PHYLISS DILLER AND NEIL ARMSTRONG

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2012

     When a King is in his court and requires a miracle, he calls for his wizard. When he needs someone to protect his kingdom and vanquish the enemy, he calls for his knight, but when he needs to laugh, he calls for his jester. In the September 7 edition of the magazine, The Week, there were two obituaries, that of Neil Armstrong and also that of Phyllis Diller, two very different personalities, but the citizens living in the kingdom of the United States forty years ago knew Neil and Phyllis very well.

      In the late 1960’s, Neil Armstrong was our country’s predominant wizard, the man who was capable of flying a contraption called a rocket to the moon, and once there, he walked upon the moon’s surface and then flew that same rocket back to Earth, where he was welcomed home with wild unabashed public acclaim. Prior to that in the early 1950’s, as a Navy jet pilot he was a knight who climbed into his special suit of armor, into the cockpit of a fighter jet, and “flew 78 combat missions” over Korea.

     Phyllis Diller was the kingdom’s jester, a lady who could produce a laugh amongst the most jaded of audiences. The late 1960’s were difficult years: Walter Cronkite’s news of the war in Vietnam was grim, anti-war demonstrators ran wild in the streets, and the disenfranchised demanded that now was the time they receive their civil rights. Yet, when Phyllis Diller strode onto the stage, all that was momentarily forgotten, swept aside. The New York Times said that she had a “hard-hitting approach to one-liners.”

     Her jokes, “her rapid-fire wit,” overpowered audiences. Women working at home for a husband and children identified with her persona as a middle-aged housewife worried about her looks and stuck in a dreary marriage with a husband she called “Fang.” She asked, “What exactly causes wrinkles?” She answered, “Worry and stress! That’s why my face has been perennially selected as poster girl for the Ohio State Fair Whipped Prune Festival.” She said, “Whenever someone suggests that we get together and chew the fat, I start squirming.”

     There you have it—the roles people play: the King seated atop a throne wearing a jeweled-crown, the White Knight suited in glistering armor, the Wizard with his books of enchantments and his tall cone-shaped pointed hat, and the Jester with his jester’s goofy hat. Each plays a part in life’s grand acts.

     And where do you go to watch this play? Before the days of television, radio, movies, and twenty-four hour on-line news, people observed it via the newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines. Thomas Paine, writing in 1775 in the Pennsylvania Magazine, called a magazine “as a kind of bee-hive, which both allures the swarm, and provides room to store their sweets. Its division into cells gives every bee a province of its own.” In Time, Newsweek, and The Week, an inquisitive soul can read of books, houses, art, political developments, obituaries, sciences, and of kings, queens, wizards, knights, and jesters.

     Paine said that “a magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius, . . . a kind of market for wit and utility,” and that “The two capital supports of a magazine are utility and entertainment.”

     Phyllis Diller provided the entertainment. Of wit, Thomas Paine observed, that it, “like the passions, has a natural wildness that requires governing. Left to itself, it soon overflows its banks, mixes with common filth, and brings disrepute on the fountain.” Phyllis governed her comedy well.

     Neil Armstrong offered plenty of utility, that talent to accomplish amazing things. Of utility, Paine wrote, “Something useful will always arise from exercising the invention. . . . We owe many of our noblest discoveries more to accident than wisdom. In quest of a pebble we have found a diamond, and returned enriched with the treasure.” Paine was correct. The U.S. space program sought for moon rocks but in that process produced dazzling technological skills.

      On February 29, 2000, Armstrong described himself: “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-flow dynamics, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.”

     Armstrong was the modern Merlin who lived his life according to his structured notes, namely his checklists. After landing on the moon, he grabbed the checklist which spelled out to him what he should do next. Because the checklist reduces error, pilots, astronauts, and even surgeons live by the checklist. Armstrong’s commitment to that list made life difficult though for his wife Janet. In 1989, after 38 years of marriage, she left him, saying, “The fact was it took a whole year to get on his schedule to go away for a weekend! In a sense, I resented it.” The checklist ruled Neil Armstrong’s life.

