Language

by William H. Benson

February 26, 2015

     To learn a second language is difficult, if not impossible. At an early age, a child learns to think in his or her first language, and so his or her brain is set, hardwired for that first language. After that, an adolescent or an adult cannot stop thinking in that first language and begin thinking in a second or third. Thus, most people fail to learn a second language, despite loads of willpower and intense study.

     One guy said, after years of living in the Orient, “I am just not that good at learning languages.”

     Daniel Everett, an American linguist, studied the Pirahã people of the Amazon for thirty years, and determined that they “use grammar in ways that violate our understanding of how language works.” Because they have no words for numbers, other than “one or many,” they cannot count, and their word for blue is the same for green. From his research, Daniel Everett concluded that “human beings invented language, that they can reinvent it, or they can lose it.”

     In his 1990’s bestseller, Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus, popular psychologist, John Gray, points to the language barriers that divide men and women. He contends that women count, that they keep score, and that men are unaware of a woman’s scorecard. A woman places a value of one on each of a man’s attempts at sincerity or attention, and she expects to receive a series of points daily.

     On the other hand, a man believes a single overpowering act of devotion and attention will offset his days of remoteness and unwillingness to talk. Hence, he will escape into his work or his “cave” for days, but then emerge to take his wife on an exotic week-long vacation. He thinks, “All is ok? Right?”

     My contention: both genders live on Earth, and on this planet, men and women must work together to provide food for themselves and their children. Those who fail to cooperate end up alone.

     Shakespeare’s Rosalind said, “Do you not know that I am a woman? When I think I must speak.”

     After years of listening to thousands of women’s stories over several decades, Sigmund Freud asked a most profound question that he failed to answer, “What do women want?” A perceptive woman replied to Freud’s question. “Women,” she said, “want to live their own lives.”

     James Herriot said, “It is a pity that the animals cannot talk. If they could, what would they say about us.” It was human beings whom evolution blessed with the right combination of lungs, larynx, pharynx, palate, and tongue that permits spoken language. Still a dog communicates. A rush to the door and a whimper means he or she wants outside. A head tilted, ears cocked, and a tail wagged speaks volumes, and some people miss this human/dog language.

     Monty Roberts, the man who listens to horses, says that horses communicate with each other and with humans through a language he named Equus, and so he trains them within that language.

      Two weeks ago, the columnist Jonathan Chait of the New York magazine observed that the “language police” for political correctness have gone too far. He writes, “Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate.”

      Few would want to return to the days when editors permitted slights, insults, or overt racism to appear in print. “There’s a reason we don’t use slurs in newsprint anymore,” he writes, “because the framework for acceptable language and behavior has changed.” America expanded its language framework to include most American people and its numerous minority groups.

     Americans learned a second language, one that was polite and respectful, and it was not easy.

     But, Chait says, “Now the language police condemn people of unforgivable racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry” for what he calls “micro-aggressions.”

     “If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt, and if you are accused of bias, or ‘called out,’ reflection and apology are the only acceptable response. To dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in PC culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous.”

     America’s language contrasts sharply with that of others. How can anyone explain ISIS’s “savage irrationality,” where “an intoxicating vision of Islamic purity has attracted thousands of young men who have traded lives of powerlessness for a thrilling and pitiless campaign against a corrupt world?”

     George Packer, writing in the New Yorker, answered the question. “Slaughtering infidels is not a means to an end—it is the end. It is a mass death cult.” Because these cult members speak a single language, one of massacre and slaughter, no one can or will communicate with them.

Language is the essence of becoming human. Words ignite our emotional vocabularies, kindle our passions, and enliven our ordinary existence. Language is the instrument, that when used in an appropriate manner, makes us human, a more complete man or woman.

Abraham Lincoln & Edwin Stanton

by William H. Benson

February 12, 2015

     Today we honor Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

     In the summer of 1855, George Harding hired Abraham Lincoln to assist him in a patent infringement case because Harding needed an attorney knowledgeable of Illinois law, such as Lincoln.

