Lebanon’s Civil War

by William H. Benson

December 3, 2015

     In the book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the book’s author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the people in Lebanon, his native country. It was, he writes, “an example of coexistence,” “a mosaic of cultures and religions,” a place where “people learned to be tolerant” of others, and where “the terms balance and equilibrium were often used.”

     The Lebanese people believed themselves blessed. Their climate was Mediterranean, of course, and their citizens were sophisticated, refined, educated, peace-loving, and “acted as if they were in an old James Bond movie.” Among the people there was a rich diversity of cultures and religions, all who lived beside each other at the Mediterranean Sea’s eastern shore.

     There were the several forms of Christians: “Maronites, Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, and Byzantine Catholic, plus a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Moslems, both Shiite and Sunni; Druzes; and a few Jews.”

     Taleb says, “We thus managed to live in peace for more than a millennium, almost devoid of bloodshed; our last true problem was the later troublemaking crusaders, not the Moslem Arabs.”

     The “balance and equilibrium” in this “Lebanese paradise suddenly evaporated” on April 13, 1975, when fighting between Christians and Moslems erupted. Taleb writes, “After close to thirteen centuries of remarkable ethnic coexistence, a Black Swan, coming out of nowhere, transformed the place from heaven to hell.”

     A Black Swan is Taleb’s metaphor for a highly unpredictable event, one that no one can foresee, such as a tsunami, a comet striking Earth, or an unexpected war. When all we have ever seen are white swans, the appearance of a black swan causes us to revise our former beliefs.

     The Lebanese Civil War was a vicious war, fought in residential areas in Beirut and other cities. Schools, hotels, parks, homes, and office buildings were the battlegrounds, and car bombs were omnipresent. Retribution was the one constant.

     Like a vacuum, this war pulled in others. There were the 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled Israel in 1948, and now lived in temporary settlements in southern Lebanon. Led by Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Palestinians sided with the Moslems. Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, sent in his army to occupy portions of eastern Lebanon, and in early June of 1982, Ariel Sharon, the commander of Israel’s army invaded southern Lebanon in “Operation Peace for the Galilee.”

     The Americans sent in the Marines, and the Soviets sided with the Syrians. It was convoluted.

     In 1975, most Lebanese believed that their civil war was temporary, that it would end in a few days, but not until October 13, 1990, after 15 ½ years of bloodshed, did it end. In fact, Syria did not withdraw its military from Lebanon until April 30, 2005, thirty years later. No one predicted a long war.

     After a truck bomb blew up a U.S. Marine barracks on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, in Beirut, and killed 241 American men, Ronald Reagan ordered the U.S. troops to withdraw.

     From Taleb’s observation of this civil war in his homeland, he makes some sweeping generalizations. “History is opaque,” he says. “You can see what comes out, but you cannot read the script that produces the events, the generator of history.” He then writes, “Humanity is a great machine for looking backward, because we can only assess matters after the fact.”

     Then, he says, “Information is of dubious value.” Although everyone studied the newspapers, no one person knew much. The news of yesterday could not forecast what would happen tomorrow.

     From that, Taleb then brings up a major philosophical problem: “How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions?” In other words, “How do we know anything?” This is called the Problem of Inductive Knowledge.

     Taleb mentions the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote, “Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck.” Chickens and turkeys believe that men will provide them food forever. Russell writes, “The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again.” For the turkey, that assumption proved itself false last week.

     The Lebanese people expected that the Christians and Moslems would live side-by-side in peace, as they had for centuries, but then a black swan appeared out of nowhere, people were forced to revise their beliefs, and they grabbed their guns and bombs and went to work killing each other.

     Consider another black swan, the Syrian Civil War, that appeared in the spring of 2011, now in its fifth year. Over 200,000 people are now dead because of that war. May it end sooner than later.

     The Christmas season approaches, and the angels’ words still proclaim the good news, “Peace on earth and goodwill to all men.” May it be so.

China’s One-Child Policy

by William H. Benson

November 5, 2015

     The Chinese people felt an immediate sense of relief last Thursday when their government stated that it will permit married couples now to have two children. The government’s one-child policy has created “a demographic nightmare,” and its leaders now must address the glaring side-effects of that policy: a diminished work force, an aging population, and a shortage of marriageable women. 