     Phyllis Diller had her checklist too, her memorized list of one-liners that she had properly arranged for producing maximum laughs from an audience, and she dared not deviate from that checklist.

     She passed away on August 20, at the age of 95. Neil Armstrong died five days later on August 25, at the age of 82, and last Friday, on September 14, his ashes were scattered at sea, in a ceremony aboard a U.S. Naval vessel upon the Atlantic Ocean.

GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER AT WEST POINT

by William H. Benson

September 6, 2012

     Teachers and students are back in school, and it is time for students to think about what they will achieve between now and next May. During a person’s lifetime, school lasts only a short while, but it comes first in a person’s life, before that person enters the workforce. Because the kind of training determines the kind of work that will occupy a person’s remaining years, it is important for a student to think through what he or she wants to train for. One person who did that was George Armstrong Custer.   

     In Stephen E. Ambrose’s book Crazy Horse and Custer, Ambrose describes how the officers and instructors at the West Point Military Academy tried to discipline and train George Armstrong Custer for the four years just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. It was as intense and regimented an experience as one can imagine, and at no time was Custer convinced that he would succeed, graduate, or receive a commission in the U. S. Army.

     In 1856 sixteen-year-old Custer sought an appointment to West Point, and the next year John A. Bingham, an Ohio representative, selected him. He was seventeen and a half years old when he arrived at West Point in New York State in July of 1857. He would remain there for the next four years, until July of 1861, when he was twenty-one and a half. He would leave only once during those four years, and that was only for a few weeks when half-way through.

     Custer did not respond well to the discipline and regimentation, mainly because at seventeen he was full of fun and boundless energy. His infectious smile and curly blond hair, his slim build and gaunt face just looked like trouble. The West Point officers jumped all over him, but they would not ever break him. He loved to play pranks on his fellow cadets, and for those infractions he received an abundance of demerits.

     Yet, he knew where the line was and did not exceed it. Ambrose explained that if any cadet received more than 100 demerits in a six-month period, officers would eject him from the Academy. Custer would boast that “he had ninety-four demerits in one six-month period, ninety-eight in the next, and so on.” For his demerits, he stood guard on Saturdays, and he confessed that “he spent sixty-six Saturdays marching post to pay for his transgressions, four hours at a time, without speaking to anyone.”

     Constantly did the West Point officers write up Custer for infractions: “late for parade, talking on parade, face unshaven, hair unkempt, equipment dirty, uniform disordered, shoes unpolished, slackness in drill, failure to salute a superior, sitting down on sentry duty, room out of order, gambling in quarters, tobacco smoke in quarters, late for class, and so on.”

     Custer admitted later: “My career as a cadet had but little to recommend it to the study of those who came after me, unless as an example to be carefully avoided.” His biographers say that he was “a slovenly soldier,” “a deplorable student,” a tardy and a clumsy recruit,” and that “it is safe to say that in all the long history of the Military Academy it was never afflicted with a less promising or more cantankerous pupil.”

     Ambrose wrote that West Point’s educational curriculum “was the toughest” in the country, mainly because “it was nearly all rote learning, memorization pure and simple.” One cadet at that time said that students at other colleges “have not the faintest idea of what hard study is.” “You can not and you dare not slight anything” at West Point. The cadets were forced to study long hours memorizing information and then recite it all back to the instructor during class.

     In a letter to his sister Lydia, Custer wrote that “I and others only average about four hours’ sleep in the twenty-four. I work until one at night, and get up at five.” Although his grades were normally the lowest in his classes, he was determined to survive. He wrote to his sister Ann and said that, “I would not leave this place for any amount of money, for I would rather have a good education and no money than a fortune and be ignorant.”

     In November of 1860, Custer and the cadets learned that the Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was elected the new President, and they knew that war was imminent. The cadets from the Southern states—South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama—began leaving West Point and returning to their homes, a most agonizing decision on their part. The following April the canons fired on Fort Sumter, war was declared, and the Union needed military officers, men like George Armstrong Custer.