     At the last moment, the trial was moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, and so Lincoln’s services were not needed. Instead of withdrawing from the case though, Lincoln headed to Cincinnati to offer his help. In the meantime, Harding hired Edwin Stanton, a polished lawyer from Ohio.

     In Cincinnati, Harding and Stanton were shocked when Lincoln first approached them. He was a “tall, rawly-boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella.”

     Stanton pulled Harding aside, and asked him, “Why did you bring that long armed Ape here? He does not know any thing and can do you no good.” Lincoln felt their rejection. He was never invited to discuss the case with them and was never asked to join them for a meal, but he attended the trial and listened to Stanton’s arguments. There he stood in “rapt attention . . . drinking in his words.”

     Six years later, Abraham Lincoln would win the 1860 election for President, and in January of 1862, he would name Edwin Stanton his new Secretary of War. As he did with Stanton, again and again Lincoln would demonstrate his ability to set aside slights, humiliations, and insults. Resentments never rankled or accumulated within Lincoln.

     One day George Harding assumed that Stanton had written some “some remarkable passages” in one of President Lincoln’s messages, but Stanton corrected Harding. “Lincoln wrote it—every word of it; and he is capable of more than that, Harding; no men were ever so deceived as we at Cincinnati.”

     Stanton was not alone in making a snap judgment of Lincoln. Others who witnessed Lincoln’s face, his body, and his bearing concluded that he was an ignorant and “long armed Ape.” His appearance hid his piercing intellect, his skill with the English language, and his over-arching ambition.

      Lincoln chose well when he chose Stanton, who whipped the war department into shape. Because he was responsible for an army of more than two million men, he was merciless in the exacting demands he issued to his subordinates. He ruled others by fear.

     All this was required, an absolute necessity. After all, there was a war to win, the nation had divided into two parts, and four million people were locked and chained into bondage and slavery. What Stanton did or did not do would effect the nation and its future.

     Stanton’s secretary, A. E. Johnson, observed Lincoln and Stanton and said, “No two men were ever more utterly unlike.” Whereas Lincoln was tall and lean, Stanton was short and round.

     “The charity which Stanton could not feel, coursed from every pore in Lincoln,” who “was for giving a wayward subordinate seventy times seven chances to repair his errors; Stanton was for either forcing him to obey or cutting off his head without more ado.” Lincoln was “calm and unruffled,” but Stanton “would lash himself into a fury.” Lincoln “would tell a funny story,” but Stanton was “all dignity and sternness.”

     What the two men did share was an enormous capacity for work. Johnson wrote, “Yet no two men ever did or could work better in harness. They supplemented each other’s nature, and they fully recognized the fact that they were a necessity to each other.”

     Neither knew how to play. Neither “cards, the bottle, or dice” diverted their attentions. A relentless ambition and a focused intellect drove them forward day after day. Although Lincoln would concede that Stanton was the better legal mind, mainly because he had received a formal legal education, Lincoln was more widely read.

     Lincoln knew Shakespeare, he knew the English poets, and he knew the King James Bible. He absorbed the English language, it imbedded itself deep into Lincoln’s mind, and he would use it to great effect when he would write his speeches and his letters.

     When those who hated Stanton urged Lincoln to terminate him, Lincoln said, “He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him, I should be destroyed.”

     When told of Lincoln’s assassination, Stanton rushed to Lincoln’s side and said to the others gathered around his bed, “Now he belongs to the ages. There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” From outright hostility and disrespect, Edwin Stanton had yielded first to admiration and then to profound love for Abraham Lincoln.

Self-Government and Modernity

by William H. Benson

January 29, 2015

     Historians rank Frederick Jackson Turner one of the most noted of all American historians. In 1893, in Chicago at the American Historical Association, he delivered a paper he entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and in it, he argued that the frontier shaped the American character.

