Magic and Michael

by William H. Benson

November 7, 2013

     Magic and Michael. Both were from the Midwest, from the cold Rust Belt. Magic was from Lansing, Michigan, and Michael was from Gary, Indiana. When young, both moved to warm and sunny California. Magic played basketball better than anyone, perhaps better than Michael Jordan, and Michael danced and sang better than anyone, perhaps better than Elvis. Both achieved global fame.

     Magic Johnson played for the Los Angeles Lakers for thirteen seasons, won five national championships, the first in 1980, and the last in 1988, and was named the NBA’s most valuable player three times, in 1987, 1989, and 1990. On a basketball court, he dazzled everyone with his “Showtime” playing style, “a mix of no-look passes off the fast break, pin-point alley-oops from half-court, spinning feeds, and overhand bullets through triple teams.”

     The magic ended with a routine blood test, and the worst news. On November 7, 1991, 22 years ago today, at a press conference, Magic announced that he had tested positive for HIV and that he would retire from the Lakers, and from basketball. The news stunned his fans, his team, his coaches, and the nation. HIV was now infecting heterosexuals, not just gay men and drug addicts.

     An ominous and bleak future stretched before Magic Johnson, because in those days, HIV was considered a death sentence. If a person contracted the virus, he or she would get AIDS and die. There was little hope. Magic responded to the dire news in two ways: by taking a daily combination of multiple antiretroviral drugs that strengthened his body’s immune system, and by pursuing a second career in business. The drugs worked; he is alive today, and his business is successful.

     At the age of twenty-four, Michael Jackson achieved stunning success when he released his Thriller album on November 30, 1982. It has sold 42.4 million copies, the best-selling album ever, by far. The songs are tame compared to today’s heavier style. In one of them, Michael and Paul McCartney sing a cute duet, “The Girl is Mine,” but Vincent Price’s ghastly voice at the end of “Thriller” is haunting.

     “Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. And grisly ghouls from every tomb are closing in to seal your doom. And though you fight to stay alive, your body starts to shiver, for no mortal can resist the evil of the thriller.” Price then finishes with a maniacal laugh from deep within an echo chamber.

      The thirteen-minute “Thriller” video features zombies who crawl from their graves to dance and spin with Michael. It still thrills to watch it.

     The 1980’s was Michael’s decade. If he would have stopped then, he could have achieved more, but the weirdness consumed him: the unrestrained spending habit without the income, the half a billion dollars of debt, the bills never paid, the promises to perform never honored, his failed marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the child abuse accusations and criminal trial, the addiction to drugs to numb him and give him sleep, and the plastic surgeries to redesign his face.

     Jane Fonda confronted him about that. “I want you to stop now,” she said. “No more. Promise me you won’t go too far with this thing. Love yourself the way you are, for who you are.” But Jane could not reach him, and his looks deteriorated. Gaunt, ghostly-looking, and emaciated, he transmogrified himself into a freak, which reminds me of the joke kids say in November. “Halloween is over. You can take off your mask now.” For Michael that was impossible; his mask had become his face.

     Michael died June 25, 2009, four years ago, of cardiac arrest caused by a drug overdose when trying to get some sleep, to quiet the inner loop that ran again and again through his mind.

     Like Elvis, Michael still sells tickets, still packs auditoriums across the world, and people still love to hear him sing “Billy Jean,” watch him moonwalk, spin, and stand on his toes, but they are watching a video. John Branca, Michael’s estate attorney, says, “Michael sells more tickets now than when he was alive.” The magic that was in Michael still lives.

     Magic and Michael. Similar starts in life and both endowed with breath-taking talents, but their lives unfolded in such disparate ways. Michael never contracted HIV, but Magic did. Both turned to drugs: Magic to stay alive, and Michael to quiet the demons. Michael left behind three children: Prince, Paris, and Michael II. Magic also has three children, but he never held any of his babies over a balcony in Germany, like Michael did with his youngest. Despite HIV, Magic worked to maintain his balance and common sense, but Michael lost his sometime after “Thriller.”

