Hillbilly

by William H. Benson

December 29, 2016

     “Mountain dew” is a slang word for moonshine. The extensive marketing for the soft drink of the same name first appeared fifty years ago, in the mid-1960’s. The cartoon advertisement featured a hillbilly who wore a floppy hat, sported an unkempt beard, smiled a toothless grin, had shaggy hair, and wore ragged shirt and pants. No shoes.

     On occasion he would lift a brown jug to his lips and drink deep of his “mountain dew, and just as often, he would aim his shot gun and shoot at anyone who dared to offend him. His catch phrase, “Yahoo! It’s Mountain Dew. It’ll tickle your innards.”

     Television and movies adopted the Appalachian mountain man stereotype. There was Ernest T. Bass and Pa Darling on “The Andy Griffith Show,” Festus Haggen on “Gunsmoke,” and a string of amusing characters on “Hee Haw.” The most famous fictional hillbilly family though was the Clampett’s on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” There was Jed Clampett; his daughter, Elly May; his mother-in-law, Granny or Daisy Moses; and his nephew, Jethro Bodine, who bragged on his sixth-grade education.

     Al Capp drew the newspaper cartoon “Li’l Abner” for forty-three years. In it he featured Abner Yokum who lived in a cabin in Dogpatch, with his parents Mammy and Pappy Yokum.

     A new book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” landed on the New York Times best-seller list earlier this year. Its author, J. D. Vance, tells a compelling story of his family. His grandparents, Jim and Bonnie Vance, fled their community of Jackson, in eastern Kentucky, in the middle of the twentieth century, and followed the “Hillbilly Highway” north to Middletown, Ohio, where Jim worked in the steel mill.

1. D. lists the reasons why he calls Jim and Bonnie Vance hillbillies. They spew the most foul language. They display hair-triggered tempers, ready for a fight. They are quick to defend their family’s honor. They marry far too young. They drink far too much alcohol. They consume a poor diet. They are uneducated. College or a hope for a better future are distant dreams.

     When young, J. D. has little contact with his dad, and his mother is a hopeless drug addict who brings a string of men into their home. She turns on each of them. She screams, she throws things at them, until the tirades and the drug-induced hysteria drive each away. As a result, J. D. and his older half-sister Lindsay spend lots of time with Jim and Bonnie, who take a special interest in them

    Bonnie encourages her grandson to do well in high school. He tries, but his home life is so chaotic, and he misses so much school. Evenings Jim works with J. D. on his math problems. After high school, J. D. joins the Marines, serves one tour in Iraq, and then attends Ohio State University, where he graduates in a year and a half, even though he works at two jobs. The Marines’ discipline allows him to survive on four or five hours of sleep. He applies to Yale Law School and receives an acceptance.

1. D. is now thirty-one, works as an attorney, and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

     The book’s critics point out that J. D. is not a hillbilly. First, he is smart, focused, and driven. He sees distant goals and pursues them. Also, he worked to control his temper and cease lashing out at those he loves, and he managed to steer clear of the drugs and alcohol. Most people though cannot ace Yale law school, and cannot escape their chaotic and depressed home lives.

     Then, J. D. did not grow up in the Appalachian Mountains. Instead, he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, in the Rust Belt, two generations removed from eastern Kentucky’s economy and culture.

     One of the book’s reviewers, Paul Prather, points out that J. D. identifies certain of the Rust Belt’s negatives: “the vanished jobs in union factories and steel mills,” and that “the working class seems caught in a free fall of addiction, unemployment, fury, and hopelessness. ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ shows us how that feels up close.”

     Donald Trump, a New Yorker, who has lived his life many miles removed from either the Rust Belt or the Appalachians, tapped into those feelings of “fury and hopelessness” during his run for the Presidency. Middletown’s residents recognize that the jobs in the steel factories have “vanished,” and that the town’s middle-class workers struggle to find work. As a result, people turn to alcohol and drugs. Trump perceived their deep frustration and spoke to it.

