OBAMA VS. ROMNEY

by William H. Benson

November 22, 2012

     Although President Obama won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, the popular vote was closer: 62.6 million to 59.1 million. Obama won the northeast: all the states between Minnesota and Iowa in the west to Maine in the east were blue. He won just two states in the South, Virginia and Florida, and he won the three states on the west coast, plus Hawaii. Then, in the country’s interior he won exactly three states: Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. All others were red, for Mitt Romney.

     By now the election-shocked Republicans are facing the ugly reality that they lost an election that they were so confident they would win.

     Why did Romney lose? One pundit suggested that the Republicans and their “super PAC’s” “bet on the wrong tactic.” Those, such as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, spent nearly $500 million on television advertisements, but “voters said they were overwhelmed by the din of ads and tuned it all out.” Voters felt that listening to Big Brother’s steady drone on television was most unsatisfactory.

     Instead, the Obama campaign focused on the swing states’ voters and urged them to get to the polls and vote, a more personal approach that proved more effective.

     Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, observed that “Romney was an unpalatable candidate,” mainly because he and his party “made little effort not to alienate women.” Karen Hughes, George W. Bush’s former aide, said, “If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.” Single women voted for Obama.

     Then, last summer Romney alienated the poor when he said that “47% of the American people will vote for President Obama because they are dependent upon government, believe they are victims, and expect government to care for them.” As a life-long Republican, I was most disheartened when I heard that comment. Saying that is not how one wins an election. The young and the poor voted for Obama.

     In addition, some voters saw in Romney a return to the George W. Bush days of tax cuts for the rich, un-winnable foreign wars, excessive spending, a galloping federal deficit, and an arrogant display of unilateral power that alienated the world. They said, “Never again a GWB,” and they voted for Obama.

     Romney also failed to find an economic message that would appeal across the demographic lines. Ross Douthat, another columnist, said that “Latino voters don’t relate to the current G.O.P. fixation on upper-bracket tax cuts.” So, the Latino’s voted for Obama.

     Observing this outcome, William Falk, a columnist at The Week, said that “America’s demographics are changing, and at the same time we remain a fundamentally centrist nation.” He pointed out that the young, the single, the poor, the women, and the Hispanics are no longer the outliers, stuck on the fringe, but that, “They are the authentic face of America.” Our nation is no longer just WASP men.

     Also, the American voters are skeptical of all extreme political positions, and so they tend to vote towards the center. Falk points out that late in the election, “Romney nearly caught Obama when he ran away form the ‘severely conservative’ positions he adopted during the primaries. But it was too late.”

     What can the dazed Republicans do now to revitalize their party and look forward to 2016, when   they will not be racing against an incumbent? The Republicans have four years an appealing candidate, someone without the arrogant, white-male dominating attitude, so redolent of W and Romney.

     They might find a candidate who will extricate us from the Middle East’s wars. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Israel, and Palestine are, so said Thomas Friedman, “countries too hard to fix but too dangerous to ignore.” Such a candidate would insist that the foes and the entire region lead the way in finding solutions, and not just the United States.

     The ideal Republican candidate should urge the legislators to reform our immigration policies, discover alternatives to Obamacare, diminish the ill effects of crony capitalism, build more schools than prisons, and work towards not only balancing the budget but paying down the federal debt. This means higher taxes, less government, and entitlement reform, but those are issues we must face now or later. Now is preferable.  

     Short-term the legislators face a fiscal cliff, but long-term I think that they should climb that mountain of debt with shovels in their hands and begin digging a hole deep into it, instead of adding more to it. If any Republican would just start leveling with the American people in those kind of words, I say they would listen. They may not like it, but they would listen.

     The Republicans have four years to plan, to look deep within themselves, to re-evaluate their  conservative views, and to insist upon policies that would thwart the wild-spending legislators, that would promote family values, and that would encourage affordable education for the poor and the middle classes. It will then fall to the G.O.P. “to reform and streamline this government.”

