Viruses

by William H. Benson

October 23, 2014

     Fierce opposition has met the slightest steps forward in humankind’s war upon any of the several viruses that inflict us. Fear of the unknown, religious persuasions, and lack of knowledge of the scientific method have each contributed to that opposition.

     For example, in Boston in 1721, another smallpox epidemic broke out. Cotton Mather, the pastor at the old North Church, had learned of inoculation as a means to prevent the disease, but he could convince only a single one of Boston’s several doctors, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to try the procedure. For nearly a year, until May of 1722, Boylston inoculated hundreds, including Cotton’s son, Samuel.

     The other doctors were livid that Boylston was infecting people before they showed symptoms of the disease. The common people believed that inoculation was spreading smallpox among them, and the other ministers believed it wrong for Cotton to dabble in scientific experiments and “desert religious principles” and practices, such as prayer and fasting.

     The most vicious of Cotton’s critics though was James Franklin, owner and editor of a Boston newspaper, The New England Courant. He compared Cotton to a “peevish Mongrel,” and called him a “Baboon.” Month after month, James tore and scratched at Cotton in print. James’s younger brother, Benjamin, joined in and wrote humorous essays about an old busybody, a fictional woman named Silence Do-good, an obvious reference to Cotton Mather.

     By the end of the epidemic, in February of 1722, it was determined that smallpox had infected 5,889 persons in New England, “of whom 844 had died,” but only a few of those whom Dr. Boylston had inoculated died. Cotton Mather felt vindicated.

     As the years passed, the medical community came to accept inoculation with smallpox as a viable treatment, although a small percentage of those treated would catch the disease and then die. 

     In 1798, an English physician named Edward Jenner discovered that an inoculation with cowpox was less harmful than with smallpox. Jenner had noticed that those milkmaids who first suffered poxes on their hands were then immune to smallpox, and so he named his method vaccination, because the Latin word for cow is “vacca.”

     Doctors came to accept vaccination as the standard preventative in Europe and North America.

     Smallpox though continued to kill off millions in Asia and Africa. As recent as 1967, there were between ten and fifteen million people infected every year in thirty countries, and two million of those stricken died. It was then that the World Health Organization, established by the United Nations, decided to attack smallpox by a 100% vaccination policy, but officials soon discovered that those who were isolated, uneducated, and superstitious refused immunization.

     Because of the massive vaccination program though, cases were rare, and so officials of WHO then instituted a “surveillance and containment” policy. When notified of a case, they would rush in, isolate the stricken patient, vaccinate all those living within a mile, and then move village to village, house to house, and room to room, searching for any others stricken by the disease, and treat them the same. Thus, smallpox’s transmission chain was broken.

     By that formula India’s Smallpox Eradication Program defeated smallpox there. The last known case of smallpox occurred in May 1980 in Somalia. Humankind had conquered its most dreaded disease.

     Eight weeks ago, Dr. Peter Clement, working for WHO, traveled for eight hours over dirt roads to a village in Liberia, near the border with Guinea. He explained to the village’s chiefs, “Ebola is the enemy. If we don’t chase Ebola, it will kill us. You have to know Ebola to fight Ebola. Mobilize your people. Let’s get to know Ebola.”

     The people came up with a plan. “Ebola is a disease, not a curse, not a government plot. The sick must go to the clinic. Only officials will bury the dead. No more touching when greeting.”

     Although officials have not yet contained Ebola in west Africa, there is some good news. Last Friday, October 17, WHO officials announced that Senegal was now free of Ebola.

     Last week, the writer Eula Biss published her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation. In it she takes issue with those who are “white, educated, and relatively wealthy” and because of fear refuse to vaccinate their children, because, they claim, there are toxins in the vaccine, that is unnatural and impure. Biss writes that this attitude is selfish, and that it “compromises herd immunity” and allows pathogens to spread. These anti-inoculators argue and rally as they did in Cotton Mather’s day.

     One parent who failed to immunize his son was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin Folger Franklin, “little Franky,” died of smallpox when he was four years old, not because Benjamin disapproved of inoculation, because by then he understood its merit. He had just forgotten to do it. Benjamin regretted that failing the rest of his life. On his son’s tombstone, he wrote, “The delight of all who knew him.” 

