Willie Lincoln

by William H. Benson

April 6, 2017

     Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever, on Thursday, February 20 1862. The most likely cause was from drinking contaminated water drawn from the Potomac River. His mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, was hysterical with grief, and the President suffered his own private agony.

     He said, “My poor boy He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so much. It is hard, hard to have him die.”

     Four days later, the Lincoln family laid Willie to rest in a vault at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, a Washington D.C. district. In the days ahead, the grief-stricken President returned again and again to the crypt to lift Willie’s body out of his vault and hold him, a strange and unusual action.

     The modern-day author, George Saunders, writes short stories, mainly of the supernatural. He took the historical facts associated with Willie’s passing and then wrote a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, now a best-seller that he first published on February 14. To the historical characters, Saunders adds a full cast of fictional characters, spirits of those buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery.

     “Bardo” is a Tibetan word from Buddhism that refers to a state of existence between death and rebirth, that varies in length according to a person’s conduct in life. It is the son Willie who is in the bardo, and not the father Abraham.

     In each chapter, Saunders offers a series of quotes—most are a line or two, but some a page—that he lifts from countless historical documents and then provides attribution, as to where he found each.

     For example, “’Willie was burning with fever on the night of the fifth, as his mother dressed for the party. He drew every breath with difficulty. She could see that his lungs were congested and she was frightened.’ In ‘Twenty Days,’ by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt.”   

     The dead gaze at the lad, and talk amongst themselves. For example, one of the dead, Reverend Everly Thomas, says, “’The newcomer was a boy of some ten or eleven years. A handsome little fellow, blinking and gazing cautiously about him.” Then, after Lincoln visited the crypt, the spirit Hans Vollman said, “And yet no one had ever come here to hold one of us, while speaking so tenderly.”

     Rather than build a plot or a storyline, Saunders paints a collage, a verbal work of art. He intersperses the words of the those who witnessed Willie’s death and burial, with those of the walking, and talking, dead. One book reviewer said, “Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, a theatrical panorama of voices.”

     In a “Letter to the Editor,” dated Sunday, March 12, 2017, Jay H. Lefkowitch of New York points out how similar Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo is to an episode of The Twilight Zone, called “The Passerby.” (Season 3, episode 4.) Rod Serling wrote the story, and it first aired October 6, 1961.

     Serling begins, “It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomattox. It’s littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams. In just a moment, you will enter a strange province that knows neither North nor South, a place we call The Twilight Zone.”

     A woman named Lavinia rocks back and forth on a chair on the front porch of a burned out house somewhere in the South. A stream of wounded and crippled soldiers pass by her house, each anxious to get to the end of the road, obscured by fog. She soon realizes that they are dead, Civil War casualties.

     Lavinia sees her husband Jud, and he tells her that he too is dead, killed in a battle, and that she also died of a fever. He wants to walk on, into the fog, but she hesitates, falls to her knees, looks up, and sees Abraham Lincoln standing over her, his stove-pipe hat atop his head.

     Lincoln helps Lavinia up to her feet, and then he quotes Shakespeare’s words from his play Julius Caesar. “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” Lincoln tells her that he is the final passerby, “the final casualty of the war.” She races ahead to join Jud, in the fog, at the end of the road.

     Rod Serling concludes the episode. “Incident on a dirt road during the month of April, the year 1865. As we’ve already pointed out, its a road that won’t be found on a map, but it’s one of many that lead in and out of The Twilight Zone.”

     George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Rod Serling’s “The Passerby.”

     The actor James Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington D. C. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and he died on Saturday, just hours away from Sunday morning, Easter. A funeral train carried the President’s body, and that of his son Willie, back to their home in Springfield, Illinois, where they were buried side by side in the family plot on May 4, 1865.

Comedy

by William H. Benson

March 23, 2017

     We now stand midway between the Ides of March, and April Fool’s Day. The first marks the day when Cassius and Brutus stabbed and assassinated Julius Caesar, March 15, 44 B.C., and the second is a day reserved for harmless jokes that people play on each, but without cruel motives. On occasion tragedy yields to comedy, but then comedy can and will defer to tragedy.

     Tragedy is heavy, somber, intended to shock and horrify; comedy is light-hearted and playful fun. Although at opposite poles, both literary forms William Shakespeare mastered. His tragedies, such as Julius Caesar, and his comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, rank among the world’s best.

     Read the newspapers and discover the world’s tragedies. Somewhere in the world everyday, there is a tragedy unfolding. But somewhere in the world there is a comic ready to stand up, break into a monologue, and incite laughter. Look for them, and you will find them. I prefer the happy comic to the bearer of grim news. The jester’s jibes, I have found, are more satisfying than the king’s dull talk.