     It is true. Middletown’s residents do suffer from rampant drug abuse. The city lies inside Butler County, and the county’s coroner recently said that that “he expects 2016 will top last year’s 189 drug overdose deaths, and that 141 of those are related to heroin or fentanyl.”

     J. D. Vance was lucky. He escaped Middletown’s drug problem, and his mother’s chaotic life, and he forged a better life for himself. He dresses well, speaks well, writes well, and holds down an excellent job. He is far from the hillbilly stereotype, and thus sees little reason to grab a gun and shoot at anyone who offends him, or to sip home-brewed “mountain dew” moonshine from a jug.

Paul Getty and Ebenezer Scrooge

by William H. Benson

December 15, 2016

On July 10, 1973, kidnappers in Rome, Italy seized J. Paul Getty III, the sixteen-year-old grandson of the oil baron and the reported wealthiest man in the world. The kidnappers sent a ransom note that demanded $17,000,000, but the grand Senior Getty refused to pay. He said, “I have fourteen grandchildren. If I pay one penny now, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.”

Some whispered that the kidnapping was a staged hoax, designed to fleece the Senior. Hence, the kidnappers cut off the boy’s right ear and a lock of his hair, and mailed the two body parts to a newspaper, as proof that they had custody of the grandson.

The kidnappers negotiated down to a rock bottom $3,000,000, but then Senior agreed to pay only $2,200,000, the maximum amount his advisors claimed was tax deductible. Senior then required Junior, the child’s father, to sign a promissory note for a loan of $800,000, the difference, and then charged his own son four percent interest.

This was well within the Senior’s character. A miser to a fault and known for his tight-fisted ways, the Senior Getty had installed coin-operated telephones for his visitors’ use when in his home, in order to prevent them from running up excessive phone bills.

The kidnappers released J. Paul Getty III on December 15, 1973, ten days before Christmas, a wonderful gift for the lad’s mother, who told her son to call Senior and thank him for paying the ransom. He dialed the phone number, but Senior refused to take his grandson’s call.

1976. Paul Getty, the Senior, was married five times and divorced five times. After his final divorce in 1958, he gave up and remained single until his passing in 1976. Of his five wives, he said, “I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.”

He and his fifth wife, Louise, had a single son, Timmy, who, when he was six, lost his eyesight because of a brain tumor. Louise said that Senior scolded her for spending an excessive amount on Timmy’s medical care. When Timmy died at the age of twelve, in 1958, Louise sued for divorce, and Senior did not attend his son’s funeral.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Past revealed to Ebenezer Scrooge, he saw himself as a young single man seated beside his fiance, Belle, who had tears in her eyes. He asks her why she cries, and she tells him, “Another idol has displaced me.”

To her he tried to justify his miserly ways, but she said, “You fear the world too much. All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one.” It is no wonder that she broke off their engagement.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Present revealed, Ebenezer saw two children hiding within the Ghost’s robe, a boy named Ignorance, and a girl named Want. Dickens described the two urchins as, “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” Dickens personified children whose parents have neglected and subjected them to emotional and physical abuse.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come revealed, Ebenezer saw Bob Cratchit’s family mourning the passing of Tiny Tim, his little crutch laid aside. He hears Bob say to his other children, “’I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim.’ ‘Never, father,’ cried they all.”

Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol on December 17, 1843. In it, time is fluid. It backs up, jumps forward, and then races ahead into the future. At the story’s end, time returns to the present, and Scrooge is ecstatic. He now has a chance to rectify his errors, and he does.

The story is a call for a “secular conversion,” and Ebenezer Scrooge did experience an alteration. He purchased the prize turkey hanging in the butcher’s shop and had it delivered to Bob Cratchit’s home. He celebrated Christmas at his nephew Fred’s home. Of the day, Dickens wrote, “Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, wonderful happiness.”