Dialogue

by William H. Benson

October 24, 2013

     In recent days I came across a book published in 2010 with a thought-provoking title, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us. The author, an Englishman named Ferdinand Mount, argues in it that “so much about the society that is now emerging bears an astonishing resemblance to the most prominent features of what we call the classical world.”

     In Mount’s book, he dares to equate our modern society to the Greeks of 400 B.C. and to the Romans of the days of Julius Caesar, and that we of the living have reverted to similar ideas and habits of those who died ages ago in Mediterranean Europe.

     Mount’s chapter titles include: “bath, gym, bedroom, kitchen, science, and religion.” Then, midway through the book he includes a chapter on “dialogue.” In it, Mount describes our human love for dialogue, for conversation, for argument, for talk, as did the ancient Greeks and the Romans.

     Mount lays out a series of sentences that would resound in any reader’s ears: “The dialogue is the key that opens up fortified intellectual positions and minds that are firmly closed.” “It has become unchallenged wisdom that all wisdom has to be challenged.” “The most abundant of all the fruits of affluence is conversation.” “The fashion for contestation is not just an accidental quirk of modern life. It is built into the nature of modernity.” “Everyone has the right to engage in the conversation.”

     Yes, those sentences would cause a reader to pause and think and even reflect upon them, but I question Mount’s argument that what occurred in Greece and Rome eons ago has returned to us. History does not always repeat itself, but on occasion it will rhyme. I say that in every generation certain human beings wanted to talk and question others, but many did not dare out of fear of their life. 

     Our modern society has decided that conversation is a good thing, that “the only way forward is through dialogue,” and that “getting around a table” and “getting down to serious talks” is crucial. A week ago Congress and the President agreed to reopen the government, but only after endless discussions, proposals, counter-proposals, and threats, until one side capitulated to the other.

     Thursday, October 24 is the day we remember the United Nations, an organization that asks countries’s leaders to engage in dialogue, rather than threaten war. The UN’s success is debatable.

     Education and talk are one in the same thing. The teacher or professor talks, and the students listen and respond back on exams or reports. In that dialogue between master and student, education happens, or so it is believed, will happen. Mount says that, “In the real world, most education turns out to be a mixture of injecting facts, and training in critical evaluation, a blend of information and skepticism.”

     Where marital counseling is a three-way dialogue, psychoanalysis is two-way. “Dialogue, “writes Mount, “is the dominant cure for all forms of addiction, and that talking really is good for our mental health,” an idea that extends back to Sigmund Freud. To that idea, another Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, responded, “Psychoanalysis is the disease that takes itself for a cure.”

     But the one arena where talk has multiplied exponentially is on the television and radio airwaves. Where once a nameless reporter shoved a microphone in front of a celebrity or politician and allowed him or her to express his or her arguments, now the interviewer speaks as much as the interviewee, often supplying words and ideas into the dialogue. I wonder, “who is interviewing who?”

     In ancient Greece one person dared to dialogue and to question all assumptions. His name was Socrates, and he frustrated so many by his questions and talk that the authorities executed him. His disciple, a philosopher named Plato, wrote down Socrates’s words in works he called “Dialogues.”

     According to Plato, wherever Socrates went, he caused havoc by asking difficult questions: “How do our acts of piety benefit the gods?” “How on earth can there be any justification for attributing divine sanction for our acts?” “How can we achieve anything resembling justice except by relentlessly examining our motives and our prejudices?”

     In ancient Greek, dialogue meant the flow of ideas “through speech,” and not “two-speech,” which would have been “duologue.” In other words, dialogue is the revelation of crucial and important ideas through the medium of language and conversation.

     Should we talk everywhere? Mount says “no,” not in areas where health and safety are paramount, such as in a surgical ward or in a jet’s cockpit. Should we talk to everyone? I say not to tyrants, madmen, or dictators. There is no conversation with them because they only understand power, not language. We should enjoy our conversations, our dialogues with others, because in their midst we feel human warmth, are connected and comforted.