     A theory of humor, called the “detection of mistaken reasoning,” argues that humor evolved in our species, because “it strengthens the ability of the brain to find mistakes in actual belief structures.” It is the comic who pokes fun at the ridiculous ideas that people proclaim as true.

     Daniel Gilbert, now a Harvard psychology professor, wrote a most interesting article that appeared in the American Psychologist in February 1991, entitled “How Mental Systems Believe.” Gilbert argued that to comprehend a statement or idea, a person must first believe it. After that, upon reflection, he or she can continue to believe it, or suspend judgment, or yield to doubt and dismiss the notion.

     Daniel Kahneman in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, calls the first belief that coincides with comprehension “thinking fast,” or our brain’s System 1. It is quick, nimble, and impulsive. The second belief, or what we may call doubt, he calls “thinking slow,” or our brain’s System 2. It is ponderous, less enthusiastic to commit, and demands further information before proceeding.

     Kahneman writes, “System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving.” This two-tiered system balances our thoughts, and works to keep us out of trouble. He also points out that “when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 2 is sometime busy and often lazy.” On those occasions, you and I will jump to a premature conclusion.

     It is then that the comic should, or even must, step in and do her or his job. We need the comic to take center stage, burst into a monologue, wake us up, jar us loose from our hidebound thoughts, and bring into the light a superior set of ideas.

     Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, a satirical news program on Comedy Central, from 1999 until 2015. David Letterman hosted The Late Show with David Letterman until May 20, 2015. I say that both comedians retired two years too early. We need them today. Still, we have Alec Baldwin imitating Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, but we need more comedians now, far more.

     On March 5, David Marchese, of the New York magazine, interviewed a full-bearded David Letterman, now 69-years-old. Marchese asked him, “How would you interview Donald Trump?”

     Letterman said, “I would start with a list. ‘You did this. You did that. Don’t you feel stupid for having done that, Don? And who’s this goon, Steve Bannon, and why do you want a white supremacist as one of your advisers? Come on, Don, we both know you’re lying. Now, stop it.’ Yeah, I would like an hour with Donald Trump; an hour and a half.”

     Over the years, Letterman interviewed Trump a number of times. Letterman remembers, “He was a joke of a wealthy guy. We didn’t take him seriously. He’d sit down, and I would just start making fun of him. He never had any retort. He was big and doughy, and you could beat him up. He seemed to have a good time, and the audience loved it.”

     Letterman perceives the need for more comedy now. “We gotta figure out ways to protect ourselves from him. We gotta take care of ourselves here now. Comedy’s one of the ways that we can protect ourselves. Alec Baldwin deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

     In Shakespeare’s play, Henry VI, Part II, his character Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do. Let’s kill all the lawyers.” A modern-day Shakespeare would instead have his character say, “The first thing we do. Let’s kill all the comedians.” Today, jesters can upset the kings more than the lawyers. It is the comedians who pose the greater threat to a dictator’s power.

     In anticipation of April Fool’s Day, join me in reciting King Lear’s words. “I cry that we have come to this great stage of fools.”    

Richard Nixon vs. the Media

by William H. Benson

March 9, 2017

     Lyndon Baines Johnson was ensconced in the White House when the war in Vietnam was raging and spinning out of control. The nation’s media—the newspapers and television—reported to the public the war’s horrific battles, and the numbers killed each week. It was an ugly time.

     On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite offered “a rare, brief, and potent editorial” on the war at the close of his television news broadcast. He said that the U.S. should cease the fighting now.  ‘[T]he only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.”     

     In the White House, LBJ watched Cronkite’s editorial and then remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” meaning that if he ran, he would lose the 1968 election. Two weeks later, on March 12, LBJ announced he would decline to run for a second term. Walter Cronkite, a member of the unelected media, helped lead Johnson out of the Presidency.

     The British historian, Paul Johnson, said that Johnson’s “will to win the war sagged at this time,” mainly because of “media criticism, especially from its East Coast power-centers.” He also said that, “The trouble with the Washington establishment was that it believed what it read in the newspapers—always a fatal error for politicians.”

     If Johnson had difficulty with the media, his successor into the Oval Office, Richard Nixon, initiated an all-out war. His animosity for the press was reciprocated. Each loathed the other.

     In 1962, Nixon had run for California’s governor and lost. After the election, Nixon lashed out at the press. “Just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” That proved not true, because he won the 1968 Presidential election, and endured several press conferences thereafter.

     Nixon displayed a paranoid attitude towards the press. He told his staff, “Remember, the press is the enemy. When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend. They are all enemies.”

     One commentator at the time said, “The men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969; breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the second time round.”

     Paul Johnson remarks that, “It was something new for the American media to wish to diminish the presidency.” Instead of “goading a comatose legislature” into action, the press now scrutinized and attacked the President, convinced that “something was going on.” Johnson said, “The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.”