     Turner insisted that on the frontier pioneers dropped their European characteristics and values, and picked up a respect for democracy, an intolerance of social hierarchy, a distrust of authority, and a dependency upon local political organizations. Not all, but many historians then and since Turner’s day have agreed with his thesis that the frontier fostered self-government.

     Turner’s critics point out that the frontier disappeared in 1890, three years before Turner delivered his paper, and so they wonder, “how does self-government occur today, in the absence of a frontier?”

     In The New York Times Sunday edition, two weeks ago, a writer named Sam Quinones published a column he entitled, How Mexicans Became Americans. In it, Sam described the process he observed in South Gate, California (pop. 96,000), a suburb southeast of Los Angeles. “In the late 1970s,” he wrote, “the factories started leaving, and so did the white people. By 1990, towns like South Gate that had been 90 percent white were more than 90 percent Latino.”

     These recent immigrants to South Gate came “straight from the ranchos, the small villages on Mexico’s frontiers, far from the center of government,” where “they had shunned politics,” lived a “tradition of non-engagement,” and were expected to defer to the all-powerful “cacique,” the village’s political boss. Because they had no experience in self-government, at first they were swayed by flimsy propaganda, by promises of giveaways, and by the crooked and greedy who almost bankrupted the city.

     Once the immigrants acquired citizenship and the right to vote, Sam wrote, “the voters woke up,” and felt “ashamed they’d been duped.” They voted the crooks out of office, sent some to prison, and realized that it was their responsibility to monitor and participate in their municipal government.

     South Gate’s citizens now consider the city their home. Here they have jobs, send their children to school, and plan for a future. Then, because of the recent violence in northern Mexico, many Mexican-Americans hesitate to return to their villages. Jorge Morales, a South Gate city councilman, said, “My parents always talked about going back to Mexico. Now it’s a place they’ll visit, but this is home.”

     In 1979, Eugen Weber, a history professor at UCLA, published his book, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, and in it, he described a similar process, whereby the peasants who lived in small villages all over France were forced to confront modernity.

     Late in the nineteenth-century, France’s countryside was a place “where many did not speak French or know the metric system, where pistoles and écus were better known than francs, where roads were few and markets distant, and where a subsistence economy” existed for generations.

     “Significant portions of rural France continued to live in a world of their own,” Weber wrote, “until near the end of the nineteenth-century.” So, how was the peasant transformed into a Frenchman?

     Weber believed it resulted from at least two things: better roads and better schools. He entitled his twelfth chapter, “Road, Roads, and Still More Roads.” With an abundance of useful roads that criss-crossed France, the time required for a peasant to cart his fruits, grains, and vegetables to Paris or Nice or Lyon dwindled. This development opened up new and more promising markets and higher prices.

     Weber entitled his eighteenth chapter, “Civilizing in Earnest: Schools and Schooling.” In the villages’ schools, teachers revealed to the peasants’ children the world that existed beyond the village’s borders and fields. The brightest students escaped the fields’ mind-numbing drudgery, and so the abundance of roads and exceptional schools transformed France’s peasants into Frenchmen.

     Not everyone is attracted to modernity or self-government though. The terrorists in Paris who killed seventeen people earlier this month displayed an utter disregard for advanced and civilized thought. The two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, murdered twelve people in Paris at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and Amédy Coulibaly murdered four Jewish shoppers and a policewoman at a kosher supermarket.

     Because “Muslim immigrants to France were never required to adopt Western values of tolerance, free speech, and secularism,” they can turn to an extreme set of beliefs that directs them to terrorism.  Both modernity and self-government expect people to act reasonable, without resorting to violence, and to believe that the vote and the market are more powerful than all the world’s guns and bullets.

     On the American frontier, in South Gate, and in rural France, the modern self-governing model won the day, despite mistakes along the way. Today many—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—hope that modernity and self-government will also convince the vulnerable young men and women, those attracted to extreme beliefs, to lay aside the guns and participate in local governments and markets.