Jim Ryun and the Mile

by William H. Benson

October 10, 2013

     Decades ago, one lap around a high school or college track equalled a quarter of a mile. A race on the straight in front of the stands was the 100 yard dash, and a half lap was 220 yards. Those two were the sprints. A single lap was the quarter mile run, and two laps was the half mile run. Those were the middle distance races. Four laps was the mile run, and eight laps was the two-mile run. Those were the long distance races. Along with the relays, that was “track” for generations of students.

     At some time in the recent past, those distances were converted over to the metric system. Oval tracks are now 400 meters long, which converts to 437.445 yards, just short of the former 440 yards. Now runners run meters: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, 3000, 5000, 10,000 or more. According to the International Association of Athletics Federation, records now are in meters, indoors and outdoors, men and women, with one exception: the mile run.

     The mile run captivated people’s imagination once a stop clock was brought to the track, and people began dreaming about running a mile in less than 4 minutes. Quarter-milers routinely run their race in less than 60 seconds, but for a runner to run a sub 4 minute mile means that his average for each lap must be less than 60 seconds, no small feat. Theorists believed it impossible, the limit of man’s ability.

     One hundred years ago, two Americans set the world record for the mile: 4:14.4 in 1913, and 4:12.6 in 1915. Glen Cunningham ran the mile for the Kansas University track team, and set the world record on June 6, 1934, at 4:06.8. At his prime he could not break the 4 minute barrier.

     Finally, on May 6, 1954, on the track at Oxford, an English medical student named Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile mark for the first time, and set a new world record at 3:59.4. Once he proved the feat achievable, others did the same. The Australian John Landy did it 46 days later.

     Ten years later, a running phenomenon began to catch people’s attention. His name was Jim Ryun, an East High School student in Wichita, Kansas, who had the body build of a distance runner: tall, thin, and long legs. Plus, he possessed an amazing kick on the final lap. Soon, he was breaking the nation’s high school records in the half-mile, 1500 meters, mile, and two mile.

      Then, at Kansas University in Lawrence, he continued breaking records. On July 17, 1966, when he was 19, he raced at Berkeley, California and set the world’s record in the mile at 3:51.3. Eleven months later, on June 23, 1967, he broke his own record at Bakersfield, California, running the mile in 3:51.1, and that record stood for the next 8 years.

     He was the fourth and the last American to own the world record in the mile.

     In October of 1968, Jim Ryun ran the 1500 meters at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Heavily favored to win, Ryun was not accustomed to Mexico City’s altitude of 7,300 feet. Plus, he had suffered a bout with mononucleosis in June. Throughout most of the race, Ryun ran at the back of the pack while the Kenyan, Kip Keino, ran a blistering pace at the front of the pack. On the final lap, Ryun kicked and sprinted ahead of the pack but was still 20 meters behind Kip at the finish line.

     Ryun ran a time of 3:37.8 and took the silver, and Kip Keino ran it in 3:34.9 and took the gold.

     Years later, when reflecting on that race, Jim said, “We had thought that 3:39 would win, and I ran under that. I considered it like winning a gold medal; I had done my very best, and I still believe I would have won at sea level.” Also, if the race had been a mile, or 1,609.334 meters, instead of 1500 meters, Ryun’s kick may have carried him past the Kenyan. An additional 109 meters may have helped.

     Jim Ryun was tripped at the beginning of the 1500 meter race at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, and was disqualified. Because he retired from competitive running after that, he never won an Olympic gold.

     In 1996, Kansas’s voters elected Jim to the U.S. House of Representatives, and he served there until 2006. He is now 66 years old, and lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Kip Keino is 73, and lives in Eldoret, Kenya. Both men have established schools and programs in their respective countries to encourage students to run. Roger Bannister became a neurologist at Pembroke College, Oxford, and is now 84.

     The current record holder for the mile is Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, who ran the race on July 7, 1999 at a time of 3:43.13, almost 8 seconds faster than Jim Ryun’s world record, and over 16 seconds faster than Roger Bannister’s personal best.

     The mile is still there, but runners run it on 400 meter tracks. The stop watch is still there, and runners shave seconds and tenths of seconds off their times. Matching time to that distance is the competition. Someone will set a new world record in the mile run someday.

