Lyrics and Graduation

by William H. Benson

May 7, 2015

     Fifty years ago, on the night of May 7, 1965, in a Florida hotel room, Keith Richards strummed his guitar while a cassette recorder taped a phrase that he had dreamed, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The next day he asked Mick Jagger to listen, and days later the Rolling Stones recorded the song.

     Mick and Keith had no idea what they had done. That song catapulted their band into superstar status, laid down one of the greatest pop hooks of all time, and now The Rolling Stone Magazine ranks that song as number two of the greatest rock and roll songs ever.

     Lyrics to a popular song are often just filler, background noise, there to provide a human voice, but with little thought. Often the writers design the song to hook a listener. The amplified words, electronic guitars, keyboards, and drums jump into a human brain, and there they churn, vibrate, and sizzle. Because so few can resist the lure, many wire themselves to the music via ear buds.

     Often the word jumble makes little sense, and no listener believes the writer or takes action because of a song’s lyrics. Sting stated his intention in the eighty-fourth greatest song. “Every breath you take, Every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” I say that is a stalker’s confession, and so watch out for Sting.

     And what was Mick Jagger trying to say? “When I’m drivin’ in my car, And that man comes on the radio, And he’s tellin’ me more and more, About some useless information, Supposed to fire my imagination, I can’t get no, oh no no no, Hey hey hey that’s what I say, I can’t get no satisfaction.” He stated that modern American life bores him, and that he finds the news on the radio unsatisfactory.

     In 1976, the rock band Boston recorded the last song on the list, number 500. “I looked out this morning, and the sun was gone, Turned on some music to start my day, I lost myself in a familiar song, I closed my eyes, and I slipped away. It’s more than a feeling.”

     Question: what is more than a feeling?

     Possible answers: an opinion; a recognition of a truth not perceived before; an intelligent or perceptive thought; a fact backed up with solid documentation and verifiable evidence that is more than assertion. In the areas of thought and discourse, popular lyrics fall short.

     In October of 1971, John Lennon wrote and recorded his signature song “Imagine,” and Rolling Stone ranks it third among the greatest songs. Lennon’s lyrics exhibit some thought though when he imagines a different world. “No heaven, no hell below us, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, no religion, all people living life in peace, no possessions, no greed, and no hunger.” Yes, you and I can imagine, but Lennon’s lyrics fail to offer suggestions to achieve his dream world.

      Rolling Stone ranks Bob Dylan’s song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” first among the greatest hits. Recorded in July of 1965, Dylan sings to a fictional character, Miss Lonely, whose life has changed. “Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you? Now you don’t talk so loud, Now you don’t seem so proud, About having to be scrounging your next meal.”

     Then, in the song’s chorus, he chides Miss Lonely. “How does it feel? How does it feel? To be without a home, Like a complete unknown, Like a rolling stone?” One commentator said that the song suggests “a loss of innocence and the harshness of experience,” and that “the myths, props, and old beliefs fall away to reveal a very taxing reality.” In other words, Dylan sings of vengeance.

     He jeers at this former sorority sister whose life has now faltered and crashed. Life’s circumstances has broken a once proud and haughty girl, and he enjoys seeing her anguish. Why would Rolling Stone‘s editors consider this cruel song the greatest?

     Universities will conduct graduation exercises this Saturday. The pride that the graduates will feel may give way to frustration and inner turmoil. Will they too become Miss Lonely? Will someone, like Bob Dylan, ridicule them and call them a rolling stone? Will someone, like Sting, be watching them? Given today’s job market, can any graduate get immediate or eventual satisfaction?

     In the weeks ahead, they may feel like Jackson Brown, who sang about “Running on Empty,” but I say that Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac offered the better advice, “You Can Go Your Own Way.”

     University graduation—a cap, a gown, and a diploma—is more than a feeling, and far more than a popular song’s lyrics. It is recognition of an accomplishment that astonishes both student and parent. What the student imagined four or more years before, she or he has now achieved. Best wishes and congratulations to all the university graduates. “We did it.”

Virus

by William H. Benson

April 23, 2015

     At a TED conference on March 18, in Vancouver, Bill Gates said, “If anything kills over ten million people in the next decades, it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than war; not missiles, but microbes. We are not ready for the next epidemic.”