     On June 24, 1861, he graduated 34^th in a class of 34 graduates. Of the sixty-eight admitted four years before, exactly half graduated. Custer succeeded where many thought he was doomed to fail. Five days later, Custer failed to break up a fist fight between two newly-arrived cadets and was promptly arrested and pitched into the guardhouse, where he sat for the next three weeks until his trial on July 15. The judges only reprimanded him, and then dismissed him.

     He departed West Point, a graduate and an officer in the U.S. Army, bent but never broken.

VIETNAM

by William H. Benson

August 23, 2012

     The Vietnam War began on August 22, 1945, when French paratroopers dropped into southern Indochina to counter a coup by guerrilla forces led by the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. This war was less hot, more cold, and more protracted than the war with the Japanese. The French army battled Ho Chi Minh and the Communists for the next nine years, until March of 1954, when the French lost a crucial victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

     By then the French had their fill of Vietnam. They met the Communists at a Geneva Conference, and there signed an armistice agreement that divided Vietnam into two states: North and South.

     The Americans stepped in. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter, dated October 1, 1954, to South Vietnam’s new leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and declared American support in light of the North’s aggressive tactics: “The purpose of this offer is to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” The support was limited and intended to only provide arms to the South Vietnamese.

     In the winter of 1959-60, the North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam. In an article that appeared in The New York Times two weeks ago, on August 12, Lien-Hang Nguyen explained the Communists’ rationale for war then. “Revolutionary war was an effective way to deflect attention from domestic problems, including a devastating land reform campaign, a dissident intellectual movement, and an unsuccessful state plan for socialist transformation of the economy.” So they attacked the South.

     John F. Kennedy, the new U.S. President, elected in November of 1960, stuck with Eisenhower’s plan to contain Communist expansion in Vietnam, and he did so by providing more money and more military advisers than Ike had. On May 11, 1961, Kennedy issued Memorandum 52 that reiterated U. S. objectives: “to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam, and to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society.”

     One can see the battle of ideas approaching a flash point. The Americans wanted a free South Vietnam, able to defend itself, with periodic elections and private ownership of land and property. The Communists wanted national ownership of all land and property, Communist Party-control of all official governing posts, and absolute control of the media. The two ideologies would inevitably clash.

     November 22, 1963 came and went, and Kennedy’s Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, succeeded him in the White House. Johnson’s military advisers insisted that he accelerate U.S. support for the South Vietnamese, but he waived them aside, knowing that public opinion would frown on a military strike, and so he would wait until after the November 1964 Presidential election.

     On May 27, 1964, Johnson spoke on the telephone to his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy  and indicated his anxiety if he allowed the Communists in the North to overrun the free people in the South. If it fell, so too would Laos, Cambodia, and the rest of southeast Asia. If one domino fell, so would all the others. Publicly, Johnson said, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii , and next week we’ll be fighting in San Francisco.” Because he believed in the “domino theory,” he felt obliged to support the South Vietnamese people.

     The North Vietnamese attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf Tonkin, and on August 7, 1964, Congress gave LBJ authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.”

    Johnson won the election by a landslide over Barry Goldwater in November 1964. On February 24, 1965, just seven weeks after his inaugural address, he introduced Operation Rolling Thunder. American military aircraft would bomb the North Vietnamese into submission. He intended it to last eight weeks, but it lasted for three years. On March 8, 1965, Johnson sent the first 3500 Marines to South Vietnam.

     He never envisaged what lay ahead for him and the American and Vietnamese people.

     James Cameron, a reporter near Hanoi and the Vietcong, wrote on December 10, 1965 that the North Vietnamese people adapted by burying their army under branches and leaves by day and moving at night. When an America jet screamed overhead, the reaction was horror as the people scrambled for protection. Cameron wrote, “There was somehow a sense of outrage against civility: what an impertinence, one felt, what arrogance, what an offence against manners. The people in North Vietnam are agreeable, shy people, and very poor. Will this sort of thing blow Communism out of their heads?”