RICHARD NIXON AND BILLY GRAHAM

by William H. Benson

November 8, 2012

     Since I am writing this on the Sunday before the Tuesday election, I do not know that election’s outcome. As to who will sit in the Oval Office for the next four years, I dare not predict, other than to say that it is difficult to beat the incumbent, who has a better field position and a head start. Yet, it has happened in recent years. Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, after Carter served only a single term, and Bill Clinton soundly defeated the first George Bush after he won the Persian Gulf War.

     Carter and Bush I were outclassed. Walter Cronkite called Ronald Reagan “the most winsome man I ever met,” something that the American public instinctively knew and appreciated. Reagan’s jokes and affable manners were as attractive as Carter’s somber demeanor and hesitant leadership style were repellent. And Bill Clinton was a golden Wonder-boy when contrasted with the elder George Bush.

     For every election’s winner there is also a loser, and to lose an election is extraordinarily painful. George McGovern recently passed away, but in 1972 when running against Nixon, the incumbent, McGovern won only a single state, Massachusetts. Then, in 1984 Walter “Fritz” Mondale also won a single state, his native Minnesota, when running against Reagan, the incumbent then.

     After his devastating loss, Mondale called McGovern and asked him, “George, how long does it take for the hurt to wear off?” “Fritz,” said McGovern, “I’ll call you when it does.”

     The sorest loser in modern history has to be Richard Nixon. He ran for President in 1960 and lost to Kennedy, and then in 1962 he ran for California’s governor against the incumbent Edmund G. Brown and lost that race also. On November 7, 1962, the day after the election, Nixon appeared at a press conference in Los Angeles and announced that he was finished with campaigns and elections and that he was retiring from politics. The reporters looked up at him, stunned by his frankness.

     Then, Nixon spoke directly at them, saying, “just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” This was an unfortunate choice of words, because eventually he did return to politics, did run for president six years later, and did win the 1968 election, defeating Hubert Humphrey.

     The press now had more opportunity to kick Nixon around, and kick him they did. His presidency was marked by sheer animosity for the media, and it was the media, specifically Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post, which finally did him in by exposing Nixon’s coverup on Watergate.

     Throughout his career as Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President, Nixon had befriended the Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, and once Nixon was President, he invited Graham frequently into the White House, to stay in one of the bedrooms, and visit him in the Oval Office. One biographer wrote that “Richard Nixon and Billy Graham were simply two pieces cut from the same American apple pie. They were just naturally fated to gravitate together at some point in their lives.

      Graham considered Nixon his friend, and spoke up for him when his enemies spoke or wrote ill of him, but they saw in Richard Nixon what Billy Graham would or could not see. “Like some dark enchantment,” Billy “proceeded in a kind of perceptual and moral glaucoma,” dwelling in an “abiding eager innocence throughout his relationship with Nixon.”

     It was the tapes that knocked Graham’s perceptions of Nixon off kilter. Billy read the transcripts of the recorded tapes of Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office, and was stunned. “Those tapes,” he said, “revealed a man that I never knew; I never saw that side of him.” His language was indeed foul, coarse, and vulgar, but it was the conniving, deceitful, and manipulative manner that he governed himself and the White House that struck Billy most hard.

     Watergate was Nixon’s subordinates’ attempt to ensure that he, the incumbent, won the job of President in 1972, and he did win, defeating George McGovern forty-nine states to just one. Watergate was so pointless, so needless. He would have won without his Plumbers Gang breaking into a Watergate hotel room. How foolish it was to go to such extremes to win an election already won.

     Years later, Billy admitted, “I think I always thought a great deal more of him than he thought of me.” Face it, Billy; he used you. He befriended you, for a reason: to earn political points, and so that the American public would think that he agreed with your Christian principles of decency and fair-dealing, when he did not.

     Jimmy Carter still lives and so does Bill Clinton and the two George Bush’s, but Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford are both gone as is Richard Nixon, who passed away at the age of eighty-one on April 22, 1994. As for Billy Graham, the “Preacher to the Presidents,” he celebrates his 94^th birthday on November 7, and I and the nation wish him well. Perhaps he can preach to the next President: either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. His words might help, they may not, but they could do little harm.