     Gates pointed out that the Ebola virus killed 10,194 people in three west African countries this past year, but it could have killed far more. Gates said, “we were lucky that the Ebola virus did not spread through the air, and that it was limited to rural areas rather than urban.”

     Gates also said that the effort to contain Ebola demonstrated the need for a global comprehensive medical treatment system. “The Ebola epidemic was not a systems failure, but a lack of a system.” He suggested stronger health systems in poor countries, a medical corps organization, a pairing of military and medical personnel, a series of germ games rather than war games, and more vaccine research.

     Researchers are just now—a full year after the Ebola epidemic—testing vaccines for Ebola.

     A virus is small, about one hundredth the size of the average bacteria. It contains either RNA or DNA, a protein coat, and lipids. It is parasitic in that it lives inside a host, such as a plant, animal, or a bacteria. It possesses a drive to replicate, but if it kills off its host, it too dies.

     People have known of certain viruses—smallpox, rabies, poliovirus, and measles—for centuries, but others have merited more attention in recent years, such as swine flu, avian flu, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS, Hantavirus, West Nile, HIV, monkeypox, and Norovirus.

     Children suffer from chicken pox, mumps, and measles; but more elderly people suffer from shingles and West Nile. The chicken pox virus, or zoster, never leaves the body, but instead it lies dormant, poised to strike a second time as shingles. That virus causes a rash and also severe nerve pain, a symptom that chicken pox fails to manifest. Thus, the zoster virus evolves into another form.

     Some viruses—such as herpes simplex virus and Human Papillomavirus—infect hosts through sexual contact, but others are transmitted through contact with body fluids: blood, urine, saliva, and sweat. HIV infects its hosts through both sexual contact and tainted blood. Influenza spreads in the air through sneezes and coughs, or it can lie on a surface up to two days, waiting for someone to touch it.

     The tobacco ringworm virus infects both tobacco plants and soybeans, but when the honeybees gather pollen from the infected plants, they too become infected. Researchers now suspect that the former plant virus may have contributed to the bees’ CCD, or colony collapse disorder.

     Viruses strike different organs. Hepatitis, A through E, attacks the liver; and polio, West Nile, and viral meningitis attack the nervous system. Smallpox, measles, herpes, shingles, monkey pox, and dengue produce skin lesions, pustules, or rashes. Influenza strikes at the lungs and causes pneumonia.

     Rotavirus and Norovirus focuses its attack upon the gastrointestinal tract and causes diarrhea. Hantavirus can either attack the kidneys or the lungs. HIV disables the body’s immune system. Monkeypox causes the lymph nodes to swell, and mumps cause the salivary glands to swell.

     Many viruses though cause fever, headache, chills, body pain, nausea, and immense misery.

     The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people than any other epidemic in history. Bill Gates said that in 263 days 33,365,533 people died across the world. Pitiless, it often attacked men and women in their prime, between the ages of twenty and forty, an unheard of phenomenon. Most viruses attack children, the seniors, or those in a weakened condition.

     This strain of influenza first erupted in Haskell County, Kansas, west of Dodge City, in February of 1918. From there, certain soldiers—Dean Nilson, Ernest Elliot, and others—who were home on leave, carried it back with them to their army base, Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas, where it caused pneumonia in 237 men, and of those, thirty-eight died. It then raced through other army camps.

     Because of the World War, transport ships ferried troops across the Atlantic, and on April 10, the first appearance of this strain of influenza appeared in the French army, but then this strain died out both in France and the United States. In John Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza, he wrote that this pandemic “came in waves. The first spring wave killed a few, but the second wave would prove lethal.”

     Barry wrote that “biology is chaos. It is the product not of logic but of evolution, an inelegant process. It adapts and builds upon what already exists.” Between May and August in 1918, this influenza virus went dormant, but researchers now know that it was evolving into a more lethal killer.  

     The second wave erupted in August of 1918. Researchers suggest that “the ancestral virus responsible for the spring epidemics in the United States passaged and mutated, and that the process continued in France.” This second strain unleashed quick and ghastly consequences among the world’s armies and civilians. Millions would feel sick, and just hours later, pneumonia would strike them down.

     Bill Gates estimated that a similar pandemic today would cost an estimated $3,000,000,000, and millions would lose their lives. “There’s no need to panic,” he said, “but time is not on our side.”