     It was on September 25, 1980, thirty-five years ago, that China’s leaders tried to rein in China’s galloping population of one billion people by a social engineering project, and that was to deny couples more than one child. A government sign read, “All citizens must observe the law; a single child is glorious.” Although enforced more in the city than in the country, officials expected all to obey.

     Mao Tse-Tung, the Chinese Communist Party’s leader, had encouraged families to produce children, as many as four per family, but because of his failed-economic plan, called the Great Leap Forward, there was a famine in 1959-1961, that caused an estimated thirty million Chinese to starve to death.

      The Chinese government remembers that worst of human catastrophes, and ever since its leaders have worried about how they will feed its massive population, which stands now at 1.4 billion people.

     The one-child policy has resulted in carnage, slaughter, massacre, and suffering. Because the Chinese people prefer sons over daughters, pregnant mothers request an ultra-sound, and if the procedure determines the fetus is a girl, the mothers will abort. Those women who conceive a second child are then subjected to forced abortions, and those women who already have their allotted single child must undergo sterilization.

     The husbands are not exempt from ill-treatment. Officials will beat, jail, fine, and even terminate the employment of men who disobey the policy and produce a second child.

     The single child suffers also. He or she grows up alone, without siblings, without playmates, surrounded by his or her parents and two sets of grandparents who dote upon him or her. The boys are pampered, spoiled, and nicknamed “Little Emperors.”

     Of course, many couples will produce a second or even a third child, more so in the country than the city, but the parents keep the child’s identity secret. Over the past thirty-five years, an estimated 6.5 million Chinese boys and girls have grown up hiding in their rooms, without residence permits, without citizenship documents, unable to attend school, and without any potential to find meaningful employment, living as a cast-off in political and social isolation.

     Out of fear of job loss, financial ruin, and social exclusion, some couples will end a second baby’s life after it is delivered, especially if it is a girl. Infanticide is the most horrific consequence of the one-child policy, a program reminiscent of Herod the Great. Some mothers will abandon their second child, give him or her to an orphanage, or place them in an adoption agency. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, adoption agencies placed thousands of Chinese girls in homes across the United States.  

     Because China’s birthrate stands at almost 120 boys for every 100 girls, millions of young men will never marry because of the short supply of young women. The Chinese call these solitary young men “guanggun” or “bare branches,” because they will never bear fruit. By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors, frustrated and angry, ready to rebel, poised to march in the streets.

     The Chinese government observes their disappointment and is wary of their potential for social and political unrest, but the “bare branches” have few options? They could drive off, or even murder, another man and take his wife, or they could migrate alone to another country.

     In recent days, an economics professor at Zhejiang University named Xie Zuoshi suggested polyandry, or “one wife, many husbands.” In other words, a wife would receive permission to marry two husbands. It is incredible to think that such a social experiment would ever work. “Much of the response to the professor’s suggestion has been outrage,” and is most deserved. For a wife to have one husband at a time in this life is sufficient.

     Xie Zuoshi responded to the outcry. The thing to remember, he said, is that “behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination. But somehow everyone is still crying that some men cannot find a wife.”

     Famine, starvation, infanticide, revolts, polygamy, and even polyandry have at times appeared in China’s vast history. Read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. It is “unsparing in its depiction of the oppression of women and the horrors of peasant life.” A flood and then a famine forces a family—Wang Lung and his wife O-lan and their children—to flee their home and live in the city. One character says it best, “Hunger makes a thief of any man.”   

     Governments make plans, but Mother Nature has other ideas.

Bobby Fischer and Steve Jobs

by William H. Benson

October 22, 2015

     Hollywood just released two biographical movies. The first was on Bobby Fischer entitled Pawn Sacrifice, and the other was on Steve Jobs, entitled Steve Jobs. Bobby’s passion was chess, but Steve’s was computers and marketing. Chess experts now consider Bobby one of the three greatest chess players ever, and Steve revolutionized the personal computer industry.

