ERROL MORRIS’S “BELIEVING IS SEEING”

by William H. Benson

September 29, 2011

     In the September 4^th edition of the New York Times Book Review, I happened to read an interesting review of a new book, Errol Morris’ Believing is Seeing: The Mysteries of Photography. Before Morris achieved distinction as a movie director, he worked as a detective, and so he approaches the business of understanding the details hidden inside a photograph, as a detective might, with bullheaded determination, sheer doggedness, and unflagging tenacity. His book is an unswerving search for truth.

     Six primary photographs make up each of his six chapters.

     The first is actually Roger Fenton’s two photographs of the same scene he took in 1855 of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, so named for the ghastly battle fought there during the Crimean War. The first photograph is without cannonballs on the road, and the second is with them. Ever since, people have looked at the two photos and accused Fenton of posing, of placing those cannonballs there in the second, in order to heighten the effect, an error in journalistic judgment.

     Morris though makes a persuasive argument that Fenton did not place the cannonballs there on the road, but that he took the two photographs at different times on the same day. Morris explained, “I wanted to experiment with lighting the cannonballs from various directions, replicating the directions of the sun and time of day.” With the sun casting shadows, Morris determined that the cannonballs may have been seen in the second photograph, more so than in the first.

     I wonder why Morris finds this so important. So what? Why would he take seventy-one pages to arrive at such a simple idea. He explains that he is urging his readers to begin “thinking about some of the most vexing issues in photography—about posing, about the intentions of the photographer, about the nature of photographic evidence, and about the relationship between photographs and reality.”

     The second is that of the Hooded Man standing atop a box with a poncho-like blanket draped over his thin frame, his fingertips wired to the electrical cables stretching up the wall behind him. It is one of those ugly photos taken in the Abu Ghraid prison in Iraq, on the night of November 4-5, 2003.

     The third is that of Sabrina Harman, a young female U.S. Army soldier, stationed at Abu Ghraib prison, who is smiling, looking up at the cameraman, her thumb raised. What makes the picture unique is that she is close to the corpse of an Iraqi man, who Morris identified as Manadel al-Jamadi, who was killed during the course of an interrogation by CIA officials in the prison’s shower on the morning of November 4, 2003. Sabrina Harman, Morris determined, had nothing to do with the murder.

     The fourth is that of a steer’s skull lying bleached out, white, bone-dry, on a sun-baked landscape in North Dakota in the summer of 1936, during “one of the worst droughts in American history.” The fifth is a Mickey Mouse toy lying atop the rubble after an Israeli air strike on southern Lebanon in 2006, and the sixth is that of a photograph of three children that Amos Humiston, a Union soldier, was holding in his hand on the day he was killed, July 1, 1863, at Gettysburg.

     For each of the six, Morris slowly peels away, like an onion, the series of mysteries that surround each photograph, digging deeper, taking it down to another level. Who was the photographer? What was his or her intentions? Was posing involved? What is the truth here? I assume that the lesson that Morris wants to leave with his readers is that we are not to trust our eyes, that what we see in a photograph is not always what we should believe, even though he entitles his book Believing is Seeing.

     Posing can mean excluding something of importance out of a photo. For example, what if an elephant had been on that Crimean road and Fenton had waited until it had passed? If that had been the case, Morris writes, “he posed the photograph by excluding something. . . . But how would you know? . . . . Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?”

     A photograph can be our sole frame of reference, as can a literary work, a painting, a job, a career, an education, or a speech. Those who exist within that single frame will not often permit anything new or different to enter into that frame. Such people succumb to what Morris labels “cognitive dissonance: when we embrace one theory, we will firmly reject beliefs that are incompatible with it. Faced with evidence that is incompatible with a theory, we will throw away the evidence, rather than the theory.”

     With photographs, there is always the potential that it has been faked, doctored, or that the photographer staged it, posing the scene, waiting for the elephant to pass out of or into the scene. Photos, videos, books, the news, speeches, and other frames of reference are all suspect, and demand our scrutiny and best judgment to discover what is the truth here.