DETECTIVE NOVELS

by William H. Benson

October 25, 2012

     It is a winning formula. Create an appealing character, place him or her in a complex, hard-to-crack situation, and watch the plot boil. For decades, authors have written mysteries by that same formula.   

     Agatha Christie brought to life Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and sold thousands of books. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found fortune and fame when he described the mystery-solving talents of his pipe-smoking detective Sherlock Holmes. Earle Stanley Gardner wrote eighty-six Perry Mason mysteries. Then there is Dick Francis’s Sid Halley, Dashiell Hammet’s Phillip Marlowe, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Robert Parker’s Spencer, and multitudes more. The suspense holds our attention because as human beings we are curious. We read because we want to know what happened.

     But we should not limit ourselves to just mysteries. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote adventures, stories of Tarzan swinging through African jungles, and of John Carter fighting the creatures that inhabit the planet Mars. Ian Fleming wrote fourteen James Bond spy novels. Then there is Fran Striker’s Lone Ranger, a detective but in a Western setting.

     Then there are the comic book superheroes, such as Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, who solve immense problems with their superior-strength, skill, and acumen. In the movies there are hundreds of larger-than-life characters. For example, Sylvester Stallone built a franchise around his fictional boxer Rocky Balboa. It is difficult to determine who is more real: Stallone or Rocky? Wherever one looks, one sees the same formula again and again: a larger-than-life character blessed with skills of perception, or strength, or endurance.

     These characters are normally on the side of “good.” Few, if any, are sewing seeds of discord and enmity, for there is nothing attractive or appealing in that. Instead, they sort out tangled webs of intrigue, and bring resolution and insight to a stack of problems. For example, the Lone Ranger offers hope and comfort to hard-up people eking a living on the western frontier, and Tarzan kills a lion, a rhinoceros, a panther and so protects Jane Porter.    

     It is human nature to allow a story to invade our thoughts and carry us into a fictional world, one where perplexing circumstances are at the last moment corrected, where the super person performs effortlessly, and where people are suddenly relieved from their tensions and burdens.

     The creator though remains hidden, screened from sight by his or her text. The author is a far less-compelling figure than the fictional created-being. Where the creation assumes a fabled existence, the author is stuck in the drab and colorless world called the present, one absent the excitement and intrigue that the creation inhabits. There is a distinction between creator and creation.

     The English majors are those best at bringing into life these wonder-filled creations. Those students are superb at reading, describing, and revealing any given character’s motivations and actions. On the other hand, the history majors are relegated to observing only real-life, actual, historical persons. Two different mindsets: the former includes intrigue, tension, superhuman capabilities, complex plots, a powerful antagonist, and admirable characteristics, whereas the latter limits him or herself to a real person and to identifying what happened and why.

      Hollywood jumps into the fictional world because it dazzles, tempts, and grabs our minds better than the historical world does. History may provide a movie its background, but the story is fictional.    

     Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first detective novel, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” featuring Dupin, a predecessor to Sherlock Holmes, but Poe downplayed what he called, “these tales of ratiocination,” because he observed that “people think them more ingenious than they are.” He asks, “where is the ingenuity in unraveling a web which you yourself have woven for the express purpose of unraveling?” The answer is that the story holds our attention and keeps our innate boredom at bay for an hour or two.

     The elections will be over in two weeks and then we will know. When we vote, we cease dwelling in the fictional world, peer at the candidates, and select one rather than another. Inevitably, the candidates fall short of fulfilling the promises they made to get our votes, dashing our expectations. We expect a super person, but we get someone human, all too human, someone much like ourselves.

      The truth is that there is no Lone Ranger who will stealthily enter into our lives and solve the problems we ourselves have created. There is no Tarzan to fight the wild animals lurking in the forests we have blindly walked into, and there is no Sherlock Holmes to sort out the crimes we and others have committed. No one among us wears a cape or a mask, or drives a Batmobile. We are too much human.