     A certain level of mystery surrounds both Bobby and Steve’s birth.

      Bobby was the older, born in March 1943 in Chicago. His mother, Regina Fischer, was separated from her husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, at the time she gave birth to Bobby. Since then, it is speculated that Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist then living in the United States, was Bobby’s father, but Regina never confirmed that, and Paul was not involved in the family. Thus, Regina raised Bobby and his older sister, Joan, as a single parent, who worked as a nurse in New York City. 

     Steve was born in February 1955, in San Francisco. His biological father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a native of Homs, Syria, who had studied economics and political science at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he met Joanne Schieble, daughter of a Wisconsin farmer.

     After Joanne became pregnant in 1954, she fled Syria and moved to California where she gave birth to a boy and placed him up for adoption there. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted Joanne’s boy and raised him in and around Cupertino, a San Francisco suburb.

     Bobby grew up in New York City, on the east coast, and Steve in San Francisco, on the west coast.

     At sixteen Bobby dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School, saying, “You don’t learn anything in school.” Steve’s GPA at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California was 2.65, meaning he received B’s and C’s. For a year, he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out because his parents could not afford it. Instead, he travelled around India for seven months.

     Formal education failed to interest either Bobby or Steve.              

     Bobby found his passion when just a child. In March of 1949, when he was six, he and Joan bought a chess set at the candy store, and Bobby taught himself the game by reading books on chess. He then began playing in New York City’s chess clubs, where the best players recognized his talent.

     On October 17, 1956, Bobby won the “brilliancy prize” for his innovative play against Donald Byrne, in what Hans Kmoch of the Chess Review called “The Game of the Century.” On move number seventeen, Bobby dared to sacrifice his queen, but went on to defeat Byrne by a crushing offense.

     Kmoch said, “The following game, a stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of thirteen against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record among chess prodigies.” A year later, when still fourteen, he won the U.S. Championship.

    After Steve returned from India, he teamed up with an electronics geek named Steve Wozniak to market Wozniak’s computer projects. Whereas Wozniak was interested in design and technology, Jobs promoted and marketed the company that the two created. It was wildly successful, and Steve Jobs became a multi-millionaire at twenty-five.A California dreamer converted himself into a businessman.

     Throughout his playing career, Bobby wanted to take his chess skills to the next higher level, and so he never stopped reading. He taught himself Russian and other European languages in order to read the chess periodicals. A Latvian player once asked Bobby, “What do you think of the playing style of Larissa Volpert?” He replied, “She’s too cautious. But you have another girl, Dmitrieva. Her games do appeal to me.” Bobby had learned to read Latvian, evidence of his deep commitment to winning chess.     

     In 1972, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship when he defeated the Russian chess champion, Boris Spassky. Bobby turned down all endorsement offers which would have made him rich, but instead, he surprised everyone and retired from competitive chess playing for the next twenty years. He flitted about the world, a fugitive from America.

     In 2006, Bobby said that the openings in chess are crucial and that players “today have so many examples of what to do from this position, and that is why I don’t like chess any more. It is all memorization and prearrangement.” Few had studied and memorized though as well as had Bobby Fischer. For his endgames, he liked to combine a rook with bishops and a pawn to force a checkmate.

     Bobby Fischer died on January 17, 2008, at the age of 64, in Reykjavik, of renal failure following a urinary tract blockage, and after he had refused medical treatment. In October of 2003, doctors diagnosis pancreatic cancer in Steve Jobs. He received the best treatment, but he too passed away on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56. Bobby and Steve’s endgame had arrived too soon.

     Daring, smart, intense, driven, ambitious, and almost superhuman, these two American men dared to imagine and dream at a level that few others could ever hope to see nor achieve. Enjoy the movies.

Mel Blanc: Comedy and Tragedy

by William H. Benson

October 8, 2015

     Mel Blanc was known as “the man with a thousand voices” because he created voices for numerous cartoon characters. For Warner Brothers, Mel was the voice of Wile Coyote, Speedy Gonzales, Pepe LePew, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester the Cat, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny. “What’s up, doc?” Then, for Hanna Barbera, he was Barney Rubble and Cosmo Spacely.

