The Luck of the Irish

by William H. Benson

March 13, 2014

     Thelma Catherine Patricia Ryan is a very Irish name, and she had the red-hair to go with it. Born March 16, 1912, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, in Ely, Nevada, her parents moved to Cerritos, California, when she was a child. After high school, she worked her way through the University of Southern California, taught at Whittier High School, and then married the lawyer Richard M. Nixon.

     Patricia is the feminine form of Patrick, the name of the English missionary who introduced Christianity and the Catholic Church into Ireland in the late fifth century. The Scots have St. Andrew, the English claim St. George, but the Irish point with swelling pride to St. Patrick as their patron saint. He died on March 17, known as St. Patrick’s Day.

     In 1995, the writer Thomas Cahill published his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. In it, he detailed St. Patrick’s missionary work, and then Cahill described the important work that the Irish monks completed when Rome fell in 492 A.D.

     Cahill argues that when the Germanic tribes—the Goths, Franks, and Vandals—sacked Rome, set afire the libraries and churches, and destroyed the original texts written by the ancient Greek and Roman writers, the monks of Ireland were busy copying them. So, they preserved Plato and Ovid.

     Immediately and ever since, scholars and historians have criticized Cahill’s argument. They counter that Cahill overstated his case, that copies of those texts were preserved elsewhere across Europe, not just in Ireland. Cahill’s historical interpretation may be doubtful, but his book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for two years.

     The popular perception is that Ireland is an island of green, of shamrocks, of four-leaf clovers, of the Blarney stone, of leprechauns and their lucky charms. The truth is that for centuries the Irish suffered immense depravity, unrelieved poverty, and their share of alcoholism and mental illness.

     On the first page of Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes, he describes the misery he suffered when growing up in Limerick, Ireland. He writes, “It was, of course a miserable childhood. Nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.”

     What did the English do to the Irish for eight hundred long years? James Godkin answers that question in his book, The Land-War in Ireland, published in 1870. Godkin writes, “All the maladies of Ireland have arisen from injuries inflicted by England in the wars which she waged to get possession of the Irish land. Ireland has been irreconcilable because she was robbed of her inheritance.”

     Godkin argues that the English stole the arable land, and then converted the Irish into tenant farmers who were forced to pay rent to an absentee English landlord. This injustice galled the Irish who were dependent upon that land for their survival and existence.

     Irish proverbs underscore their plight. “Cleaning the house will not pay the rent.” “Rent for the landlord or food for the children.” “Colder than a landlord’s heart.”

     The Irish fought back for centuries, but the English dismissed them. They were convinced that the Irish could not save themselves, let alone all of Europe’s civilization, that they were too busy drinking their pint of Guinness, complaining, and crying out at the injustices that they suffered. The English failed to see that the Irish wanted and needed their land returned to them.

     In 1880, the Land League in County Mayo, in Ireland, requested that the English land agent, Charles Boycott, reduce the rent that year because of poor crops. He ignored their request, and instead delivered eviction notices to the tenants. The Land League responded with a plan to isolate Boycott. The mailman would not deliver his mail to him. The laundry refused to wash his clothes. Restaurants would not serve him. Boycott gave in and moved back to England. The Irish had boycotted him.

     Not all was gloom and misery in Ireland though. The sun does shine some days, and the luck is not always bad. Despite their difficulties, the Irish know how to joke and laugh. Edward Lear developed the humorous poem called the limerick, named for Limerick, Ireland. It has five lines, and the first, second, and fifth rhyme, as does the third and fourth. For example, “There was a young rustic named Mallory, who drew but a very small salary. When he went to the show, his purse made him go, to a seat in the uppermost gallery.”

     Another example, “There was a young lass named Pat, who was a thin girl not fat. When young she married Dick, who played many a trick, and his enemies called him a rat.” Of course the limerick is silly, but it is also lighthearted and so very Irish. (By the way, the very Irish-American Pat Nixon died on June 22, 1993, at the age of eighty-one, and her husband died ten months later on April 22, 1994.)  

     Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on Monday, and write a limerick.

Vladimir Putin and the Crimea

by William H. Benson

March 27, 2014

     Three weeks ago, Hillary Clinton spoke at a fundraiser at Long Beach, California and suggested that Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea equaled those of Adolf Hitler eight decades ago. She said,

     “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30’s. All the Germans that . . . were the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

     Yes, the world condemns Putin’s actions as immoral and unlawful, but others say it is a stretch to equate the Russian autocrat with the Nazi dictator. One commentator said, “Hillary’s too smart to actually believe that Putin’s actions are remotely close to anything that Hitler did.” Another said that “Putin does not have Hitler’s global vision of world domination.” Still, Putin’s actions concern us.