The Yom Kippur War

by William H. Benson

October 9, 2014

     The twin attacks came at 1400 hours on October 9, 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. First, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, dispatched his troops to cross the Suez canal with the intent to reclaim the Sinai peninsula, land that Israel’s soldiers had seized from Egypt in the Six Day War in June 1967. At the same time on the same day, Syria attacked Israel’s northern border, along the 36-mile-long Golan Heights, also to reclaim land that the Israeli army had seized in 1967.

     After six years, both Egypt and Syria’s governing officials and citizens still felt a grinding humiliation because of the loss of their real estate, land that belonged to them. They wanted it back.  

     Thus, Israel was forced to fight a two-front war that hit its army Pearl-Harbor-style. Defeat appeared inevitable because the state of Israel was unprepared. It “came as a surprise, though it was not unexpected,” wrote the Israeli general, Moshe Dayan. Convinced of its army’s invincibility, Israel had neglected military preparations and drifted into a state of complacency. When told of Egypt’s military build-up on the Suez Canal’s west side, Israel’s officials dismissed it as “training exercises.”

     Only 436 Israeli soldiers were positioned to stop Egypt’s 80,000 soldiers from marching across the Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s 180 tanks were far less than Syria’s 1,400, and Egypt’s 2,000. Nine other Arab states, plus the Soviet Union, supported Egypt and Syria, and so Israel felt alone and unprepared. 

     Because the Soviet Union had provided the tanks, missiles, aircraft, training, arms, and munitions, the Egyptian and Syrians’ Soviet Union-styled massive frontal assault overwhelmed the Israelis. In just four days the Israelis lost one-fifth of their air force, and a third of their tanks. By October 14 the Egyptian army was dug into the Sinai peninsula along a hundred-mile line and set to march north.

     The next night the war changed when Israeli commandoes slipped through a seam in Egypt’s line and then swept north and south to attack the Egyptian army’s rear, a plan devised by Ariel Sharon. Within days the Israelis had encircled Egypt’s army that was now facing annihilation. To prevent that, the Soviet Union and the United States initiated a tentative ceasefire on October 24, but by the war’s end, weeks later, Israel had regained the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights.

     How did that happen? How was the Israeli army, so outmanned and outgunned, able to defeat both Syria and Egypt? The person most responsible for this turnabout was President Richard Nixon.

     Because Nixon judged an “Arab victory by Soviet arms,” a political disaster, he decided to supply Israel the tanks and aircraft the army needed. He initiated Operation Nickel Grass, a series of airlifts to carry military supplies from the United States to Israel, and it lasted 32 days, from October 14 until November 15. A CIA official said that “Nixon gave it the greater sense of urgency. He said, ‘You get the stuff to Israel. Now. Now.’”

     He did this at a time when his enemies wanted his head. His vice-president Spiro Agnew had resigned that month due to a scandal. “The Washington Post had put Watergate stories on its front page seventy-nine times.” Congress was threatening impeachment, and inflation was wrecking the economy. At great political cost, Nixon decided that he must assist Israel’s army. 

    The United States Air Force flew 567 missions, and delivered a total of 22,300 tons of supplies. The transports carried their loads over the Atlantic, landed in Portugal’s Azores to refuel, and then flew east, down the middle of the Mediterranean Sea to land in Israel. Israeli soldiers quickly changed the decals and insignias, and sent the tanks, aircraft, and missiles to either the northern or southern front.

     Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister said, “For generations to come, all will be told of the miracle of the immense planes from the United States bringing in the materiel that meant life to our people.” The airlift allowed Israel to reverse its earlier losses, surround Egypt in Sinai, and retake the Golan Heights.

     Historians consider it likely that without Nixon’s support the Egyptians and Syrians would have destroyed the Israeli army and may have exterminated the state of Israel. If Nixon’s enemies had driven him from the White House in August of 1973 instead of August of 1974, those twin disasters may have happened. Instead, Nixon was still around to save Israel, and he did. The historian Paul Johnson wrote that “October 1973 was his finest hour.”

     One wonders about Nixon’s motivation. He was not above uttering hostile anti-Semitic comments, never hesitated to use the crudest of slurs, which his White House tapes recorded, and some argue that he just wanted to defeat the Soviet Union’s allies in the Middle East. Despite his words, his actions indicated that he felt driven to help Israel survive the attacks.