     On occasion, Mel also appeared on Jack Benny’s television program.” In one classic routine Mel would wear a wide-brimmed sombrero and a serape, acting as if he was from Tijuana. Jack would approach Mel and ask him a series of questions, and to each question Mel would reply with the single word “Sí,” pronounced “see,” meaning “yes” in Spanish. An astonished Jack would stare at the audience in a deadpan glare.

     Jack then tried another tactic. He thought of questions that would require a different answer than “Sí.” Jack asked, “What is your name?” Mel replied, “Si,” pronounced “sigh.” By now in a rage, Jack asked Mel, “Well, then what is your sister’s name?” Mel replied, “Sue.” “Well, then, what is your sister’s occupation?” “Sew.” Jack would explode, “Now cut that out!”

     Among humor’s many forms, Jack and Mel stood at polar opposites. Whereas Mel gave voice to a thousand or more characters, Jack created just one, and that was himself. He only played the part of a tight-fisted guy who played his violin and was instantly provoked. Because he rarely, if ever, revealed his real self in public, there was little distinction between his program’s character and himself. The public loved his character, and so he refused to alter it or create new ones, unlike other comedians.

     For example, people loved Jackie Gleason’s comic monologues, especially when he included his routine phrases: “How sweet it is!” and also his departing line, “And away we go!” Jackie dared though to experiment with other characters: Reginald Van Gleason III, Rudy the Repairman, Joe the Bartender, and Poor Soul. His most well-known character was the New York City bus driver, Ralph Kramden, of “The Honeymooners,” Alice’s husband and Ed Norton’s neighbor and best friend.

     Red Skelton also created his own cast of characters: Clem Kadiddlehopper, Freddie the Freeloacer, Gertrude and Heathcliff, Sheriff Deadeye, San Fernando Red, as well as Junior, the Mean Little Kid. Red proved his versatility when he performed pantomime on his television show in “The Silent Spot.”

     Bill Cosby achieved fame when he told stories of his days growing up in Philadelphia among a hilarious circle of childhood friends, such as Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold. He expanded his comedy routine when he dared to imitate Noah, who received divine instructions to build the ark.

      Cosby’s reputation has suffered in recent years, when more than fifty women have accused him of Quaalade-induced assaults, going back to the 1960’s. If true, it demonstrates the truth that “How a person behaves in public does not always equate with how he behaves in private.” Comedy in public, but tragic actions in private.

     Bob Newhart is now called “the world’s first solo straight man.” He would pretend he was talking to someone on the telephone, but his audience would only hear his side of the conversation. For example, he once played a slick Madison Avenue promoter who called Abraham Lincoln and suggested that the President should “boost his image.” One can imagine the laughs.

     Certain comedians—such as Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts, and Henry Winkler—were typecast into a role that they could not abandon. Jerry Lewis played the role of a zany, unintelligent, and incompetent adolescent better than anyone, but he struggled to transcend that character. Don Knotts was Barney Fife, but after that role ended, he searched for years until he found Ralph Furley on “Three’s Company.” Henry Winkler was Fonzie on “Happy Days,” but he failed to find a character since then.

     Life is not always fair to comedians. Gifted and talented does not always ensure constant success.

     Lines from the musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” “Nothing with gods, nothing with fate, weighty affairs will just have to wait. Tragedy tomorrow, but comedy tonight.”

     On January 24, 1961, at Deadman’s Curve on Sunset Boulevard, just north of UCLA’s track and field stadium, Mel Blanc suffered a head-on collision. The Aston Martin he was driving folded him up inside of it, and police had to cut him out. Both of his legs were broken, as well as his pelvis and skull. He lay in a full-body cast and a coma at UCLA’s hospital for days.

     Into the third week, a bedside nurse named Louis Conway glanced at the television and saw Bugs Bunny. Conway walked over to Mel’s bed, and asked, “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?” Mel startled everyone in the room when he replied, “Eh, what’s up, doc?” The nurse then asked Mel, “And Porky Pig, how are you feeling?” “Ju-ju-st fi-fi-ne,” replied Mel. “Tweety Bird, are you there?” Mel replied, “I thot I taw a putty tat.” And with that Mel himself woke up and asked what had happened.