Literary Styles in the English Language

by William H. Benson

September 26, 2013

     “September 30, 1659. I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked, during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which I called ‘the Island of Despair,’ all the rest of the ship’s company being drowned, and myself almost dead.”

     So writes Daniel Defoe in his classic tale, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. I have always liked Defoe’s book, ever since I first read it. I like Robinson Crusoe’s resourcefulness, his ability to thrive despite adversity and isolation, elements that make a great story.

     But I also like Defoe’s literary style, his no-nonsense and straightforward English, without embellishment. Pick a sentence, any sentence, and you will see and hear his sense of pace, his rhythm, his workmanlike style, his matter-of-fact explanations.

     “But being now in the eleventh year of my residence, and, as I have said, my ammunition growing low, I set myself to study some art to trap and snare the goats, to see whether I could not catch some of them alive.” Forty-three words, all Anglo-Saxon, except the French words ‘residence’ and ‘ammunition.’ 

     I am partial to the writers, like Defoe, who work the English language, like a craftsman who chisels a wooden block, who shape and form an image.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work.” Emerson’s style is wise, gentle, and cerebral.

     On the other hand, the curmudgeon H. L. Mencken observed, “Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.” Note his exaggeration in one direction and then his quick reversal. Two extremes contrasted and then the blazing image of alley cats, pure Menckenesque.

     Literary style is comparable to a fingerprint, a palm-print, or a face, individual and unique.

     Yet, an author’s style should not overshadow the content of his or her words. A “bad good writer” has important ideas to share, but expresses them in a haphazard manner. A “good bad writer” phrases his words and sentences with care, such that they sparkle, but alas, their content is empty, meaningless, misguided, or just plain wrong.

     The historian Jacques Barzun writes that “English has a great advantage over German” because ‘it possesses two vocabularies, nearly parallel” to each other: the first is Anglo-Saxon and the other is French derived from Latin. We can write “concede” or “give in;” “assume,” or “take up;” “deliver” or “hand over;” “insert” or “put in;” “retreat” or “fall back.” The French gave to modern English the first of those pairs, and the Anglo-Saxons gave the latter.

     Barzun says that “the existence of the quasi duplicate makes for a wide range of coloring in style and nuances in thought.” In other words, a writer in English can display shades of meaning and distinctions of thought that writers in certain other languages may not.

     Most composition teachers encourage students to stick with the more concrete Anglo-Saxon word and avoid the more abstract and stilted French word, but Barzun cautions that “Only a mechanical mind believes that the so-called Anglo-Saxon derivatives should always be preferred.”

     Mark Twain, who knew a few things about an English literary style, hated the German language and suggested that it “ought to be trimmed down and repaired.” He disliked the way that German relies upon the parenthesis, that it capitalizes its nouns, that the verb appears last in a sentence, that the gender classification makes no sense, and that it builds long words by splicing together other words.

     For example, Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen means, according to Twain, “Declarations of Independence.” Where an English-speaking man or woman drops a preposition between words to convey meaning, the Germans sew together a series of words and create “a mountain range” of a word.

    Twain wrote as a critic would write, pointing out mistakes, finding fault, and suggesting improvements. I would suspect that at least one German critic in turn criticized Twain’s literary style.

     The English stylist Peter Elbow writes in his book “Writing with Power,” that “Scholars like to tell the history of language as a story of things we gained that our forebears lacked—in terms of the stupid mistakes the ancients made.” Elbow sees the opposite, and asks, “But how about what we lack and what they had? They had power in language that’s hard to capture now.”

     Consider Homer, the other ancient Greeks, and the early Anglo-Saxon writers. They displayed a style, a power, and a magic that casts a spell upon their readers, as does Daniel Defoe.

     Elbow believes that the great writer “paralyzes the reader, prevents him or her from moving away, and compels him or her to experience the words, the story, and its meaning.” That, he says, is  magic.