     On June 13, 1971, Nixon and his staff were startled to read the “Pentagon papers,” in the New York Times, “a 7,000 word survey of American involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War Two until 1968.” Its author was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation employee.

     Convinced that White House employees had leaked certain information to Ellsberg, Nixon’s staff assembled an anti-leak unit that received the name “Plumbers.” It was a short step then to criminal activities: breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, and into the Democratic Party’s campaign office in Washington’s Watergate Hotel.

     Nixon learned of these events afterwards, but then he participated in the coverup, a mistake that led to his impeachment and forced his resignation.

     Our current president, after just weeks into the job, decided to attack the media, because he did not appreciate all that he read in the newspapers and saw and heard on television. He lashed out at the reporters and called them “dishonest,” peddlers of “fake news,” and said the press “is out of control.”

     He then labelled the media, “the enemy of the people,” a quick phrase that the twentieth century’s most vicious tyrants pinned on anyone who dared to question their authority. Senator John McCain remarked that an attack upon the press’s veracity and legitimacy is “how dictators get started.”

     On February 25, the president announced he will not attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the end of April. Only one of him against dozens of reporters.

     When a hostile press confronts a president, some, like Johnson, will rollover and die, but others, like Nixon, will declare war. Journalists, though, when provoked, can and will fight back. “If anything, ‘journalism as an institution has reasserted itself’ in the Age of Trump.” Today the media is convinced that “something is going on” between Trump and Putin, and they will leave no stone unturned.

     Nixon learned too late Mark Twain’s maxim, “Never pick a fight with people who buy printers ink by the barrel.” Breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the third time around. One wonders who will win this war, Trump or the media?

Booker T. Washington

by William H. Benson

February 23, 2017

     Booker T. Washington says he was born in either 1858 or 1859. In his book Up from Slavery, he writes, “I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth.” He describes his home as a fourteen-by-sixteen cabin, that he shared with his mother, brother, and sister. The family “slept in and on a bundle of filthy rags laid upon the dirt floor.” In the cabin, his mother cooked meals for the plantation’s owners.

     Although Booker did not know the identify of his father, he harbored no ill will towards him. He said, “But I do not find especial fault with him. He was simply another unfortunate victim of the institution which the Nation unhappily had engrafted upon it at that time.”

     Booker wanted to pursue an education, but he admitted, “I had no schooling whatever while I was a slave.” After the Civil War ended and his white owners declared him free, his stepfather expected him to work in the salt and coal mines in West Virginia rather than permit him to attend school. He said, “This decision seemed to cloud my every ambition.”

     When still in his teens, he learned of a school in Virginia established for black students, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Alone, with very little money, Booker walked and rode wagons and coaches the five hundred miles to Hampton. There, he worked as a janitor, attended classes, studied books, and learned certain basic life skills.

     Of his days there, he writes, “Life at Hampton was a constant revelation to me; it was constantly taking me into a new world. The matter of having meals at regular hours, of eating on a tablecloth, using a napkin, the use of the bathtub and of the tooth-brush, as well as the use of sheets upon the bed, were all new to me.” Booker stuck with it, learned his lessons well, adopted them, and graduated.

     In 1881, when still in his twenties, he accepted an offer to establish a normal college in Tuskegee, Alabama for the training of black teachers, and there Booker remained the rest of his life.

     At Tuskegee, he established the guiding principle that, “every student must learn some industry.” He expected the students to build the campus’s buildings, manufacture the bricks needed there, and also construct wagons and carts. The students’ parents objected. They wrote letters of protest. They showed up at Booker’s door and confronted him, but he says, “I gave little heed to these protests.”

     He reasoned, “The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end make his way regardless of his race.” A community needs houses, bricks, wagons, and carts, but may not need someone who can provide “an analysis of Greek sentences.” He wanted his students to “lift labour up from mere drudgery and toil, and learn to love work for its own sake.”

     He insisted upon cleanliness. No grease stains or missing buttons or tears on their clothing.

     In addition, he writes, “The gospel of the tooth-brush is a part of our creed at Tuskegee. No student is permitted to remain who does not keep and use a tooth-brush. It has been interesting to note the effect that the use of the tooth-brush has had in bringing about a higher degree of civilization among the students.” He also taught his students “to bathe as regularly as to take their meals.”

     In his quiet way, Booker T. Washington led his students towards a better life. He wanted them to possess the skills that their respective communities needed, to appreciate and respect physical work, to develop lifetime hygienic habits, and to read and write the English language with skill.

     Booker’s methods contrast with those of another African-American leader. Frederick Douglass said, “The only way to guarantee true black freedom is to give blacks the vote,” and so he placed education second to the ballot. Booker though avoided political confrontations; he was too busy training students.

     Up from Slavery‘s style is forthright and candid, and void of all animosity. He writes, “I have long since ceased to cherish any spirit of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race. No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction, and, besides, it was recognized and protected for years by the General Government.”