     Each character had survived intact, and each had awakened before Mel did. It is now known as “the day that Bugs Bunny saved Mel Blanc,” a day when comedy and tragedy had united.

A Fork in the Road

by William H. Benson

September 24, 2015

     Yogi Berra played catcher for the New York Yankees for nineteen years, from 1946 until 1965. Noted for his funny expressions, such as, “It ain’t over ’till it’s over,” and “I didn’t say everything I said,” his most quoted malapropism is the gem, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi said that when he was giving directions to his house during a conversation he had with Joe Garagiola. Yogi meant that from that fork in the road, either way led to his house, but his words came out funny.

     Robert Frost wrote a poem about the day when he too came upon a fork in the road. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry that I could not travel both.” He ended the poem. “I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

     Frost’s poem carried over into the comics. Beginning in the August 2009 edition, number 600, of the “Archie Comics” series, Archie Andrews sees himself in a yellow wood staring at two roads, or two futures, while images of his two high school sweethearts hover over each road. He wonders what his life will become if he marries Veronica Lodge, the spoiled rich brunette, or if he marries Betty Cooper, the sweet blond next door.

     First, he dreams of a life married to Veronica, working for her tycoon father, and raising their fraternal twins. Then, he dreams of a life married to Betty. He wakes up and asks both girls out for a date for that Saturday night, and when they discover his duplicity, they dump milkshakes on his head.

     Michael Uslan, the author of those particular “Archie Comics,” explained. “The story arc is all about choices and consequences. These choices don’t impact just the people getting married. They have a butterfly effect and alter the lives of friends and family as well.”

     The butterfly effect is when small events that happen in distant places can influence events around the globe. “The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in South America could affect the weather in Texas. The tiniest influence on one part of a system can have a huge effect on another part.”  

     When working towards a decision, people often feel wistful. Robert Frost stared at those two roads and said that he was “sorry that I could not travel both.” Then, once a person makes a choice, regrets can appear if he or she chose too quickly or not quick enough, or he or she can feel pleased with the choice. Robert Frost must have felt pleased because he said, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

     Which way do we go? Cupid’s line dance song, the Cupid Shuffle, offers little help. “Now walking by yourself. To the left. To the left. To the right. To the right!”

     The Monte Carlo simulation is a method used in finance, sports, games, and even politics to determine outcomes that are dependent upon a list of assumptions and variables.

     For example, LeBron James asked the question, “Which is better when you are down by three with three seconds to go— shoot a hard three and go into overtime, or take an easy two and hope to steal the ball on the inbound pass?” Computer wizards can run hundreds of simulations based upon his and his teammates’ two and three-point shooting percentages, their abilities to rebound the ball, as well as their opponents’ skills. The computer then generates the better answer for each change in each variable.

     Without all of that, I would give the ball to LeBron James and tell him to shoot and win the game.

     The middle of the road is a hard road. It requires focus to avoid the extreme views that appear on either side. A drive into the ditch can lead to excitement, but there is more risk in the ditch. The middle of the road requires that a person focus and judge which road is the correct one for him or her.

     The American voters will make a series of crucial decisions soon. In sixteen months, we will inaugurate a new president, and then the wistful feelings we may feel when we voted for a candidate will give way to either regrets or to a pleased feeling with the president’s performance.

     Then, there is the four-year civil war in Syria that has caused the Syrian people to flee their country in an exodus bound for Europe. Should we stand and watch while the Syrian government bombs its own people? Should we watch when immigrants desperate for sanctuary are turned away at Europe’s borders? Choices of which road to take are not easy.

     Then, there is the fate of liberal democracy, the government that promotes human values. Last week a writer for the New York Times asked, “Are Western values losing their sway?” Russia, China, and the Middle East have not adopted those values, despite the USA’s many attempts to proselytize them.

     To be human is to choose, and our lives are composed of a series of choices we have made, some good and some not so good.

     One of Yogi Berra’s friends announced, “Hey, Yogi! I think we’re lost.” He replied, “Yeah, but we’re making great time.”