hot war, without massive casualties. Rust’s flight, and a series of defections played a small part in the Cold War’s demise.

Mikhail Gorbachev

by William H. Benson

September 21, 2017

     Mikhail Gorbachev was born in the village of Privolnoye, near the city of Stavropol, 700 miles south of Moscow, on March 2, 1931, a most horrible time for all Soviet Union citizens. The harvests were poor that year due to a drought. Plus, Stalin, the Soviet dictator, decided to collectivize the farms. He seized the nation’s farmland, and transferred ownership to either a collective or to the state.

     When the more well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, resisted Stalin’s land-grab, he crushed them. He executed or deported to Siberia hundreds of thousands of the kulaks, a misguided policy that resulted in a famine that starved to death an estimated seven million people across the Soviet Union.

     Mikhail said, “The famine was terrible. A third, if not half, the population of Privolnoye died of hunger. Entire families were dying. The half-ruined ownerless huts would remain deserted for years.” Two of his uncles, an aunt, and some cousins starved to death.

     In 1937, Stalin instituted a Great Purge, and officials arrested both of Mikhail’s grandfathers. One was deported to Irkutsk, the other was tortured, but both men returned to tell of their brutal experiences.

     Then, in 1941, Mikhail heard on the radio that the German Nazis’ war machine had marched deep into the Soviet Union. Mikhail’s father was sent to the front to fight the Nazi’s, but in 1945, after the war ended, he too returned home, and went to work on a collective farm driving a combine.

     For five summers in his teens, “from the end of June until the end of August,” Mikhail helped his father drive combines, up to “twenty hours a day.” Mikhail said, “I was proud of my ability to detect a fault in the combine, just by the sound of it.”

     In 1950, Mikhail received an acceptance letter to Moscow State University, and there he studied law for five years. He met and married Raisa, and after graduation, the couple moved back to Stavropol, where he worked as a Communist Party official. Soon, he oversaw the province’s industrial and agricultural production.

     On September 19, 1978, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party in Moscow, and his associate, Konstantin Chernenko, stopped at Stavropol for an hour or two, when on a train ride to Baku. The two men met two other men: Yuri Andropov, a party official from Stavropol, and also Mikhail Gorbachev. The four men talked as they “strolled up and down the empty train station.”

     Mikhail later wrote in his memoirs, “It was indeed a rare sight: four men who in the near future were to succeed each other as General Secretaries of the Party!” Andropov would replace Brezhnev in 1982, Chernenko would replace Andropov in 1984, and Gorbachev would replace Chernenko in 1985.

     That night though, Brezhnev looked at Gorbachev and asked him, “how are things going in your sheep empire?” Gorbachev wrote, “Stavropol accounted for 27 percent of all the fine wool produced in the Russian federation. In early summer, after lambing, thousands of flocks grazed in the steppes: a total of ten million sheep. An impressive sight, I can tell you: truly a ‘sheep empire.’”

     In November 1978, Gorbachev and Raisa moved to Moscow, after Brezhnev appointed him Secretary of the Central Committee. Then, in March of 1985, party officials appointed Gorbachev the Soviet Union’s next General Secretary, following the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko.

     Over the next seven years, Gorbachev introduced reform policies designed to ignite the country’s depressed economy and its entrenched political system. His reforms included “perestroika,” or restructuring, and “glasnost,” or openness, as well as “democratic reforms.” Few people suspected that this party official, who believed in socialism’s highest principles, would permit these drastic reforms.

     The changes proved too much and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was forced to resign on December 25, 1991. That day he reflected upon the nation seven years before.

     “Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system. Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost. We had to change everything. The totalitarian system, which prevented this country from becoming wealthy and prosperous a long time ago, has been dismantled. A breakthrough has been made on the road to democratic reforms.”

     One wonders why? “Why did a man at the head of a superpower undermine his own authority? Did he fail to understand the consequences of his actions.” He proved an anomaly among the powerful.

     Gorbachev is now eighty-six. Raisa passed away in 1999. Today, the western powers revere Gorbachev for his boldness, but in Russia, he is reviled and blamed for the loss of the Soviet Union empire. Russia’s current ruler, Vladimir Putin, has reverted the country back to “its traditional, authoritarian, anti-Western norm,” and dreams of re-establishing the empire. This proves “how exceptional Gorbachev was as a Russian ruler and world statesman.” 

Creations that Last

by William H. Benson

September 7, 2017

     Isaac Asimov wrote 515 books over 75 years, until his passing in 1992. He wrote mainly science fiction, but he also wrote plenty of non-fiction books: on physics, chemistry, biology, and literature. People still buy and read his books today, a trend that will, most likely, extend far into the future.

     Cotton Mather, the Puritan clergyman in colonial Boston, wrote 437 books, mainly of a religious nature. Almost no one today reads any of Mather’s books, a trend that will, most likely, continue.