     Nixon won the White House in 1968, accelerated the bombing, but finally decided to let the South Vietnamese fight their own war as he drew American forces down. Under President Gerald Ford, in April of 1975, the last of the Americans fled Saigon. The war in Vietnam was officially over.

     Question: What war did the U.S. fight for 7382 days? Answer: The war in Vietnam.

PROGRESS AND OPTIMISM

by William H. Benson

August 9, 2012

     Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher of the early twentieth-century, depicted time’s movement—from the future into an immediate present and then settling into a receding past—by describing a painting called “Angelus Novus.” In that painting, an angel faces the past, his back to the future. “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.”

     The angel would like to turn around and face that impending future, but a storm called progress has “got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.” He cannot reorient his position. What that angel sees is “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is prevented from stopping this ongoing carnage. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But he cannot. 

     Such a vision of history is certainly pessimistic. Benjamin sees the past as little more than a continual series of unfolding disasters, and that the angel, this divine being who is supposedly in charge of time’s incessant flow, is paralyzed from halting the carnage because of a storm called progress.

     Appearing in last week’s edition of Newsweek was a column by the journalist and historian Nial Ferguson that so reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s negative view of history. Ferguson entitled his column, “I wish I were a technoptimist.” Ferguson argues that even though technological advances are spellbinding, they do not always ensure a positive or a progressive future. So he writes:

     “There was great technological progress during the 1930s. But it did not end the Depression. That took a world war. So could something comparably grim happen in our own time? Don’t rule it out. Let’s remind ourselves of the sequence of events: economic depression, crisis of democracy, road to war.”

     Ferguson points out that, “Technology can also empower radicalized (or just plain crazy) individuals and groups.” He then goes so far as to agree with the Chinese in their condemnation of “participatory democracy” as a defective governing model, and next he predicts “a really big war,” an Armageddon, originating in North Africa or the Middle East and drawing in all the major world powers.

     There is a lot of pessimism out there today. One need not look far to find it. The poet agrees, “Hope lies to mortals, but man’s deceiver was never mine.” This negative thinking reminds me of a favorite quote, “I tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept creeping in.”

     Benjamin and Ferguson may be right. The world’s nations may fall off a cliff, drift into an economic maelstrom, and march off to war, but then again they may not. I ask you, “Where is your optimism? Where is your I-can-do-it attitude?” Conditions in the past have been worse. Franklin Roosevelt faced a Great Depression, Adolph Hitler, and the Japanese Empire. Ronald Reagan faced the Soviets and their immense nuclear stockpile, and yet the Western powers whipped the Depression, Hitler, and Japan, and the Soviets disarmed themselves in the face of Reagan’s determination.

     The historian Stephen Ambrose displayed a far better mindset when he wrote of America’s pioneers. “Nearly every American believed in the future, in the doctrine that things were getting better all the time, for individuals and for the country as a whole.” The reason they believed in a brighter future is because they worked hard to make it happen. “Americans worked because they believed it was godly to do so, because of the vastness of the task facing them, and because the work would be rewarded.”     

     The 19th-century French aristocrat De Tocqueville visited North America and observed, “The first thing which strikes a traveler to the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition.” The historian Henry Steele Commager boldly stated that, “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America.”

     This difference between pessimism and optimism was clearly seen in the leadership styles of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Where Carter worked fifteen hours a day trying to untangle a series of knots and a host of seemingly-unsolvable problems, Reagan worked at the most six hours a day and sliced through those same problems with decisions that in hindsight were more correct than wrong.

     I believe that America can set things right in the world by first setting things right at home. In other words, America can lead by example rather than by dictating orders to the world’s other nations or threatening to stomp off to war. Americans can govern themselves effectively now, as they have done so in the past, and they can work hard to prevent wars and economic calamity. Yes, Mr. Ferguson, I agree with you. “It’s a dangerous world,” and we must ever be vigilant and alert, but instead of trucking with pessimism and negativity, let’s shoulder instead a positive and optimistic mindset and let the cheerfulness creep in.