     The United Nations proved itself helpless again, and the Obama administration’s tepid response failed to alleviate fear in the Ukraine and in the former Soviet Union republics that Putin’s Russian army would ignore those countries’ sovereignty and grab more of their territory. “The current generation of Western leaders has chosen to ignore Putin’s malevolence.”

     Those who remember the past, or who have read it, are reminded of Neville Chamberlain’s claim of “Peace for our time,” after he had signed the Munich agreement with Herr Hitler and gave portions of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, to Germany. Yet Hitler grabbed more; he wanted all of Europe.

     In 1990, a student named Mike Godwin made an observation: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Known ever since as Godwin’s Law, it means that in all discussions or arguments that last for a length of time, someone will dredge up Hitler or the Nazis, mainly because they are the example of the worst ever.

     A corollary to Godwin’s Law is that whoever invokes Hitler’s name first has lost the argument as well as credibility, and a second corollary is that “the frivolous use of such analogies tends to rob the valid comparisons of their impact.” Based on the law and its corollaries, Hillary Clinton lost some of her credibility to speak on Crimea.

     Instead of dropping Hitler’s name into her speech, she should have explored the Western powers’ options and informed Putin that the United States and western Europe will take issue with his land grab, and that he must pay a price for his ruthless actions.  

     Sixty years ago, in 1954, the Soviet Union’s leader at that time, Nikita Krushchev, decided to grant to the Ukraine the Crimean peninsula, for undisclosed reasons, even though there was at that time a heavy concentration of Russians living there. Today, sixty percent of Crimea is Russian-speaking.

     Just days after Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukraine’s former president, fled the country, the new government in Kiev passed an “odious law” that “eliminated Russian as an official second language.” That law gave Putin the excuse he needed to send 16,000 Russian troops into the Crimea and seize control. His pretext was that he wanted to protect the Russian people there. 

     The truth is that Putin was horrified that the Ukrainian people had moved closer to the European Union and away from Russian domination, and he was horrified by “the sight of Yanukovych being driven from his palace.” He feared the loss of Crimea’s ports for his Russian navy, and he feared a liberal democracy emerging in Ukraine.

     John McLaughlin, a writer for USA Today said, “Russia’s czar knows that if liberal democracy takes hold next door, many middle class Russians will get dangerous ideas.” The Russian people may revolt and drive him and his thugs from his palace in Moscow, a scenario that must terrify him.

     Putin did not win favors in Washington last fall when he granted asylum to Edward Snowden who stole NSA secrets, but he dazzled the world at the Sochi Winter Olympics last month.

     Putin is sixty-one. He retired from the KGB as a lieutenant colonel, and was in line to accept the presidency of Russia once Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. Putin loves judo and karate, and he can be seen on YouTube sparring with others. He and his wife, Lyudmila Putina, have two daughters: Maria is twenty-nine, and Ekaterina is twenty-eight.

     On June 6, 2013, Putin and Lyudmila announced that after thirty years they would divorce soon. Since 2008, Putin has dated the Russian gymnast, Alina Kabaeva, who won a bronze medal in rhythmic gymnastics in 2000 at Sydney, Australia, and the gold in 2004 at Athens, Greece. Alina helped carry the torch in Friday night’s Olympic Opening Ceremony in Sochi.

     Despite the glittering display at Sochi, Western analysts and Putin’s neighbors have reason to suspect him of greater territorial ambitions. Some speculate that he is the richest man on the globe, and Forbes magazine claims that he is the most powerful man in the world. The Russian Empire is back.

Citizenship

by William H. Benson

February 27, 2014

     The New York Times reported last Sunday that Queen Elizabeth II is strapped for cash. This is a surprising development for an English monarch who owns Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, acres of farmland, horses, art, and jewelry, and has a net worth that Forbes magazine estimates at $500 million. In addition, she collects 15% of the income derived each year from the Crown Estate, assets that the nation owns but the queen uses, such as Buckingham Palace and the Crown Jewels.

     “The British government has subsidized the royal household since the reign of King George III.”

     So short of cash is the queen that in 2010 she “applied to a government fund normally reserved for low-income families to help with Buckingham Palace’s heating bills,” and was denied, due to “probable adverse press coverage if the palace were given a grant at the expense of, say, a hospital.”

     Although Parliament retains most of the political power, the Britons love their queen. Fewer than one in five want a pure republic, and 45% show support for the monarch. So, they pay her bills.

     This devotion and deference to a monarch made no sense to Americans in 1776. In Thomas Paine’s bestseller, Common Sense, he called King George III “the royal brute,” and wrote, “There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy.” “It is the pride of kings which throws mankind into confusion.”

     In bold words he insisted that Americans declare their independence from Great Britain. “I challenge the warmest advocate for reconciliation to show a single advantage that this continent can reap by being connected with Great Britain.” “’TIS TIME TO PART!” he shouted. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” “The birth-day of a new world is at hand.”