     One of Mather’s biographers said, “There is nothing in the enormous works of Cotton Mather that the world really treasures. There is nothing like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, or Jonathon Edwards’s relentless sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

     What determines a book’s fate, whether it lives forever or dies in a few weeks?

     Cyril Connelly, a twentieth-century author, asked that question in his 1948 book, Enemies of Promise. He wanted to write a book that would remain in publication for at least ten years. He achieved that goal, and then some. Publishers still print it today, and readers still buy it, 69 years later.

     The modern-day author, Ryan Holiday, said that, “Cyril Connelly made something that stood the test of time. The book has outlived him and almost everything else published around the same time.” The subject of Enemies of Promise is literary criticism, not an exciting subject. Connelly evaluated the novelists who wrote during the first half of the twentieth-century, and he noted certain things.

     He said, “Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them which makes for their success is the first to go; they turn over night. Therefore one must look for some quality which improves with time.” He noted that many books “become best-sellers and then flop.”

     He said, “A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.”

     This year Ryan Holiday published his newest book, Perennial Seller, and in it he extends the quest for longevity into other arenas: into plays, scripts, movies, television, songs, apps, and even restaurants. What, he wonders, determines whether any creative work lives for ten years or dies in ten weeks?

     For example, Holiday tells of Stephen King’s short story, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. A film director named Frank Darabont converted that story into a 1994 film, starring Timothy Robbins and Morgan Freeman. At the box office it was a disappointment, and never made much money, but then audiences began to watch it on television.

     Holiday says, “There are minor actors in that movie, Shawshank Redemption, who receive $800-plus checks every month in residuals. Turn on your television this weekend, and you will probably find the movie playing somewhere on some channel.” It is worth watching, if you like prison escapes.

     In a strange turnabout, the Nobel Prize committee awarded Bob Dylan the 2016 prize for Literature for the lyrics to his songs, and he was a 1960’s contemporary of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Holiday says, “Dylan’s music holds true and has ‘transcended his time.’”

     Holiday’s favorite heavy metal band is “Iron Maiden.” Their songs receive very “little radio airplay, but they have sold more than 85 million albums over a four-decade-long career. They are one of the highest-earning acts in the world, and they travel from sold-out stadium to sold-out stadium in a Boeing 757 piloted by the lead singer,” Bruce Dickinson.

     Unknown to most, except to their fans, “Iron Maiden” has enjoyed success for forty years, an incredible statistic in a business that washes out most bands in less than five years. Lady Gaga says, “When people say to me that I am the next Madonna, I reply, ‘No, I’m the next Iron Maiden.’”

     According to Holiday, creativity at this level requires two things: a superb over-the-top product, and a decades-long marketing plan. Creating anything worthwhile, with lasting potential—a book, a movie, a song, a heavy metal concert, a business—is hard work. The creator cannot short its content.

     George Orwell, in his essay, “Why I Write,” said, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

     Cyril Connelly said, “We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.”

     I know I am unusual, but I appreciate colonial American history as much, or even more, than science fiction. I estimate that I have read equal amounts of both Isaac Asimov and Cotton Mather, but nowhere near all, or even a fraction, of their books.

School is Boring

by William H. Benson

August 24, 2017

     Generations of students have said, “School is boring!” One person pointed out that school bores students because learning is difficult, and that “boredom” and “difficult” are one-in-the-same. When a serious student pushes aside all distractions, un-clutters his mind, and listens in quiet silence as the teacher explains a difficult concept, boredom can and will sneak in.

     A journalist named Manoush Zomorodi has started a campaign that calls for a “digital detox” program. In her two books—Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out, and Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self—she suggests that at least for an hour every day we should lay aside the tweets, text messages, e-mails, television, and social media, and experience sixty minutes of profound boredom.

     She argues that when we practice boredom, when we refuse to reach for the cell phone, it is then that our brains slip into the “default mode.” We day dream. We make connections. We set autobiographical goals. We give the unconscious part of our minds permission to think in new channels, to think of new and even brilliant ideas, and to jumpstart our creativity. Zomorodi says, “there is a connection between boredom and original thinking.”

     That, I say, is an interesting idea.

     The writer Ann Lamont pointed out in a recent TED talk that “every single electronic device will work better if on occasion you turn it off, let it rest, and then reboot it, including yourself.”

     In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, he suggests that it is e-mail and social media that prevent us from experiencing moments of “deep work.”

     Newport offers four rules. Build deep work rituals. Embrace boredom. Quit social media. Drain the shallows, the duties that are routine and trivial. He says, “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, and what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.”

     Most reviewers glow with enthusiasm for Newport’s book and give it five out of five stars, but the few nay-sayers criticize its length. One critic says, “Not worth reading—spent a lot of time. Would be absolutely sufficient to read an article on the topic. Maybe two. I like the idea, but it is repeated all over again without adding anything useful.”

     Another says, “Boring and a waste of money.” A third says, “Surprisingly shallow. Can be summed up with ‘focus’ and ‘limit distractions.’ I just saved you 270 pages and three hours.” In other words, to the critical readers, Deep Work is not as deep as it is shallow.