     Yet, people are credulous; they want to believe what they see. I have said it before here, but it bears repeating now, “Believe only half of what you see, and none of what you hear.” I would question the word “half.” At the most believe only ten percent of what you see.

BILL BRYSON’S “A WALK IN THE WOODS”

by William H. Benson

September 15, 2011

     Bill Bryson, the writer, moved back to the United States in 1995, with his British-born wife and their four children, and settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he intended, for employment, to write books. First, he decided to take a hike, and so he begins his book, A Walk in the Woods.

     “Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town. A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebrated Appalachian Trail.”

     So he decided that in 1996 he would hike the entire Appalachian Trail, all 2,100 miles of it, and then write a book of his adventures. He knew it would be a daunting task, especially for someone  overweight and without hiking experience. Early on he learned that perhaps only 10% of those who begin the trail ever finish it; it is exhausting, unnerving, and dangerous.

     It passes through fourteen states, from its southern point at Springer Mountain in northern Georgia to its furthest northern point at Mount Katahdin in Maine. If successful, Bryson would see portions of Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, a corner of West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, a tip of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

     Stephen Katz, a friend from Bryson’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, agreed to join him on the hike. Katz smoked, was a recovering alcoholic, was not in great physical shape, and griped. Bill Bryson’s wife was doubtful that he and Katz would relate well on a hike.

     With tents, sleeping bags, large quantities of noodles, cooking equipment, and rain gear all loaded in packs perched precariously atop their backs, they set out from Amicalola Falls Lodge, near Georgia’s Springer Mountain one spring morning. “The date was March 9, 1996,” he wrote. “We were on our way.” The temperature was 11 degrees F.

     The trail that first day opened his eyes to what lay ahead for him. “I trudged perhaps a hundred feet up the hill, then stopped, bug-eyed, breathing hard, heart kabooming alarmingly. Katz was already falling behind and panting even harder. I pressed on. I was hopelessly out of shape—hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared.  Every step was a struggle.”

     The woods—elms, chestnuts, hemlocks, dogwoods, red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, sugar maples—stretch upwards on either side of the trail and enclose and swallow every hiker.

     Bryson wrote, “The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Seven miles seems so little, but it’s not, believe me. With a pack, it is not easy.”

     The Appalachian Trail does not offer campgrounds with hot showers and warm cafeteria food every few miles, for days can go by when you see only a handful of people or no semblance of civilization. Just the trail. A person survives with the food, clothing, and shelter that he or she carries.

     In the woods, Bryson learned to live with fear, for danger seemed always just ahead. Constantly he watched out for bears, bobcats, water moccasins, or a moose. Extreme care was required when the side of the trail disappeared in a sheer drop to a point dozens of feet below. Protection and shelter were mandatory when the weather turned cold or wet or miserable.

     Then, apt to disrupt his health were the microbes: “giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis.”

     But the greatest danger came from the woods themselves. One day Katz, when alone and quite thirsty, decided to leave the trail and get a drink from a lake he saw a short distance away. In a moment he was lost. Katz explained, “There’s nothing to pay attention to out there. It’s just one big woods.”

     Bryson wrote, “And once you were lost in these immense woods, you would die. It was as simple as that. No one could save you. No helicopter could spot you through the cover of trees. No rescue teams could find you. There would be bears down there too—bears that had possibly never seen a human.”

Fortunately, Katz wandered around, stumbled upon the trail, and thus saved his life. It was a miracle.

     Bill Bryson walked 870 miles of the Appalachian Trail that summer, for he said, he came “to realize that this was way beyond—way beyond—anything I had attempted before.” He and Katz skipped difficult portions of it, like the Smoky Mountains, and kept moving northward.