     Certain Americans agreed with Paine, that no longer should they cower to King George, that they could govern themselves, that they could establish an American republic, and so in 1776, they declared their independence, and in 1787, they wrote the Constitution.

     One question the Constitution’s writers failed to answer was, “who is an American citizen?” The founding fathers did say in the second article that the president must be “a natural-born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States,” when the Constitution was adopted, but they said little else.

     It was not until 1868, during Reconstruction when Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, that citizenship was defined as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, . . . are citizens of the United States.”

     Last Thursday, National Public Radio reported that in 2013 almost 3000 Americans renounced their citizenship, and among them was Tina Turner, who has resided in Switzerland since 1995 with her German-born husband Erwin Bach. Tina signed a “Statement of Voluntary Relinquishment of U. S. Citizenship,” paid the $450 fee, and turned in her passport. Federal officials recorded Tina’s name in the “name and shame” list published each quarter in the Department of Treasury’s Federal Registry.

     Never again will Tina cast her vote for a president, senator, or representative, and if the Federal government should decide to enforce the Reed Amendment, officials may bar her entry back into the United States if they determine she renounced her citizenship in order to avoid U. S. taxes. She must have thought that what she lost in privileges was of less value than what she gained by renouncing her American citizenship. “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”

     Others believe United States citizenship offers more value, than do the renunciants.

     In 1806, forty years after Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, he appeared at the polls in New Rochelle, New York, but the poll’s supervisor, Elisha Ward, denied him a ballot, saying, “You are not an American.” What? Thomas Paine, the first American to urge independence, is now told he cannot vote. Ward argued that because Paine had lived for fifteen years first in England and then in France after the Revolutionary War, he had either lost his citizenship or never had it in the first place.

     Ward said to Paine, “our minister at Paris, Gouverneur Morris, would not reclaim you when you were imprisoned in the Luxembourg prison at Paris, and General Washington refused to do it.” Paine contradicted that argument, but Ward would not budge. A humiliated Thomas Paine was forced to leave the polls without voting. Paine sued Ward, but the judge sided with Ward, and so Paine lost the suit.

     What do American citizens do? They speak their minds, they voice their opinions, they disagree with their elected officials, they participate in their government when asked, but above all else, they vote. What do American citizens not do? They do not kneel before the queen, they do not subsidize her regal and extravagant lifestyle, nor do they renounce their citizenship.   

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

by William H. Benson

February 13, 2014

     Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Lee, died of a kidney infection on Valentine’s Day 1884, just two days after she delivered her first child, a daughter, also named Alice. The tragedy was compounded when Theodore’s mother died of typhoid fever that same day. So grief-stricken was Theodore by the double loss that he packed up and headed for a ranch in southwest North Dakota where he tended cattle for two years, expecting his sister in New York to care for his infant daughter

      Upon his return to New York in 1886, he married Edith Carow, and they had five children. Alice though was difficult—opinionated, rebellious, and impulsive. She needed a mother, and Edith tried, but she had five children of her own. There was tension and conflict between step-mother and daughter. Alice’s dad was a rising political star, and he had little time to give to his eldest daughter.

     After all, he had to defeat the Spanish and win the war. He and his Rough Riders sailed to Cuba, where they marched up San Juan Hill in a blaze of glory. After the war he won the election as New York’s governor, then served as vice-president under William McKinley, and after an assassin’s bullet ended McKinley’s life on September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt at forty-two took the oath to become president of the United States, the youngest president until John F. Kennedy

     Alice was seventeen and thrilled to move into the White House. Americans smiled though when they learned that she brought into the White House a pet snake that she named Emily Spinach because it was green, and officials looked the other way as she placed bets with bookies, smoked cigarettes, and interrupted her father’s meetings. At one point, the president said, “I can run the country, or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”

     After her family moved out of the White House, and the Taft family moved in, Alice dug a hole in the White House lawn and buried a voodoo doll that resembled Mrs. William Howard Taft. The new president felt so outraged that he banished Alice from all of his future White House social functions.

     Because she told an unprintable joke about Woodrow Wilson, a man who never forgot or forgave an insult, he too banished her. Of Calvin Coolidge, Alice said, “He looks as if he was weaned on a pickle.” Of her own father, Theodore Roosevelt, she said, “He has to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening.”

     After she first met Thomas Dewey, New York’s governor and the Republican candidate for president in 1944, she said, “He reminds me of the little man who stands on top of the wedding cake.”

     Alice married a representative from Ohio named Nicholas Longworth, but she carried on several steamy affairs with other men, including Senator William Borah of Idaho, by whom she had her only child, a daughter she named Paulina.