Basketball

by William H. Benson

January 15, 2015

     Vivek Ranadivé coached his daughter’s National Junior Basketball team at Redwood City, south of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. Because Vivek had grown up in Mumbai, where he had played cricket and soccer, Vivek knew very little about basketball,  His daughter’s team was composed of twelve-year-old girls, who were short, white, and displayed no talent. They could barely shoot, dribble, or jump, and yet they won most of their games, losing only in the championship game. How?   

     Malcolm Gladwell tells of this junior-high dream team in his recent book, David and Goliath.

     Vivek insisted that his girls run a full-court press. A team has five seconds to pass the ball inbounds to a teammate, and then another ten seconds to cross the mid-court. Vivek’s team contested that inbound pass. He told his girls, “Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbound plays.”

     One of Vivek’s girls explained, “We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams better than us, and we would beat them.”

     Vivek did not bother teaching his girls to shoot three-pointers, or set a pick, or execute a play. Instead, he taught them to rattle the other team’s players, steal the ball, and make a quick layup. They ran and chased the ball, but under their own basket. Vivek said, “We followed soccer strategy in practice. I would make them run and run and run.”

      If the other team did complete that first inbound pass, Vivek’s girls would trap and force a turnover. Vivek’s assistant explained, “What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses.” Gladwell explained that this was how David, small and weak, defeated Goliath, tall and strong.

     Gladwell states the obvious. “The puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular.” Why is that? First, it exhausts the players, and then, a well-prepared opponent can break a press, or run it themselves. Yet, it can give a poor team an advantage.

     Gladwell tells of a game played in January of 1971 between the University of Massachusetts and Fordham University. The great Julius Irving, “Dr. J,” played for Massachusetts, but Irish and Italian kids from New York City, with only a fraction of Massachusetts’ talent, played for Fordham. Yet, Fordham won that night 87-79, because those city kids ran a full-court press for four quarters.

     One Massachusetts player there that day, Rick Pitino, sat on the bench, astonished, and came away a believer in the press. Later, as a college coach first at Boston, then Providence and Kentucky, and now at Louisville, he instituted the press and took those teams to the NCAA tournament eighteen times. Gladwell writes, “Again and again, in his career, Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors.” He is David, and he faces Goliath.

     Sports writers consider the Washington Generals “the sorriest team in the history of sports—14,000 losses and counting.” The team has won only six games in the past sixty-two years. Who are they? In 1952, Abe Saperstein asked Louis “Red” Klotz to put together a team to tour with and play against Abe’s Harlem Globetrotters, as a foil for their comedy routines. Crowds pay to watch the Generals lose every game to the Globetrotters.

     Yet, the Washington Generals won on January 25, 1971 at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Red Klotz, only five feet and seven inches tall, made a two-handed shot, and put his Generals up 100-99. With seconds to play, Meadowlark Lemon hooked his shot, missed, and the buzzer ended the game. Perpetual underdogs, the Washington Generals, had beaten the perpetual winners, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the spectators booed. David should not have defeated Goliath.

     Perhaps, if the Washington Generals would run a full-court press, they would win more often. Gladwell says, “every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way. So why don’t they?”

     Gladwell points out that effort can trump ability on the basketball court, on the battlefield, in business, or in academics. Those who ignore the conventions of the day, hide their weaknesses, take daring risks, and maneuver themselves into position for a steal can slaughter their competitors. That is guerrilla warfare, that is judo, and that is how the English defeated the Spanish armada.

     Gladwell says, “When effort trumps ability, the game becomes unrecognizable.” Panic strikes, and the Philistines run for cover.

     “Only a boy named David. Only a babbling brook. Only a boy named David, but five little stones he took.” But then he used just one stone. Gladwell writes that “David brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield,” and that “we all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé and a shepherd boy named David will tell you that it isn’t.”

      This basketball season cheer for the underdog.

Cuba and North Korea

by William H. Benson

January 1, 2015

     The two Communist holdouts from the Cold War dominate the news again: Cuba on one page, and North Korea on the other. First, President Barak Obama wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba after five and a half decades of Communist rule. Then, the FBI has traced “one of the most punishing cyber-attacks on a major American corporation in recent memory” back to the Guardians of Peace, all because of a new movie that mocks Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator.