Whereas J. Paul Getty’s story is non-fiction, Ebenezer Scrooge’s is fiction. Both included a lad named Tim with physical ailments. Whereas Getty tried and failed at marriage five times, Scrooge failed to try even once. Getty never experienced a secular conversion, but Scrooge did.

A severed ear, a lock of hair, a ransomed grandson set free at Christmas, a child named Timmy Getty who died, a crutch, a prize turkey, and a child named Tiny Tim Cratchit who lived. These are the elements of two Christmas stories. Both are sad, and yet both include some happiness.

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis

by William H. Benson

December 1, 2016

     Billy Graham was born November 7, 1918, just four days before Armistice Day that ended World War I’s carnage. Three weeks ago Billy marked his 98^th birthday, alive but not so well.

     Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898, and died on November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It is also coincidental that both C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy had the same nickname, Jack.

     Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis were the two most popular Christian authors of the twentieth century. Walk into any religious bookstore—if any remain open today—and you will find Billy Graham’s books on one shelf and C. S. Lewis’s on another, but there were differences between the two men.

     Lewis was an Englishman, a very-well read Oxford scholar, who had studied the Greek and Latin classics, philosophy, as well as English language and literature. He taught at Oxford’s Magdalen College for nearly thirty years, and he described himself as “a jovial man.”

     Lewis and his fellow scholar, J. R. R. Tolkein, loved to gather in Oxford’s pub, “The Eagle and the Child,” where they smoked their pipes, drank their pint, laughed, swapped stories, and read aloud their literary creations. Tolkien read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Lewis read his own fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, that includes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

     It was during those gatherings that Lewis laid aside his youthful rejection of religion, and accepted Christianity. His conversion was a quiet event, but it transformed his literary style. Thereafter, in addition to his fantasy novels, he wrote nonfiction books that defended and promoted Christianity: Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Surprised by Joy. He became Christianity’s chief apologist, who wanted to present a reasonable case for Christianity.    

     On the other hand, Billy Graham was a Southerner, from Charlotte, North Carolina, a traveling evangelist, intense, focused, driven, friend to the Presidents. It is said that he preached Christianity to more people than any other person in human history.

     In his sermons, he insisted upon the absolute need for all men and women to experience conversion. In him there was no doubt and no hesitation on that, and his books dovetail into his Southern Baptist theology: Peace with God, Angels, How to Be Born Again, and World Aflame.

     Although Lewis was far more educated than Billy, but both men’s influence reached far.

     Whereas Lewis made people feel comfortable, with his avuncular and jovial manners, his deep learning, and his thought-provoking literary style, Billy Graham made people feel uncomfortable, because he told people what they must do.

     Billy was a friend to both Democrat and Republican Presidents, but only on rare occasions did he express a political position, either liberal or conservative. The most glaring of those few occasions was when he fell under President Richard Nixon’s bigoted attitude toward the media. Otherwise, Billy steered wide of political controversy.

     Lewis was more forthright, but not much. He saw danger when people mixed religion and politics. In a September 25, 2016 New York Times opinion column, the writer, Peter Wehner, said that Lewis observed that “Christians were tempted to abuse political power in ways that were bad for both Christianity and the state. He believed theocracy the worst form of government, and he detested the idea of a ‘Christian party.’”

     Wehner said further that Lewis perceived that “politics can distort and invert Christianity, turning a faith that at its core is about grace, reconciliation, and redemption into one that is characterized by bitterness, recriminations, and lack of charity.” Hence, Lewis was said to hold “contempt for politics and politicians, and that he steered clear of political controversy.”

     Both Billy and C. S. remained mute on current political issues, mainly because both men’s focus was upon religion. Wehner said that “Lewis saw public matters, and indeed all of life, through a theological lens.” The same is true of Billy Graham.

C. S. Lewis passed away a week short of his 65^th birthday. His decades-long addiction to his pipe shortened his life, when he succumbed to renal failure. So far, Billy Graham has lived thirty-three years more than did C. S. Lewis. Their books are still in print.