Terror on New York’s Streets

by William H. Benson

September 12, 2013

     A bomb exploded at noon sharp, on September 16, 1920, at 23 Wall Street, at the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets, the address of the J. P. Morgan Bank. The perpetrator had strapped 100 pounds of dynamite to 500 pounds of cast-iron slugs and weights used in window sashes, loaded it on a horse-drawn wagon, driven to the scene, lit the fuse, and escaped the carnage before the dynamite detonated.

     At the moment of impact, the crude bomb “tore arms, legs, feet, hands, and scalps from its victims.” One witness said, “It was a crash out of a blue sky, an unexpected, death dealing bolt [that] turned into a shambles the busiest corner of America’s financial center.” Thirty-nine people died that day, and hundreds more suffered wounds in what was the worst terrorist attack in American history, that is until the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995.

     In 2009, a Yale history teacher named Beverly Gage published an account of this 1920 terrorist act in a book she entitled “The Day Wall Street Exploded.” In it, she wrote that most of the victims were innocent bystanders, “messengers, stenographers, clerks, salesmen, drivers,” the workers on Wall Street, “a place to make a modest living by selling milk, driving a car, typing reports, recording sales.”

     Lawmen believed that the perpetrators directed their attack at the J. P. Morgan Bank, but only one person employed in the bank was killed, a 24-year-old clerk. Most other employees were bandaged and back at work the next day. Cleanup crews obliterated crucial physical evidence that afternoon, and so authorities failed to apprehend, arrest, bring to trial, or convict anyone, not ever.

     A visitor to the city can still walk up to the building’s marble walls to see and touch the pock marks.

     Who would commit such a crime and why? Most detectives believed that an anarchist was behind the bombing. A series of bombs exploded in 1919 and 1920, and most were linked to anarchists. On June 2, 1919 a bomb exploded outside the house where Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, lived. He flew into action, tossed aside the Constitution, rounded up some six thousand men suspected of radical thoughts, and deported 556 aliens. The Red Scare was on.

     These anarchists were for very little, but against everything. They opposed industrialization and the state’s power to protect and regulate it. They did not waste time quibbling over their ideology’s finer points, but preferred to act, calling their dynamite bombs “propaganda by deed.” They “never developed a coherent vision for a society without state power” or without industrial strength.

     If that same visitor to New York City would walk the two blocks west of 23 Wall Street to Broadway, then north on Broadway four blocks, and then one block west on Liberty Street, he or she would stand on the southern edge of the World Trade Center, the 16-acre site where the cruelest act of terrorism occurred in our nation’s history on September 11, 2001.

     Today that visitor would not see an ugly empty lot, because on its northwest corner, stands a new skyscraper, 104 stories tall, its address One World Trade Center, its spire reaching to a height of 1776 feet, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, the fourth tallest in the world. Topped out a year ago on August 30, workers installed the spire’s final piece on May 10, 2013. The 1776 feet was symbolic. Its cost was $3.9 billion, the most expensive building project in the world at this time.

     Other planes had flown into skyscrapers before. At 9:40 a.m. on July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber flown by William Franklin Smith hit the north side of the Empire State Building, at the 79^th floor and killed fourteen people: Smith, his two crewmen, and eleven others inside the building. Then, on May 20, 1946 a C-45 Beechcraft flew into the 58^th floor on the north side of the Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street, killing five people on board, but all inside survived.

     Authorities blamed the two crashes on fog, poor visibility, and pilot disorientation, but the crashes on 9-11 were no accidents. The perpetrators’ intent was self-destructive and cruel destruction on a massive scale, and they succeeded in both.

     What defeated those determined and violent 19^th and 20^th century anarchists who were so in love with dynamite?  The Newsweek writer David Wallace-Wells answered that question. “Enlightenment values have triumphed over terroristic ones before, not by defeating [them] but by absorbing them through progressive legislation, unionization, rising wages and the formalization of civil liberties.”

     Yes, the morning and evening news reminds us daily that we live in a dangerous era, but the historians observe that in the history of humankind that fact is not unique. All eras were and will be dangerous. What is remarkable is that Enlightenment values can overcome and absorb its foes.

     Because life goes on, even after a premeditated terrorist act, New York City built a new skyscraper.