     Both Cuba and North Korea are Stalinist-styled governments: brutal, repressive, and tyrannical. Since 1959, a single family has controlled Cuba: the Castro family, or Fidel and his brother Raul. Since 1946, a single family has controlled North Korea: the Kim family—Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un; or father, son, and grandson.

     Those fortunate Cubans who fled their country decades ago and found refuge in Miami have adapted to American life, and some have even prospered and become wealthy. Conditions though in Cuba are appalling. The automobiles are of 1950’s vintage, the economy is stagnant, critics are silenced, and no one in Cuba today claims much wealth, except the Castro brothers and their friends.

     The two countries lost legitimacy decades ago. South Korea is a rich economic powerhouse, but North Korea has no allies, not even Russia or China, produces nothing the world needs, suffers under the heaviest trade sanctions on Earth, but terrifies the world with its nuclear tests. The Korean people north of the DMZ suffered through a devastating self-induced famine in the 1990’s that, it is rumored, resulted in cannibalism.

     The government responded with a program it called, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.”

     Both governments in Cuba and North Korea terrorize their people. In 1959, after Fidel Castro seized control of the island, he executed hundreds who had opposed him, saying, “We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers, and they deserve it.”

      Kim Jong-un is thirty-one years old—too young to own a nuclear arsenal—and, since 2011, he has ruled hard over the North Koreans. By executing dozens, if not hundreds, he has purged the country of his suspected enemies. On December 12, 2013, the state media warned the people that the army “will never pardon all those who disobey the order of the Supreme Commander.”

     The United States government instituted trade embargoes upon Cuba and North Korea more than five decades ago, and they failed to weaken the Castro or the Kim families’ grip on power. Instead, the sanctions impoverished and starved the people. “Isolation has not worked,” said Obama, referring to Cuba. “It’s time for a new approach.”

     Before Obama would re-establish relations with Cuba, he insisted that Cuba release Alan Gross, a contractor imprisoned in Cuba for five years. Gross was arrested when working to expand Internet access for Havana’s Jewish community, an act that Cuban officials considered “undermining the state.” Cuban officials released Gross in exchange for the release of three Cuban spies imprisoned in America. 

     Both countries have refused to provide their citizens with the latest technology. Cuba’s citizens want  to own cellphones, but the phones they buy cannot access the World Wide Web.

     A Korean-American named Suki Kim published this month her memoir of her days teaching English at a North Korean university. She entitled her book, “Without You, There is No Us,” and in it she describes the students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, who “do have access to an internal network, or intranet, but it’s not connected to the Internet, and they use their computers mostly as dictionaries.”

     The sight of these whiz kids, Suki Kim writes, “staring blankly at screens was so pathetic that I was seized by a pang of anger, mixed with sadness, and soon left the room.”

     Kim Jong-un’s government did display some technical skill when the Guardians of Peace routed their cyber-attacks “through China and then through servers in Singapore, Thailand, and Bolivia.”

     An interesting fact. Kim Jong-il, who died on December 17, 2011 at the age of seventy, owned a huge collection of Hollywood movies, estimated between twenty and thirty thousand. He especially loved watching Sean Connery’s James Bond movies, and Kim Jong-il was such a great fan of Elvis Presley, that the dictator arranged his hair in a bouffant style, wore Elvis-like dark shades, and dressed in jump suits, reminiscent of Elvis’s Las Vegas performances.

     Now, his son, Kim Jong-un, feels offended because Hollywood would dare to ridicule him in a low-brow farcical movie that few people with any sense of discernment would care to watch. So offended is he that he steals from the production company and then makes threats if they release “The Interview.” Someone should remind him that he is not the dictator of the United States.

     Citizens of Cuba and of North Korea live on opposite sides of the planet, and yet both suffer for the same reason: the people have no rights because their dictators are committed to Marxist philosophy.