     A century and a half ago, an oddball named Henry David Thoreau built a cabin beside Walden Pond, and then wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” 

SHAY’S REBELLION

by William H. Benson

September 1, 2011

     Daniel Shays was bankrupt and angry. A farmer in rural Massachusetts and a former captain in the army, he gathered about him a number of debt-ridden farmers who had fought in the last war, and together they marched on Springfield, Massachusetts in September and forced the terrified justices on the state’s Supreme Court to adjourn. The year was 1786. The following January he led 1200 men, each clutching a pitchfork, back into Springfield and demanded muskets and canons plus laws in their favor.

     State officials hunted these rebels down over the next few weeks, but the Massachusetts legislature caved in: They dropped direct taxation and lowered court fees. As a result of Shays’ Rebellion, officials understood that without a national government, the thirteen states were powerless to protect themselves from large-scale domestic violence, like Shays. Hence the need for a strong national government.

     Before, during, and after a revolution, a question continues coming up, “What is next?” And the answers are “fight or cower,” “keep struggling”, or “build a new government.”

     At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, delegates from the thirteen states struggled to write a plan for a new national government. Compromise may have guided their practical decision-making, but their overall ideology was decidedly focused upon the historical past, specifically upon the ancient Greeks and the Romans. One of those delegates, John Dickinson, said, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”

     One scholar of the Constitutional Convention, Douglass G. Adair, said that when Dickinson referred to “experience” he was meaning “both political wisdom gained by participation in events, and wisdom gained by studying past events.”

     Certain of the delegates—especially Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—knew their history well, and came to the Convention convinced that each of the three kinds of government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—by themselves had “mortal diseases” or defects. Monarchy degenerated into tyranny, an aristocracy evolved into a corrupt and unjust oligarchy, and a pure democracy disintegrates into anarchy, class conflict, and social disorder.

     Indeed, a pure democracy had “existed in Greece and Italy only for short spaces of time” and each time had ended in a dictatorship.

     It was the delegates’ genius to bring the three types of government together into a single plan: a democracy in the lower House, an aristocracy in the upper House or the Senate, and the monarchy in the Presidency. “If there is one certain truth, it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties can never be preserved without a strong executive, or without separating the executive from the legislative power.”

     “The office and power of the President was consciously designed to provide the energy, secrecy, and dispatch traditionally associated with the monarchical form.”

     On September 17, 1787, the day the Convention adjourned, Benjamin Franklin spoke up and urged all the delegates to vote for the plan, saying, “It will astonish our enemies.”

     This experience, this history, this Constitution casts a perpetual shining light upon America’s people and her events, and some fail to see that light. A month ago the news reports were quite grim: “Is the political system broken? Last weeks relentless debt-ceiling showdown in Washington revealed a government that can no longer address our nation’s problems.” Huh? Really? Is that right?

     Others saw it differently: There is “a word for the rancor and the division that you describe. It’s called democracy.” Indeed, if anything, the fight for fiscal responsibility demonstrated a government that is capable of working toward a better solution, and the rest of the world took notice.

     The year of 2011 is now being called the year of rebellion by the dispossessed, an Arab Spring. First, in Tunisia, then in Egypt, in Libya, in Yemen, and in Syria people revolted, demanding a change.

     The slaughter in Syria has appalled the world; more than 2000 killed. “The tanks are firing at random. Their aim seems to kill and terrify as many people as possible.” So anxious is President Bashar al-Assad to retain his power, he thinks he can slaughter his own people without any personal consequences. What is next? More confrontation and more bloodshed. One side will win, and it is doubtful it will be the rebels.

     Last week, Libya’s emboldened rebels marched into Tripoli and strode through Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fortress-like compound, anxious to lay their hands on him. After the revolution, what is next? The answer is that the rebels will draft plans for a new government, and hopefully it will be better than the horrific dictatorship that the Libyans endured for forty-two years. We can “hope for the best, stop predicting the worst, and prepare for something in between.”

     Shays’ Rebellion prodded the wiser men of the thirteen states to create a strong federal government, one better than what they had, and after 224 years, I think we can conclude that they did.