     Or as Cassius explained to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND HIS SHIPS

by William H. Benson

October 11, 2012

     Christopher Columbus achieved preeminence during the Age of Exploration, that most adventurous chapter in Europe’s long and troubled history. The Age had begun when Portugual’s Prince Henry the Navigator in the fifteenth century, had dispatched his vessels south along Africa’s western coast, hoping to find a route to the treasures that he knew Asia possessed.

      Eventually, it was Vasco da Gama who rounded Africa’s southern cape, sailed across the Indian Ocean and reached India. Thereafter, the Portuguese set up trading stations in India, Africa, and China.

     Because the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, wanted a part in this lucrative trade, they agreed to support the Italian mariner, Christopher Columbus, who convinced them that he could sail due west and reach Asia, India and China. American history began on October 12, 1492 when Columbus landed his three Spanish caravels on an island in the Bahamas. 

     Because of Columbus’ daring, Europeans no longer considered the Atlantic Ocean a barrier, a blockade to travel. By conquering the Atlantic Ocean, he minimized the world to a navigable size. His feat was a display of human ingenuity, a confluence of skills and adaptations that men had learned over several millennium.

     Human beings are land animals, ill-equipped to survive little more than a few minutes in the water. To transport themselves to distant lands, men had to develop the means to cross the oceans and seas riding atop the water. Unlike on land, where men had harnessed a horse, mule, ox, or camel in order to carry them vast distances, men had not discovered any ocean animals that they might similarly domesticate. Whales dived too deep for men to ride on their backs.

     Men understood that they had to take land-based items with them if they were to survive when riding the waves. So, knowing that logs float on water, they chopped down trees, cut them up, and assembled them into rafts, boats, and ships. Men next wove thread made from plants into cloth that when stretched upon a mast served as a sail that harnessed the wind and propelled the ship.

     Thus, the principle was set: adapt land products in order to survive when floating atop the water. It is not a coincidence that a three-masted ship is sometimes called a “bark.”

     Some might suggest that because ship-building was so important to the English that in their language they attached it as a suffix to other words to describe an exceptional skill level, such as horsemanship, friendship, seamanship, and workmanship. Or it is more likely that the word for a floating vessel originated as watercraftsmanship or some other variation and that it was gradually shortened to just “ship.”

     Jacques Barzun, the historian and author of From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, argued in favor of the Greek word “techne” rather than “technology” to describe an accumulation of skill. Of techne, Barzun said, “The word is short and exact; technology is neither.” The construction of ocean-going vessels in the fifteenth-century was indeed Europe’s newest techne.

     It was not enough to know how to sail a ship. It was also important that a mariner know where he was in relation to his home, and in what direction and how fast he was moving. He studied the stars and identified Polaris, the North Star that sits fixed, overhead at the North Pole, at 90º latitude, but at the equator, at 0º latitude, the star appears to sit on the northern horizon. Sailors knew with astonishing accuracy their latitude base upon Polaris’s height in the night-time sky. “I am constant, as the North Star,” wrote Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar.

     Navigators began to make instruments to assist in determining a position at sea; Columbus took with him a compass, an astrolabe, an hourglass, the quadrant, the backstaff, and charts. The idea developed of applying to a map a grid of latitude and longitude, and so maps of useful assistance.

     Christopher Columbus’s Spanish caravels were an amazing display of human ingenuity, techne, and workmanship, involving shipwrights, astro-navigators, cartographers, and instrument makers. He sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean because of the efforts contributed by many others.

     Columbus sailed the Atlantic, but so did the Norsemen centuries before, but in a more northerly route. The Chinese circumnavigated the Indian Ocean in their “junks,” early in the fifteenth century, and so did the Arabians in their “dhows.” James Michener, in his book Hawaii, wrote that the Polynesians conquered the Pacific Ocean in crude dugout canoes seven centuries before Columbus, and that by doing so, they “accomplished miracles.”