Civil War Ends

by William H. Benson

April 9, 2015

     Abraham Lincoln recited the President’s oath of office on the Capitol’s steps at his second inauguration on Saturday, March 4, 1865. After four years of a ghastly series of bloody battles, the deaths of 620,000 men, and the dismemberment of thousands of others, the Civil War was winding down. Lincoln hoped that the Confederate States would surrender in the coming weeks. By that day, Grant’s army had encircled Lee’s army, the Confederacy’s resources were limited, and its soldiers’ willpower to fight was exhausted.

     To the crowd, Lincoln said, “ Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. . . . With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”

     The next day, a company of black Union soldiers from the 35^th U. S. Colored Troops marched into a rice plantation at Limerick, South Carolina. Their commanding officer, a white colonel named James Beecher, brother of the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, said to the plantation’s owner, William Ball, “I want to see all the people on this place now in front of the house.”

      Once assembled, the slaves stood in rapt attention as Stowe addressed them, “You are free as birds. You don’t have to work for these people anymore!” The former slaves danced, sang, fell on their knees, prayed, emptied the plantation’s food stores, wrecked the Ball’s good china, and played music long into the night. Before the Union soldiers departed Ball’s plantation that day, they pulled down the bell that had called the slaves to work, “six days a week for one hundred years, and smashed it to pieces.”

     Edward Bell, one of William Bell’s descendents, recently wrote in The New York Times, “Yankee armies crisscrossed the Deep South that spring and unlocked the gates of one thousand plantations, a chain of work camps in which four million were imprisoned.” Actually, 3,952,838 slaves.

     On April 3, Jefferson Davis, the Confederate States’ president, and his cabinet fled Richmond, Virginia, their capitol, as Union soldiers prepared to march into the city. Davis’s commanding officers ordered their Confederate soldiers to set fire to the city’s bridges, the armory, and supply warehouses. The fire spread, and before the Union soldiers had arrived to extinguish the last flame, some seven hundred structures were reduced to a charred rubble.

     On April 4, President Lincoln and his son Tad arrived in Richmond. With only twelve armed sailors, to guard them, the President, Tad, and Admiral Porter walked two miles across the burned-out city to Jefferson Davis’s office. Former slaves pressed and crowded about Lincoln. Some kneeled and bowed, but Lincoln said, “Don’t kneel to me. You must kneel to God only and thank him for your freedom.”

     Some questioned Lincoln’s wisdom in walking about Richmond, with so little protection. Captain Barnes, one of the sailors, thought that “nothing could have been easier than the destruction of the whole party.” Lincoln’s two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, said, “One cannot help wondering at the manifest imprudence of both Mr. Lincoln and Admiral Porter in the whole proceeding.”

     Lincoln though was pleased to sit in Jefferson Davis’s chair just forty hours after the Confederate President had evacuated his office.

     On April 9, Palm Sunday, in Wilmer McLean’s brick house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee accepted and signed surrender terms that General Ulysses S. Grant had drafted.

     On the evening of April 14, Good Friday, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln watched a silly, farcical comedy called Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. The President felt that his national nightmare had ended, and so he wanted to relax and enjoy the entertainment. John Wilkes Boothe, an actor at Ford’s Theater and a Southern sympathizer, stepped into the President’s theater box and shot the President once in the head, and the President died the next day, Saturday, April 15.

     This month, the National Geographic features an article on Lincoln’s funeral procession. From Washington the train carried Lincoln’s casket through Baltimore, Harrisburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, before arriving in Lincoln’s town, Springfield, Illinois, where officials buried his body on May 4, three weeks after his assassination.

     People turned out in great numbers to stand and watch in reverence as the train passed through their village, town, or city. The article’s author, Adam Goodheart, wrote, “Millions—as much as one-third of the North’s population—watched the procession pass. . . Everyone—white and black—knew that Lincoln’s role in ending slavery had spawned the murderous hatred that took his life.”

     Those events in the spring of 1865 lasted only two months, from March 4 until May 4, from his Second Inauguration to his burial, but for the one hundred and fifty years since, the memories of those days remain ever-present in our nation’s psyche. It was during those two months that Lincoln and his army pried open the gates of the nation’s slave camps and extinguished the plantation system.