     The historian Steven Ambrose wrote, “Those were momentous events in world history. Whatever the might-have-beens, there is no doubt that Nixon made it possible for Israel to win. He knew that his enemies would never give him credit for saving Israel. He did it anyway.”

Calendars

by William H. Benson

September 25, 2014

     President Obama visited Stonehenge three weeks ago, on Friday, September 5. As he stepped around the stones, he said, “ How cool is this. This is spectacular! Knocked this off my bucket list.”

     Stonehenge is located west and south of London, in south central England, and is a popular tourist destination site. It is astonishing to see. Prehistoric men, who lived on the British Isles then, stood a series of giant stones upright in a circle, and archaeologists believe that the first stones were positioned as early as 3,000 B.C., and that others were added piecemeal as late as 1,850 B.C.

     Because those prehistoric people left no written records, archaeologists are not certain of the stones’ purpose, but most modern scientists believe that the people designed Stonehenge to serve as a temple where they worshiped their gods and sacrificed animals.

     In 1965, a British astronomer named Gerald Hawkins argued in his book Stonehenge Decoded that the stones served as an astronomical observatory where people could observe the summer solstice, as well as other solar, lunar, and planetary movements. Although Hawkins used an IBM 704 computer to support his claims, many archaeologists disagreed with his conclusions, calling them “unconvincing.”

     Instead, they contend that these prehistoric people were “howling barbarians,” far-removed from scientific thinking, and ill-equipped to observe solar and lunar movements. Still, Hawkins’s idea that the prehistoric people were brilliant astronomers remains fixed yet today in the popular imagination.

     This week we observe the autumnal equinox, either late in the day on September 22, or early in the morning on September 23, depending upon where one lives. Equinox is a Latin word meaning “equal night.” Twice a year the sun passes directly over the equator, usually on March 21 and September 23. Except at the two poles, day and night are of equal length, twelve hours each, all over the world.

     Because of the Earth’s 23 1/2° tilt along its axis relative to the plane that it follows to orbit the sun, the Northern Hemisphere either leans toward the sun at its greatest extent on June 21, the summer solstice, and away from the sun at its greatest extent on December 21, the winter solstice. Thus, there are four days every year, two solstices and two equinoxes, that divide the year into four seasons.

     Also, this week, on September 24, we will have a new moon, a day when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, and the moon’s face is not illuminated. Because the moon rotates around its axis at the same speed that it orbits the Earth, we only observe a single face of the moon. The moon orbits the Earth every 27.3 days, but new moon to new moon is 29.5 days. A lunar month is rounded to 28 days.

     So we observe lunar cycles as well as solar cycles, and from them human beings have devised calendars. The day, the lunar month, the four seasons, and the year of 365 ¼ days are all natural occurrences, but humans invented the seven-day week, possibly because it divides evenly into 28 days.

     In 44 B.C., Julius Caesar scrapped the old Roman calendar and designed his own with seven days in a week, and twelve months, composed of 30 or 31 days each, except for February’s 28 or 29 days.

     A problem arose. Because the Julian calendar gained about three days every four centuries, Pope Gregory XIII issued a bulletin on February 24, 1582, that stated that the day following Friday, October 4, would jump to Friday, October 15. Thus, the pope removed ten days from the calendar, and brought the solstices and equinoxes back into line. Most Catholic countries accepted Gregory’s reforms immediately, but England and her colonies refused to follow until 1752.

     In that year, the British Calendar Act declared that the day after Wednesday, September 2, would advance to Thursday, September 14. Some Englishmen felt cheated and demanded that they receive back the eleven days removed from their calendars, and even rioted in the streets. Perhaps, the laborers were upset because they had lost their wages those eleven days, a reason sufficient to cause a riot.

     Most accept Julius Caesar’s calendar with Gregory’s reformation, but someone who suggested an alternative was Moses Cotsworth, who, in 1905, devised a calendar of 13 months with 28 days, divided into 4 weeks. His extra month he called Sol, and positioned it between June and July. Each month he began on a Sunday and ended on a Saturday. To bring the total number of days to 365, he had to add an extra day at the end of every year, a day he called Year Day, but he did not include it in any month.

     Then, during leap years he had to add Leap Day, set as June 29, and also not part of a month.

     The League of Nations selected Cotsworth’s calendar the best among the 130 plans submitted, but then it failed to win the League’s final support, and once the League collapsed, so did his calendar. Since then, calendar reform has remained a dead issue. We are content with what was handed to us.