AMERICAN GRAFITTI

by William H. Benson

August 18, 2011

     George Lucas had by 1972 directed only one full-length feature film THX 1138, a science-fiction film that failed, but he had ideas for two other films. The first was autobiographical, of his final days in Modesto, California, after he and his friends had graduated from high school, when they spent their nights cruising up and down the street, listening to the car radio and looking for love. The second film was a space opera in which the forces of good confront and vanquish the forces of evil.

     Lucas pitched the first film, American Graffiti to the major film studios, and each turned him down until United Artists finally advanced him $10,000 to write the script. The studio officials insisted though that Lucas work with a low budget, only $600,000, which was increased by another $175,000 when Francis Ford Coppola signed on as the producer.

     Lucas began filming on June 26, 1972 and ended on August 4, 1972. Except for Ron Howard, known as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, Lucas cast unknowns: Richard Dreyfus, Cindy Williams, Paul LeMat, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Harrison Ford, Suzanne Sommers, and Wolfman Jack, as himself. Lucas picked Harrison Ford, who was then working as a carpenter, because he arrived at Lucas’ home to build cabinets.

     Lucas ended up editing most of the film himself. The backbone to the film’s scenes was Wolfman Jack’s radio show, for Lucas had written each scene with the idea that audiences would listen to a series of  songs supposedly being played over the car radio throughout the film. The music was all late fifties, very early sixties, except for Elvis Presley because RCA would not sign a release of his songs.  

     United Artists’ officials had little expectations for the film. They thought the title silly, and the film more suitable as a television movie. But Lucas insisted upon his original vision, and so the studio gambled by spending another $500,000 on marketing and promotion. The movie, American Graffiti: Where were you in ’62? was released on August 1, 1973.

     Studio officials were astonished when it was nominated for Best Picture of the Year in 1973, and since then, thirty-eight years ago this month, American Graffiti has grossed an estimated $200 million, one of the most profitable movies ever made. Studio officials decided it was wise to listen to George Lucas, and so they bet heavily on Lucas’ second film, that of a space opera. It was released to wild acclaim in 1977 under the title Star Wars.

     What was it about American Graffiti that both audiences and critics loved? One critic wrote: “One of the most influential of all teen films, American Graffiti is a funny, nostalgic, and bittersweet look at a group of recent high school grads’ last days of innocence.” This was before Vietnam, before the British Invasion, and before hippies and flower power.

     The story is set in 1962 and revolves around four boys: Steve Bolander, Curt Henderson, John Milner, and Terry “the Toad” Fields. Two of them, Steve and Curt, intend on flying to the East Coast the next day. Curt, played by Richard Dreyfus, has doubts about leaving Modesto, and Steve, played by Ron Howard, lectures him, “We’re finally getting out of this turkey town and now you want to crawl back into your cell, right? You just can’t stay 16 forever! You’ve got to get that into your head!”

     Curt happens to see a beautiful girl, played by Suzanne Sommers, who is driving a white T-bird and spends the rest of the night trying to get a message to her, even driving out to the local radio station where he meets the legendary disc jockey Wolfman Jack. Curt listens as the Wolfman tells him, “There’s a great big beautiful world out there.”

     So it is Curt who flies out the next morning while Steve remains behind to sort things out with his girlfriend, played by Cindy Williams. College is not in the plans for John Milner, who drives and races his yellow Deuce coupe, nor for Toad Fields, the classic nerd.

     “Do we stay in our home town or do we leave?” is the question the film asks, and each character answers that question as best they can for themselves.

     The dorms open up this week; for some it is today, and last May’s high school graduates will move into a college dorm room and begin classes next week. Do we leave our home town, or do we stay? And if we leave, might we return? Seeking an education is always the right choice. Staying behind to cruise and party all night long and get into trouble with the law is not normally the best of choices. For some students, a lot of growing up is accomplished in those first few months in those dorm rooms.