     Alice lived the rest of her life in Washington D. C., just west of the Dupont Circle on Massachusetts Avenue, where she spoke her mind about all the presidents, attended numerous Washington parties, and carved out a position as a gossip. People called her “the other Washington Monument.”

     Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, when he was only sixty, when Alice was just thirty-five. Twelve years later, she buried her husband Nicholas, and she was a widow at forty-seven. She never remarried.  

     A life-long Republican, Alice Roosevelt Longworth knew all the presidents: Taft, Wilson, Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, she avoided.

     Serving as the nation’s president is difficult because criticism is expected and ever-present, but being the president’s daughter carries its own challenges: superior moral behavior is mandatory, all eyes stare at the poor girl, one mistake and the outcry could wilt the strongest constitution. The deluge of attention would cause some to give up and crawl into a corner of their bedroom and never say or do anything in public ever again, but not Alice.

     Sons of two of our nation’s presidents have won election as president also, John Quincy Adams and George W. Bush, but never a daughter. Officials in Ohio asked Alice to run for Congress after Nicholas died, but she turned them down because the thought of campaigning repelled her. “All those people.” She should have run for president. Few would or could push her into doing anything she opposed.

     After a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, and a double mastectomy due to breast cancer in her eighties, Alice died on February 20, 1980, eight days after her ninety-sixth birthday, and after she had outlived her five younger siblings.

     My favorite Alice Roosevelt Longworth quote: “If you can’t say anything nice about anybody, come sit next to me.”

English vs. French

by William H. Benson

January 30, 2014

     Edgar Allan Poe first saw in print his poem “The Raven” on January 29, 1845. You might recall from high school literature, that the raven visited the poet on a cold December night and would say only one word, “Nevermore,” a word that rhymed with the poet’s deceased lover, the lost Lenore. The poet shouted at the raven, wanted to know why the bird tormented him, and called it a “Prophet, a thing of evil!” The raven replied, “Nevermore.”

     On January 3 this year, Heather MacDonald, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, lamented on an English department’s recent decision to abandon the requirement that English majors read the works of great literature, poems such as Poe’s “The Raven,” as well as Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and plays such as Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and “Macbeth.”

     Instead, the deans in the English department at the University of California at Los Angeles, like other universities, have ruled that students should study issues of gender, race, ethnicity, disability, or sexuality, and ignore the written works of dead white men who, they claim, were part of the “Empire.” In other words, UCLA’s students will nevermore read of the raven who said “Nevermore.”

     MacDonald writes that this decision reflects “an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics.” Now the English student will only “study oppression, preferably his or her own.”

     Why read the literature of dead white men? By doing so, a student will learn how to identify the nuances of meaning in a passage, how to tease out an idea from a tangle of words, how to express a fleeting thought, and how to think in an independent way, without undue influence from others. It is not the dictatorships but the republics who need the independent thinkers.

     MacDonald writes that “humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so.”

     “The Raven.” A poem, a thing of beauty, an object that all who know English should admire.

     The French may have fought the English for centuries, but the French love Poe, especially the French Symbolists, who admire this American author and his deft style with the English language.

     But now the French have troubles. Newsweek‘s January 3 edition reported that “ever since Socialist President François Hollande was elected in 2012, income tax and social security contributions in France have skyrocketed. The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent.” Unofficially, unemployment is “more like 5 million,” and “the cost of everyday living is astronomical.” But if a citizen wants anything, “fill out a form,” and the government will pay.

     Two weeks ago the French newspaper Closer printed photos of Hollande riding his motor scooter away from the Elysée Palace to rendezvous with the actress Julie Gayet, and a media scandal erupted. One writer said Hollande is “the most unpopular president in French history.” The previous president Nicolas Sarkozy married the supermodel Carla Bruni and so flaunted her that he “paid a price at the polls,” and lost the election. French men have interests other than political, economic, or literary.

     French is a Romance language, derived from the ancient Romans’ Latin. Old English was a Germanic language, but after William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel in 1066 and conquered England, he introduced the French language into the English court. Modern English now offers dual vocabularies: one is Anglo-Saxon and the other is French. We can say either lake or reservoir, box or cache, bucket or pail.

     The French battled the English for centuries, but the English language has won the war. Today English and not French is the world’s “lingua franca.” A Channel separates the two countries, but now a Chunnel connects London with Paris in two hours and fifteen minutes.

     In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, a detective story set in Paris, he mentions the game of chess and then observes that “what is only complex is mistaken for what is profound.” Games and sports can be complex but not so profound. What is profound? I would say that medicine, government, the law, and technology are all profound. Medicine saves people’s lives, people rule themselves in a republican government, the law brings order to human society’s chaos, and technology provides people with an amazing array of tools.

     Literature is the sum of “the stunning complexity of the past,” but is it profound? I would agree that it is because literature is the summit of the English language, the greatest construction for human communication ever devised, and so may it live evermore.