     Booker prizes skill first, above all else. “My experience is that there is something in human nature which always makes an individual recognize and reward merit.” “Every individual should get much consolation of the great human law, that merit is in the long run, recognized and rewarded.”

     Because Booker was born into a degraded and powerless position, he viewed his life’s direction as always up, towards a more civilized and pleasant life. He invited his students to follow him, and many did. Each February is designated as African-American History Month. Find a copy of Up from Slavery, and read for yourself Booker T. Washington’s quiet and disarming wisdom.

A Romance Gone Bad

by William H. Benson

February 9, 2017

     La La Land‘s script follows a familiar pattern. A boy named Sebastian and a girl named Mia meet, and fall in love. They share their dreams with each other. He wants to play the piano in his own jazz club. She wants to achieve fame as a Hollywood actress. They work hard to achieve their dreams, but their personal lives move in separate directions.

      Five years later, Mia walks into a jazz club and sees Sebastian on the stage. He stares down at her, and she stares back at him. He says nothing. Instead, he walks to his piano, and plays their, by then, special song, Epilogue. He finishes, and she stands up and leaves the club. Neither speaks to the other.

     What do you say to a former girlfriend, or a previous boyfriend?

     In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby, the young, single, mysterious millionaire, who lives in a mansion on Long Island, carries a torch for Daisy, the supposed love of his life. He had met her five years before, fallen in love with her, and could not shake his feelings for her. He hopes now to rekindle their romance, although Daisy is now married to Tom Buchanan.

     On summer evenings, Jay Gatsby stands on the beach, and stares across the bay towards Daisy’s home, identified by a green light. He holds his arms out and stretches toward that green light. The reader sees that Gatsby is stuck in the past. He holds too tight to his memory of Daisy years before.

     What should you say to a former girlfriend, to a previous boyfriend?

     Sam Anderson, a columnist for The New York Times Magazine, wrote a short article last December on Christmas songs, and in it he argues that the best of the lot is Dan Fogelberg’s Same Old Lang Syne, first recorded in 1980. Its lyrics are haunting.

     “Met my old lover in the grocery store. The snow was falling Christmas Eve. I stood behind her in the frozen foods, and I touched her on the sleeve.” This chance meeting with his former high school girlfriend really happened on Christmas Eve 1975, at a convenience store in Peoria, Illinois. She was there to buy egg nog for her family, and he to buy whipping cream for his. He sings, “She went to hug me and she spilled her purse, and we laughed until we cried.”

     They check out their groceries, and once outside, “We bought a six-pack at the liquor store, and we drank it in her car. We drank a toast to innocence. We drank a toast to now. We tried to reach beyond the emptiness, but neither one knew how.” She tells him that she is married to an architect, and that she has seen Fogelberg’s albums in the record stores.

     They finish the beer, she kisses him, he gets out of her car, and he watches her drive away. “Just for a moment,” he sings, “I was back at school and felt that old familiar pain. And as I turned to make my way back home, the snow turned into rain.”

     What do you say to a former girlfriend, or to a previous boyfriend? Sebastian and Mia choose to say nothing. Jay Gatsby pursues the now-married Daisy, a choice that did not work out so well for him. Dan Fogelberg and his high school sweetheart drink a toast to innocence.

     Adults do odd things when placed into this circumstance. I would say that a person’s reaction to a fancy-meeting-you-moment depends upon the degree of animosity engendered at the point of the breakup, and also how far he or she has matured since then. Some remain bitter. Others get over it. 

     I struggle to find the suitable English word to describe these chance meetings with former flames and the feelings they generate. Dan Fogelberg calls it “that old familiar pain.” Can we call it “wistfulness,” “musing,” or “reminiscing?” Perhaps, but not quite.

     There are the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but for Valentine’s Day there are fifteen. They begin on February 7, Rose Day, and continue through Propose Day, Chocolate Day, Teddy Bear Day, Promise Day, Kiss Day, and Hug Day. There is also Perfume Day, Flirting Day, Confession Day, and the final day, February 21, is Breakup Day. A lot happens between that rose and the breakup.

     Perhaps we should add a sixteenth day, Surprise Meeting Day.

     Halftime at the Super Bowl and Lady Gaga sings Bad Romance. The music is ok, but the lyrics are dreadful. “You know that I want you, and you know that I need you. I want a bad, bad romance. I want your love, and I want your revenge. You and me could write a bad romance.”

     Is Lady Gaga trying to say that she wants the romance to drift into an outlandish world that makes one or both of them feel uncomfortable and distressed? If so, most people would reject such a notion.

     Someone said that “it only takes one bad boyfriend or girlfriend to realize that you deserve so much more, and that relationships resemble algebra. For instance, have you ever looked at your x and wondered y?” This year, enjoy special time with your current Valentine, and release all previous ones.