     Stonehenge was, at best, a hesitant attempt by prehistoric men—who lacked paper, pencil, and telescopes—to devise a calendar, perhaps to determine the summer solstice. Today the calendar is an app on our cellphones, an integral part of our existence, one that dictates our lives. 

Stalin and Khrushchev’s Great Purge

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2014

     Although President Obama has ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Pentagon is saying that “further strikes are needed in both Iraq and Syria to stop the militants from regrouping.” Then, from the Red Square in Moscow, Putin has “slowly ramped up his meddling in Ukraine, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation” so as to evade a larger war or a threat from the United States or western Europe. Then, today marks the thirteenth anniversary of 9-11, Al-Qaeda’s deadly attacks on New York City’s twin towers, and Washington D.C.’s Pentagon.

     One wonders where all this “war and rumors of war” will end. A columnist recently said though, “it could be worse.” Indeed, look back to the 1930’s, to the Soviet Union, and see a nation, where the citizens shrank in terror from a Great Purge: Siberian prison camps, executions, and mass graves.

     Although Hitler’s Holocaust in the early 1940’s receives the most attention today, Stalin’s Great Purge preceded the Nazi leader’s by five years.

     Beginning in 1934, Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s dictator, turned on, in succession, his own Communist Party’s members; the Red Army’s generals and officers; the writers, thinkers, poets, and playwrights; and then the Russian peasants, the kulak’s who resisted Stalin’s idyllic plan for collective farms. Most of those arrested were shot, their bodies dumped into mass graves. Most were innocent.

     The numbers are difficult to comprehend. Soviet archives list a total of 681,692 people killed, but others put the estimate at one million or more. Then, there were those transported to the prison camps in Siberia, where they worked for years, many of whom died before their terms expired. In the 1930’s, the Soviet citizens—Russian, Ukrainian, and the other nationalities—suffered unspeakable atrocities.

     Why did Joseph Stalin turn on his own party, his army officers, the intelligentsia, and the peasants? One answer is that he feared the loss of his own power, that his paranoia drove him to eliminate all potential rivals. Another answer is that he subscribed to Karl Marx’s political philosophy.

     The British author Paul Johnson wrote in his book Intellectuals that “Marx’s vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken concrete and terrifying shape and that Stalin—the ruler who achieved the absolute power for which Marx had yearned—was just beginning his catastrophic assault upon the Russian peasantry.”

     Another answer is that Stalin was contemptuous of the Russian people. In 1937-1938 he signed 357 lists that authorized the executions of tens of thousands of people, and he said, “Who’s going to remember all this riffraff 10 or 20 years? No one. Who remembers the names now of the boyars that Ivan the Terrible got rid of? No one.”

     Nikita Khrushchev supported Stalin’s purges and even participated in them. For ten years Khrushchev, a Russian, was the Communist Party’s leader in the Ukraine, and from that post, he oversaw the arrest and execution of thousands of Ukrainian people, including the kulaks there, and so many members of Ukraine’s Communist Party that they could not meet because of a lack of a quorum.

     It is no small wonder that the Ukrainians fear the Russian leaders today. Nikita Krushchev’s name is not forgotten in the Ukraine.

     At the time of the Great Purge, Khrushchev said, “Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary and fascist dogs, and that word is execution.” Khrushchev was fortunate that Stalin never turned on him, because others acted and spoke in the same servile manner that Khrushchev did, and yet Stalin rounded on them. Submissiveness to the dictator proved no guarantee of his protection.

     Still, Khrushchev said, “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances.”

     Stalin died of a stroke on March 5, 1953, and Khrushchev succeeded him as the Soviet Union’s leader, and then on February 25, 1956, to the Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech. In it he outlined Stalin’s crimes: “It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power. . . . In practice, Stalin ignored the norms of party life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership.”

     Because of his speech, Khrushchev made enemies in the Communist Party, and because of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, party officials ousted him in 1965. He died six years later on September 11, 1971.

     The machinations of ISIS and Vladimir Putin are worrisome, a harbinger of further atrocities and of world war, but they are small in comparison to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. “It could be worse.”     