     Men and women gaze upon their ships with fondness; this is a love affair that has never faltered. Cabins in those city-like cruise ships are normally filled, and daily those ships traverse the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean. Some sail for pleasure, to see the sights; others do so for business or trade; and not a few others, like Columbus, do so because they are greedy for gold.

EXTRAORDINARY VS. THE GREAT

by William H. Benson

September 27, 2012

     On September 28, 1941, a Sunday,Ted Williams played in the 1941 season’s last game for the Boston Red Sox, and at eight times at bat that day, he hit six times, good enough to push his batting average to .406. It was his third year in the pro’s, and he was the first professional baseball player in eleven years to exceed .400, ever since Bill Terry last did it in 1930, and no one has achieved it since.

     A player’s batting average tells how good or great a player truly is. It is determined by dividing a player’s cumulative total number of hits by the number of times he went to bat. A .406 batting average meant that Ted Williams struck a base hit better than four times out of every ten times that he was at bat. A batting average of .250 is terrible, .350 is great, but .406 is extraordinary.

     In the current baseball season, Miguel Cabrera of Venezuela, a slugger for the Detroit Tigers, leads the American League with a batting average of .333, and Melky Cabrera of the Dominican Republic, leads the National League with an average of .346. No one approaches .400.

     All the players in professional sports are great players. For a player to suit up and play for any professional team indicates great talent, but then there are the stars the game-changers, those immensely competitive, driven to win, and blessed with exceptional abilities.

     In hockey there was Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe. In football there was Johnny Unitas, Terry Bradshaw, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, and John Elway. In basketball, there was Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Michael Jordan. In baseball, there was Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, and Barry Bonds. The great players are common; the stars are rare, a couple handfuls.

     What is remarkable is that the difference between the great and the star is slight, barely perceptible, and yet it is there. Bill James, baseball’s preeminent statistician, said it best, “Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks.” In other words in a single game or in a week’s series of games, no one can distinguish the great from the star. Only the statistician can do that.

     Michael Lewis, in his book Moneyball, makes the point very clear that the baseball scouts are clueless about identifying the rare talent. The scout cries that he ends up “driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred [crummy] motels, and eating [who] knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you.”

     The problem with the scouts is that they rely solely upon subjective thinking, intuition, hunches, and what they see in one or two games. Michael Lewis wrote, “They believed they could judge a player’s performance simply by watching it, but the naked eye was an inadequate tool. The human mind played tricks on itself. There was a lot you couldn’t see when you watched a baseball game.”

      Billy Beane, when general manager of the Oakland A’s a dozen years ago, said that the scouts were “victimized by what [they] see.” It was Billy Beane who turned player-selection upside down by using statistics or objective thinking to determine who could hit and field, rather than by just eyeballing a player’s looks and skills. Beane had a low payroll budget, but because he wanted to win games, he found on the college statistical tables those great but low-cost players, and they won him lots of games.

     Recently I heard a foreigner now living in the U.S. summarize what he thinks of Americans. “All they want to do is throw things away and play ball.” Oh yes! They want to play ball, and they want to watch others play ball. Sometimes when seated in the bleachers though we see things happen on the field or in the court that truly amaze and astonish us. Two examples.

     The very last time that John Elway put on his helmet and played a professional football game, it was on January 31, 1999, and he led his Denver Broncos to a victory in Super Bowl XXXIII. Such a thing rarely happens in the pro’s. Most retire with a whimper, their bodies broken, their minds filled with regrets and excuses. But Elway retired a Super Bowl champion, no regrets and no excuses.

     Then, on Wednesday, September 28, 1960, the same day of the year back in 1941 that Ted Williams boosted his batting average up and over .400, Ted Williams strode to the batter’s box in Boston’s Fenway Park. It was the final game of the season, his final time at bat, and the final game of his career because he had already decided to retire. The pitcher pitched. Ted swung and hit a home run.