     A remedy for difficult and boring: engage in constructive criticism, like Newport’s critics did. A good student will ask herself certain questions often: Do I agree with the writer? Do I agree with the professor? Do I disagree with this concept? How can I improve this?” Students can learn much if they step onto the path of serious criticism, rather than follow the road of passive acceptance.

     The dialectic philosophers, Marx and Engels, labelled their formal criticism as “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” The Chinese call it “yin and yang,” two forces that complement and interconnect with each other. Students can simplify the process by listing on paper the “pro’s and con’s” of a decision.

     When we question everything that we see and hear and read, when we invert ideas on top of their heads, when we think and act and talk like a critic, it is then that we might learn something useful.

     David Denby, the film critic, points out in his book, Great Books, that Homer and the other ancient Greek authors worked “anagnorisis” into their works. That is the moment in a literary work when a character recognizes another person, and sees what that person represents. For example, in Homer’s Odyssey, anagnorisis happens when Odysseus sees Penelope, his wife, after years of separation. Denby says “these are tortuous scenes of shame and love and recognition.”

     On occasion, in a classroom, a student will wake up, hear the teacher’s words, and recognize something that he or she is saying. The thought resonates inside that student. Difficulty is conquered. Boredom flies out the window. Alas, those precious moments are fleeting. 

     A determined student was asked if a class she had already taken was difficult. She, in turn, asked, “By what terms are you defining difficult—by frequency, intensity, or duration?”

     Benjamin Franklin said, “When a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” He also said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

SETI

by William H. Benson

August 10, 2017

     One day in the 1940’s, a group of atomic scientists were discussing the possibility of intelligent life on planets outside our solar system, when one of them, Enrico Fermi, asked a blunt question, “So? Where is everybody?”

     Now known as the Fermi Paradox, what he asked was, “If there are billions of planets in the universe capable of generating and supporting life, and millions of intelligent species out there, then how come none of them have ever visited Earth, or even contacted Earth?”

     His question stumped his friends then and all those who have considered the question since then. We have no hard evidence, and no one yet has detected radio waves that originated on a distant planet. Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact,” and the 1997 film of the same name, starring Jodie Foster, considered the events that would transpire if an astronomer ever did detect a message.   

     Members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence institute look and listen for life elsewhere. Two prominent American astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake founded SETI in November 1984. Based in Mountain Home, California, its members have, so far, discovered no evidence that indicates intelligent life on a planet, other than Earth.

     If they did, the announcement would astound everyone. We would admit that we are not alone.

     In 1988, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star different than our sun. By 2003, astronomers listed seventy exoplanets, and by last month, that number had increased to 3,621. The possibility that one exoplanet has intelligent life increases as the numbers increase.

     The physicist Stephen Hawking considers one exoplanet, Gliese 832c, most promising.

     Why did life begin here on Earth? One suggestion is that it began elsewhere and was brought here.

     Back in 1871, the British scientist Lord Kelvin suggested that “the germs of life might have been brought to the earth by some meteorite.”  Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, suggested that Earth was “deliberately seeded with life by intelligent aliens,” an idea more science fiction than science.

     Still, one idea that has gathered momentum is that life originated on Mars. The theory suggests that an asteroid or a comet struck Mars in the distant past, and that ejected a Martian rock into outer space, that then struck Earth. Inside that rock were the assembled amino acids needed to start life here.

     The idea may have some merit. Of the 61,000 identified meteorites that have struck Earth, scientists have concluded that, as of March 3, 2014, 132 originated on Mars. For example, on September 28, 1969, a meteorite from Mars 4.5 billion years old, rained down upon Murchison, Victoria, in Australia, and once chemists peered into its structure, they identified seventy-four assembled amino acids.

     But then the idea begs the question, “How did life begin on Mars?”

     On November 16, 1974, at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, the astronomer Frank Drake aimed the giant radio telescope there toward M13, a cluster of about 300,000 stars in the Hercules constellation, and blasted 1,679 pulses, over 168 seconds. He chose the number 1,679, because it is a semi-prime number, the product of two prime numbers, 73 and 23.

     “Nature never uses prime numbers,” Drake says. “But mathematicians do.”

     By x’s and o’s, in binary language, on a grid, Drake transmitted “the numbers one through ten, the atomic numbers of the five most important elements, a pixelated image of a human body, a sketch of the solar system, and another sketch of the telescope.”

     For his efforts Drake received a scathing condemnation from Britain’s Royal Astronomer, Martin Ryle, who said, “any creatures out there [might be] malevolent or hungry.”

     Stephen Hawking has since urged caution also, saying that “we should be wary of sending out messages or answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like the Native Americans who encountered Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”

     A thing to consider is how merciless Mother Nature can act. One species evolves, and another slaughters it off. The old die off, and the new live on. Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest” leaves little room for pity. Aliens may not feel any compassion for planet Earth’s current rulers.

     The cartoonist Bill Watterson said, “The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.”