Robin Williams

by William H. Benson

August 28, 2014

     Robin Williams was born in 1951, and I in 1953. Due to his rapid-fire wit, his zany antics, and his overabundance of comedic talents, success came quick for him, more so than it did for others of our generation, who struggled for years to make a living.

     In 1978, when I was trying to teach English composition to seventh and eighth graders in Lodgepole, Nebraska, Robin Williams starred in his own television show, Mork and Mindy. Instead of learning to appreciate a poem’s text, my students would chant “na-noo, na-noo,” Mork’s nonsensical catchphrase. Each week on Thursday nights, Mork cast a spell on America’s junior high students.

      Mork and Mindy was a spin-off from Happy Days, and its premise was similar to the early ’60’s black and white sitcom, My Favorite Martian. Orson, the dictator on the planet Ork, had banished Mork to Earth because Orson did not permit humor on Ork.

     Then, at the end of each episode, for about three minutes, Mork, the alien, would report to Orson all he had learned that week. “Mork calling Orson. Mork calling Orson,” he would call out. “Come in Orson.” The audience would then hear Orson’s loud voice, “What is it, Mork!”

     Amongst a series of cutting comments about Orson’s rotund size, Mork would explain in very human terms his interactions with men and women, and these scenes were often unscripted. The show’s writers would leave space and then write, “Robin talks here.”

     The show’s plot was typical sit-com, but Robin’s conversation with Orson, more a monologue than a dialogue, was the clincher. It was then that Robin Williams displayed his versatile skill at stand-up comedy, at improvisation and mimic.

     His friend, Christopher Reeve, said that when the two of them met at the Julliard School in New York City, when both were young and unknown, Robin Williams “talked a mile a minute. He caromed off the walls of the classrooms and hallways. To say that he was ‘on’ would be an understatement.”

     John Houseman at the Julliard School suggested that Robin leave the school after two years and try to find work as a stand-up comedian, and so Robin moved back to California.

     At the comedy clubs in San Francisco, Robin honed his jaw-dropping talent. Other comedians would stand in the wings, gape in amazement as he performed, and realize that they could never transform an audience into a state of helpless laughter as Robin did.

     When the television producer, Garry Marshall, was interviewing actors to play Mork, he asked Robin to act like an alien, and so Robin walked over to a chair and sat on his head. Marshall gave him the job, saying that “Robin was the only alien he interviewed.”

     After four years on Mork and Mindy, Robin starred in a series of movies, and I judge Mrs. Doubtfire his best. In it, Robin played the part of a divorced man who was so saddened by his loss of contact with his three kids that he disguised himself as a kind grandmother, in order to win the job as their babysitter. Neither his ex-wife, played by Sally Field, or their three kids suspected the truth.

     In the animated film Aladdin, he was the genie’s voice, a role that the studio producer created for Robin. As the genie, he sang the show’s opening song, “A Friend Like Me.” “Life is your restaurant, and I’m your maitre d’! C’mon, whisper what it is you want. You ain’t never had a friend like me.”

     Like so many celebrities in Hollywood, Robin fell into a familiar rut: partying until late, drug use, considerable alcohol consumption, and then severe depression that led to suicidal thoughts. John Belushi’s drug overdose in March of 1982 shocked Robin, who had partied at John’s apartment that same night. In 1983, Robin Williams quit both alcohol and drugs and remained sober for two decades.

     In 2003, he was filming a movie in Alaska, felt lonely and afraid, and took his first drink in twenty years. In an interview with Diane Sawyer, he said, that “addiction is a sickness that knows no statue of limitation. It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, ‘It’s fine now. I’m OK.’ Then, the next thing you know, it’s not OK.” After a family intervention in 2006, he entered rehab.

     He claimed he never returned to the drugs though. “I knew,” he said, “that would kill me. I knew I couldn’t be a father and live that sort of life. Useless conversations until midnight, waking up at dawn feeling like a vampire on a day pass.” 

     Although he may have won the war with drugs and battled alcohol to a draw, he could not conquer his own inner thoughts that “the world would be a better place without him.” How wrong he was, and how wrong is anyone who believes that. Mara Buxbaum, his spokesperson, said that “He had been battling severe depression of late.” His gifted and volatile mind had turned on himself.

     Mork loved Mindy, Mrs. Doubtfire loved her, or his, kids, and the genie claimed that “You ain’t never had a friend like me.” How true. I consider Robin Williams my generation’s best jester.