PALEOLITHIC EMOTIONS

by William H. Benson

July 26, 2012

     I happened to read a quote in The Week‘s July 20^th edition. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist and twice the Pulitzer Prize winner for his books, once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Now, that is a perceptive observation, but I am not sure that I agree that there is a “real problem.”

     “God-like technology” is a stretch, even though humanity’s technological advances are quite impressive. From Clovis spear points to the bow and arrow during the Paleolithic era; from the crossbow to the catapult during the medieval era; and from the automobile to airplanes, jets, computers, and cell-phones during the modern age, human beings have demonstrated repeatedly their astounding ability to devise tools.

     As for medieval institutions, I think that Wilson was referring to four institutions—the state, the church, the university, and the guild—and that he thinks those evolved during the Middle Ages and have not progressed much since then. If so, I disagree. Where once there was only a monarch, a king or a queen, we also now have a republican form of democracy, and this summer our country, the United States of America, will witness that form of self-government in action at the Republican and Democratic Presidential conventions.

     The medieval church was once a single church, a uni-verse, but today we enjoy a multiple number of churches, a multi-verse. Voltaire said, “Where there is one religion, there is tyranny. Where there are two, they cut each others’ throats, but where there are a multiple number of faiths, there is peace.” The university, as it did during the Middle Ages, still has a teacher, students, a classroom, desks, grades, and a school year broken into semesters, but that too is giving way to new educational developments, such as on-line classes.

     The guild, such as those for vinters or physicians or lawyers or barrel-makers, permitted only master craftsman into its membership, but only after those masters had completed training first as apprentices and then as journeymen. Today we have similar requirements for entry into most businesses: required hours of education, hands-on training, a license, and an overseeing board. Competency is the goal.

     The state, the church, the university, and the guild may have had medieval origins, but they each have advanced well beyond their starting points, all for the betterment of humankind. People now can discover their careers in either the church, the state, the university, or the guild, and they can move freely from one to another.

     As for Wilson’s reference to Paleolithic emotions, I think that he meant that human beings still feel that same set of emotions that the stone-age people felt: anger, rage, jealousy, greed, sensuality, fear, sorrow, bewilderment, kindness, generosity, surprise, delight, love, and hate. I would agree. Human nature has not changed in several millennium.

     That slate of emotions that assaults you and me every single morning upon our awakening has done the same to all living Homo Sapiens since the first human beings stood upright on the African savanna. Before those emotions’ onslaught we are rendered helpless. It is only with civilization, plus those medieval institutions, and our own internal self-control mechanisms that we have learned to manage.

     It is not a negative thing to feel and experience emotions, both the pleasing kind—love, kindness, gentility, hospitality, compassion, and generosity—as well as the detestable kind—hatred, guilt, fear, hostility, sadness, and regrets. It is both kinds that make us truly human. Some people display more of the good than the bad kind, but for others, the reverse is true. Not all of us can be as saintly as Mother Teresa, nor as awful as Joseph Stalin.

     Without our Paleolithic emotions, our lives would resemble those of ants or bees, social insects who act according to their instincts, who work for the colony’s betterment, rather than for their own.

     Yes, we all feel those Paleolithic emotions, and yet human beings have learned to blunt and thwart their ill-effects, to work around and with them. In our modern-day caves, most of us want the same things: a comfortable dwelling, a steady supply of food and clothing, the fire that brings us light and heat in the winter, the breezes that cool us in the summer, security from predators and enemies, agreeable and loving companions, and a hope for a better future.

     Surrounded by the modern versions of the medieval institutions—the state, the church, the university, and the guild—and blessed by the amazing tools that technology has provided for our use, we can work to fulfill our deepest wishes and overcome that supposed “real problem of humanity.”