     A version of American Graffiti is played out each year in mid-August in most towns across America, and it was George Lucas’ insight to put that version into a dramatic form and onto a screen with music rumbling in the background.

TRIVIAL KNOWLEDGE

by William H. Benson

August 4, 2011

     “History is more or less bunk,” said Henry Ford. “We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worthwhile is the history we made today.” An interesting opinion.

     Late in Ford’s career someone challenged him to a series of trivia questions, and he admitted that he did not know the answers, but he replied, “Why should I know the answers? I have a dozen managers on my staff who could find the answers to those questions within an hour. Why should I clutter my mind with useless knowledge?” An interesting question.

     Thomas Edison, Ford’s mentor and his former employer, was of a different mindset. Those job applicants who wished to work for the Wizard of Menlo Park had to first complete a 150-question trivia questionnaire so difficult that no more than ten percent passed it. Edison thought his questions “exceedingly simple,” and believed that recent college graduates were “amazingly ignorant.”

     Ford and Edison may have been poles apart on the issue of trivia knowledge, but both were successful. Perhaps one could say that Henry Ford saw the “big picture” first without bothering with the minor details, but Edison drew his “big picture” in his mind from those trifling details.

     By the way, Albert Einstein took Edison’s test and failed it miserably, struggling with certain questions, such as, “what country, besides Australia, has native kangaroos, where Napoleon was born, and what is the principal acid in vinegar?”

     Recently, I found at the local public library Ken Jennings’ book Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. It was Jennings who won seventy-four games in a row on Jeopardy! between June 2 and November 30 in 2004, losing his seventy-fifth game when he missed Final Jeopardy!: “Most of the firm’s 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work for only four months a year.” He answered incorrectly, with “What is FedEx?”

     His take-home winnings totaled $2,522,700, but he did not stop there: he appeared on other game shows and won even more money, until as of today he has earned $3,773,414.29, more than any other game show contestant.

     How did he prepare himself for such a spectacular achievement? First, he admits that as a child he was drawn toward trivia, that he was predisposed to accumulating factoids of knowledge. In college at BYU, he played on the university’s quiz bowl team, and he admits that he reads a lot, soaking up, like a vacuum sweeper, enormous quantities of facts.

     Jennings confesses in his book though that his reading was not exclusively reference works and encyclopedias. “Should I admit,” he asks, “how many mythology questions I knew only because of the Thor comic books I read as a kid, or how many geography questions I know from globe-trotting reality shows? Almost all my knowledge of stars and constellations comes from bad sci-fi movies. All my national flags come from NBC Olympic coverage.”

     In his book, Jennings explores the interconnectedness between intelligence and knowledge, and  quotes from A. J. Jacobs, the man who has read all 32 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, who said, “Knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing, but they do live in the same neighborhood.”

     Jennings writes, “The power of trivia. It ignites our curiosity about things we didn’t think we were interested in.” “Simple facts, even trivial ones, are the building blocks that can be stacked and combined to form substantive knowledge, and even wisdom.” “Trivia is bait on the fishing rod of education. By the time you realize what you’ve swallowed, you’re hooked.”

     A quiz bowl coach, Eric Hilleman, admonished Jennings, “The more facts you accumulate, the easier it becomes to learn new things because you have a web of knowledge to fit those new facts into. Facts and intelligence form a vicious circle.”

     Any kind of achievement or any pursuit of excellence requires time, lots of time, far more than we would expect; plus plenty of discipline and patience; and is best accomplished in steady increments, repeated daily, rather than in one big hysterical push. Someone once said, “People fail to develop excellence the same way they fail to read big books. They either won’t start or they don’t finish.” The answer is “The major character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.” The question is “Who is John Galt.”

     For the curious, for those with a trivia-oriented mind, the above answers in order are: Papua New Guinea has kangaroos, the island of Corsica was Napoleon’s birthplace, acetic acid is the primary acid in vinegar, and H & R Block furloughs its white-collar employees eight months out of the year.