A Country Divided

by William H. Benson

November 17, 2016

     On Election Day, the country’s voters split evenly. Half voted for Hillary Clinton, and half voted for Donald Trump. After a contentious, bitter, and hard-fought campaign, we now have a winner.

     In his victory speech, Trump said, “Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division. We have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”

     The American people have experienced “wounds of division” in the past, far worst than this year, and most likely will again in the future. Raging fights are part of the political, as well as, the governing process in a free and democratic country. The Constitution permits contention and disagreement, but it also insists that the people accept the result of a vote and unite. Americans obey the majority.

     At the time of our inception as a new nation in 1776, the English colonists were split, not into two parts, but into three. A third remained loyal to King George III, and were called Tories or Loyalists. A second third rebelled against the king, but called themselves Patriots. The remaining third were ambivalent, not caring for either side, content to live and work.

     The Patriots scorned the Tories. They tarred and feathered them. They rode them out of town on fence rails. They tossed them into prisons. The worst offenders they executed by hanging. They confiscated their estates, divided the property into smaller parcels, and sold them.

     For example, Thomas Paine received a farm at New Rochelle, New York, that a Tory once owned.

     The division over the colonists’ rebellion cut through families. Benjamin Franklin wrote his illegitimate son, William, out of his will, because William had refused to join the Patriots but remained loyal to the king. Benjamin said, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for me leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”

     An estimated 80,000 Loyalists packed up and moved north to live in Canada.

     Decades later the southern states argued with the northern states over their right to own slaves. The southern states called slavery a “peculiar institution,” and thereby justified its existence. The northern states denounced it as a moral outrage, and neither side would yield or compromise.

     In 1856, the Kansas territory was converted into a battle ground over whether it would enter the United States as a slave or a free state. Journalists began to call the territory “bleeding Kansas.” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts addressed his fellow senators on May 19 and 20, and insisted that Kansas should enter the union now as a free state.

     Two days later, Preston Brooks, a Congressional Democrat from South Carolina, walked into the Senate’s chamber in the Capitol, and with a cane, he beat Sumner about the head and shoulders. The cane broke into pieces, blood splattered across the Senate floor, and Sumner almost died from his wounds. Three and a half years would pass before Sumner returned to his Senate seat. 

     In the election of 1860, the Democrats split apart over the issue of slavery. The northern Democrats selected Stephen Douglas for their candidate for president, but the southern Democrats selected John C. Breckinridge. The new Republican party selected Abraham Lincoln, and the Whigs picked John Bell.

     When Lincoln won the electoral vote, the southern states, one by one, withdrew from the union, and formed their own country, the Confederate States of America. Six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, a bloody civil war erupted that pitted north against south.

     A century later, the war in Vietnam sapped American willpower and resolve. For ten years college students staged protests and mass marches across college campuses. In order to avoid the draft into the military, an estimated 30,000 young American men fled the country to live in Canada, and there they resided, until President Jimmy Carter pardoned them in 1977. Like the Loyalists in the 1770’s, the draft dodgers in the 1960’s and 1970’s fled to Canada.

     The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War caused bitter and deep divisions in our country, and years would pass before the feelings of outrage and injustice would begin to subside. The rancor and hostility and threats we have witnessed this year, during this Presidential election, is much smaller, when compared to the “wounds of division,” that the citizens of our country felt decades and centuries ago, during the war years. No one has received a caning, and no states have seceeded.

     Yet, in recent days, I have heard that certain American are threatening to move to Canada. That prompts some questions. Will Canada permit them to stay? Will the Federal Government allow them to return if they choose to return? If we want to secure our borders, does that mean a wall along the northern border with Canada, as well as one along the southern border with Mexico? Difficult questions, but no easy answers.

U. S. Elections

by William H. Benson

November 3, 2016

     In the last century, U. S. voters have witnessed at least four lop-sided presidential elections.