France & Muslim Scarves

by William H. Benson

March 26, 2015

     In France, a fight has broken out between university professors and students who wear Muslim headscarves or veils into class. Some professors insist that before they will begin a lecture, students must remove their scarf or veil. French law already bans public school students from wearing headscarves, veils, yarmulkes, or crucifixes, but that law does not extend to university students.

     Isabelle de Mecquenem, a philosophy professor, said, “The university invented secularism,” and then during the Renaissance, it was the university that “elevated the search for truth by vanquishing the power of the state and church.” To them, the scarf and the veil represent gender oppression. One professor said, “I thought this fight against religion was long over. It’s just unbearable.”

     So, a division opens in the classroom. A student wants to demonstrate her faith, and a professor asks her to shelve that commitment and join him or her in a pursuit of truth. Can one ever have both?

     Islam began in Saudi Arabia in the seventh century. Its followers carried its message to the east, across India and into Indonesia, and to the west, across northern Africa and Spain, and into France. In October 732 A.D., the French general Charles Martel, “the Hammer,” defeated Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi at the Battle of Tours in north central France and stopped Islam’s advance into Europe, which would remain thereafter devoted to Christianity.

     In 1491 A.D., the Muslims surrendered Grenada in Spain, the last Muslim-controlled city in the Iberian peninsula, and so Spain and Portugal returned to Christianity. Thus, the known world was divided between Christianity in Europe, and Islam in the Middle East and northern Africa.

     In the modern era, Europe’s powerful nation states—Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England—would conquer and colonize the known world, and even the unknown world after Columbus’s discovery of North and South America.

     In 1848, France annexed Algeria in northern Africa and incorporated it into the French nation. French families began to migrate into Algeria, where they dismantled traditional patterns of land ownership, confiscated the best land for themselves, and converted the native Algerians into paupers.

     By 1954, French Algeria was polarized, divided along racial, religious, and cultural lines. One million French settlers controlled the land, the wealth, the economy, and the political system of the country, and nine million Algerians felt isolated and powerless. In that year, they struck back.

     The Algerian people’s revolt against the French lasted for the next eight years, from 1954 until 1962. The National Liberation Front or the “FLN,” Algeria’s revolutionary force, conducted guerrilla warfare and terrorism against France’s superior military. The fighting between Christian and Muslim, between European and African, was desperate and vicious, and both the FLN and the French resorted to torture.

     Again and again, the French military destroyed the Algerian leaders and soldiers in lopsided and successful military campaigns, but their brutal and oppressive methods alienated French citizens, failed to win an Algerian surrender, and discredited France’s standing in the world. One hundred and fifty thousand Algerians lost their lives, but only twenty-five thousand French soldiers. By 1962, Charles de Gaulle, France’s President, chose to surrender, and so he ceded independence to the Algerian people.

     The war for Algerian independence was not so much a religious or cultural war as it was a war over land. The Algerian people wanted the right to own, control, and live on their land. People can go to war over the issues that divide them—such as religion, politics, race, and culture—but those are of lesser importance in contrast to the ultimate question of land ownership. Who owns and possesses the land?

     Territorial aggression leads to war. When armies of one country invade and seize land that belongs to others, war will result. For example, people in the Southern states still refer to the Civil War as, “the War of Northern Aggression.” Although conflicts over race and slavery split the United States into two countries, war was ignited when Union troops marched into the Confederate states.

     The Nazis were rabid racists, convinced that the Aryan people were superior, and anxious to prevent the mixing of the races, but that fallacious notion alone did not lead to war. What enflamed Europe into a second world war was the day the Germans invaded Poland, September 1, 1939. Two days later both France and England declared war on Germany.

     After World War II had ended and the Allies liberated Europe, citizens of Europe released their former tenacious grip upon Christianity and gravitated towards a more secular and consumer-oriented society, one less religious and more curious about markets. Some scholars now consider Europe post-Christian. On the other hand, the Muslims continue to reject secularism, denounce consumerism, and grip even stronger their faith. Who dares to say that one approach is right and the other wrong?

The headscarf is a simple thing, an item of clothing mainly for women, and yet it is symptomatic of the centuries-long division between Christian and Muslim, and now between a secular Europe and a fundamentalist Middle East.