     In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt destroyed Alf Landon, Kansas’s Republican governor. FDR received 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8 votes. Only Maine and Vermont voted for Landon. Even Kansas failed to vote for Landon. FDR also received 62.46% of the popular vote to Landon’s 37.54%. By both measures, FDR won “the biggest landslide in U. S. history.”

     In 1964, Lyndon Johnson received 486 electoral votes, to Barry Goldwater’s 52. Johnson was from Texas, where he had earned the well-deserved nickname of “Landslide Lyndon,” for fixing and even rigging elections there, but he won the presidency in 1964 without fraud, and a minimum of gimmicks.

     On September 7, 1964, Johnson’s campaign televised a controversial ad. Viewers saw a three-year-old girl counting leaves on a daisy, until she gets to nine. Then, the camera zooms in upon her right eye, and viewers hear an announcer say “ten,” as if it is a countdown to a missile launch.

     Then, a mushroom cloud appears, and viewers hear LBJ’s voice, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

      The ad was designed to highlight Goldwater’s aggressive military position and his willingness to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, in Vietnam. Johnson’s campaign officials ran the ad that one time, but it swayed undecided voters to vote for Johnson, who then won 61.34% of the popular vote.

     Then, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 520 electoral votes to George McGovern’s 17. Only one state, Massachusetts, and also the District of Columbia, voted for McGovern. Even his native state of South Dakota rejected him and cast its 4 votes for Nixon, who won 61.79% of the popular vote.

     In November of 1972, few American voters knew how low Nixon’s campaign officials had sunk. Most likely Nixon did not know nor did he authorize the plumbers gang’s break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at Watergate, but once he learned of it, he authorized the “cover-up.” Less than two years later, he was forced to resign from the presidency or face certain impeachment.    

      Then, in 1984, the incumbent Ronald Reagan received 525 votes to Walter Mondale’s 13. Only Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, plus the District of Columbia, voted for him. When reporters asked Reagan what he wanted for Christmas, he joked, “Well, Minnesota would have been nice.” He won 59.17% of the popular vote.

     Runaways, lop-sided elections, and landslides, when 60% vote for a candidate, demonstrate that the American people have spoken and that democracy has worked. It is the razor-thin elections that cause people to wonder, “What do the American people want?”

     For example, in the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy “triumphed by the thinnest of margins.” He received 34,226,731 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,157, a difference of only 118,574 votes. JFK claimed 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, but only because Illinois and Texas had cast their votes for Kennedy.

     Right away accusations surfaced that Chicago’s autocratic mayor, Richard Daly, had stuffed the ballot box there to ensure a Kennedy win in Illinois, and that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate, had played similar tricks in Texas.

     Eisenhower urged Nixon to demand a recount in the two states, but Nixon instead “conceded defeat very early the morning after the election.” It is uncertain if a recount in the two states would have resulted in a win for Nixon. At a Christmas party, Nixon said, “we won, but they stole it from us.”

     In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote, 51,003,894 to George W. Bush’s 50,459,211, but Gore lost the electoral vote, 266 votes to Bush’s 271. This was the fourth time in U. S. history that the popular vote’s winner lost the electoral vote; this anomaly had occurred also in 1824, 1876, and 1888.

     The 2000 election hinged upon Florida. Bush needed 270 votes to win a majority, and he did so because he won Florida’s 25 votes, after the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 on December 12, to stop the recount there. It “ruled that the state of Florida’s court-ordered manual recount of vote ballots was unconstitutional,” because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment.

     Some candidates win or lose by a wide margin, others by a slight margin. Nixon did both. In 1960, he lost the closest race ever to Kennedy, but in 1972, Nixon crushed his opponent, George McGovern, and was re-elected to a second term. It was Nixon’s flawed judgement during that second campaign that led to his downfall. “Mistakes were made,” he said. It is wise to remember that the size of the win bears little relationship to the candidate’s performance once installed in the Oval Office.