Kidnapped

by William H. Benson

March 12, 2015

     In 1907, the author O. Henry wrote a short story he entitled “The Ransom of Red Chief.” In it, two crooks named Bill and Sam kidnap a red-headed boy in an Alabama town thinking that they will demand a ransom, but unaware that the boy is ornery. He throws rocks at them, claims he is an Indian chief and that they are his horses, and forces them to play by his rules. He terrorizes them.

     Bill and Sam write a ransom note to the boy’s father, Ebenezer Dorset, but he knows his son too well, and so he replies that it is they who should pay him, to take the lad off their hands. The kidnappers, Bill and Sam, surrender, pay the ransom, and return Red Chief to his father.

1. Henry wrote most of his short stories with this kind of surprise ending, but only an author with O. Henry’s literary talent could turn an ugly business, such as kidnapping, into a delightful short story.

     On February 4, 1974, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army knocked on nineteen-year-old Patricia Hearst’s San Francisco apartment, grabbed her, and transported her to their headquarters. For weeks she was beaten, blindfolded, locked in a closet, raped, and brainwashed. She later said, “I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs.”

     On April 15, 1974, acting as “Tania,” Patty Hearst participated in a bank robbery, carrying an M1 carbine and shouting commands at the bank’s officials and customers. She was arrested in September 1975, convicted of bank robbery, and received a thirty-five year prison sentence. Jimmy Carter had her released in 1979, and Bill Clinton pardoned her on January 20, 2001, his last day in office.

     The Stockholm Syndrome describes the psychological transition that some hostages undergo when captured. They begin to express sympathy for their captors and forge bonds of trust and commitment, even though they are harassed, beaten, threaten, intimidated, and even raped. Police officers noted the syndrome during a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, where the perpetrators held hostages for six days, from August 23 to 28, 1973.

     Bride-kidnapping or forced marriages still happen in Africa, in certain republics of the former Soviet Union, in Middle Eastern countries, and in China. Men kidnap young girls and insist that they agree to marry them, and if the girls refuse, they receive a beating or worse, until they agree.

     For centuries, Native American warriors considered as prizes other tribes’ women. Anthropologists explain this custom as a way to introduce new genetic material into a closed community, a tribe.

     On the morning of February 29, 1704, French soldiers and Mohawk warriors attacked Deerfield, Massachusetts. Eunice Williams was eleven years old, the daughter of John Williams, the pastor of the church in Deerfield. The French soldiers and the Mohawks marched her and her family to French Canada. Three years later John Williams was released, but Eunice chose to stay there and live her life.

     Likewise, the Seneca captured Mary Jemison, an English teenager in 1755. She married a Delaware, and when offered the chance to return to the British, she refused.

     On March 12, 2003, twelve years ago today, police took into custody fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, of Salt Lake City. Her captors, Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Ileen Barzee, had held her for nine months and one week, and she was honest about her captivity. Brian conducted a marriage ceremony and claimed Elizabeth as his wife. She described her days, “Boredom, hunger, and rape.”

     Phillip and Nancy Garrido used a stun gun on eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard as she was walking to the bus stop on June 10, 1991, and they held her in the back yard of their Antioch, California home, in a tent and a shack, for eighteen years, two and a half months. Jaycee gave birth to two daughters, the first when fourteen and the second when seventeen.

     After her release, on August 16, 2009, she sued the State of California “for various lapses of the Corrections department,” for failing to supervise Garrido, and the state settled for $20 million.

     Ariel Castro kidnapped three girls—Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus—between August 21, 2002 and April 2, 2004, and held them in his Cleveland home for the next ten years. On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry screamed at some neighbors walking by the house, and she and her daughter crawled through a hole she kicked in at the bottom of the screen door.

     Then, early this year, a twenty-two-year-old woman, escaped a California home where Jose Angel Barajas-Mireles, and his two accomplices confined her for three weeks.

     Kidnapping is ugly. It is men overpowering women and girls. It cannot be justified on biological or anthropological terms. It is immoral. It involves violence, beatings, seclusion, and rape. It is criminal. It breaks the law, the so-called Lindberg Law of 1932. Some, such as Patty Hearst, are taken in by their captors, are conned and deluded, but others—such as Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus—survive each day with a glimmer of hope.

     For them the days are not as pleasant as “The Ransom of Red Chief,” but the release is so welcome.

To Diane Sawyer, Jaycee Dugard explained her lost eighteen years, “You do what you have to do.”