DOMESTICATION

by William H. Benson

July 21, 2011

     It is summer. We know it is so because we see the things we associate with summer: a slice of watermelon, strawberries, corn on the cob, a grilled hamburger, perhaps a fried chicken leg or pork ribs marinated in barbeque sauce. In a few weeks, we will be eating peaches and garden-fresh tomatoes and going to the county fair. A backyard barbeque and a rodeo means that the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of summer are stuck on sensory overload.

     Much of what we eat throughout the summer we owe to certain of our forbears, those exceedingly intelligent individuals, who—through trial and error—learned that that if they would domesticate certain plants and animals, the result would be an infinitely tastier and more dependable food supply.

     Domestication of plants and animals is not something we, the people of this age, normally think about; it is just something we inherited, as if it is our right since we are human beings, and yet in the history of humanity, it was not always a given.

     The dog was the first animal that human beings domesticated, about 15,000 years ago and was achieved simultaneously in both Asia and North America. Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, wrote, “Wolves were domesticated in Eurasia and North America to become our dogs and were used as hunting companions, sentinels, pets, and in some cultures food.”

     Because of human supervision over the breeding of wolves, the dog evolved into its own species with its own unique characteristics, especially dramatic variation in hair form, color, and physical size. Dogs are definitely not wolves: in the wild, a female wolf will reproduce only once a year and in the same season, but a domesticated dog can breed multiple times each year, in any season.

     Human beings next domesticated sheep and goats, about 11,000 years ago and then pigs, which are true omnivores, animals capable of eating both animal and plant food.

     Then about 10,000 years ago cows and cats were domesticated. The plant-eating cow ensured humans a steady supply of milk and meat. As for cats, in the March 2011 issue of National Geographic, a writer speculated that “Wild cats were the only animals believed to have domesticated themselves, attracted at first by rodent prey found around early agricultural settlements in the Middle East, beginning almost 10,000 years ago.”

     Other members of the cat family were no so eager to be tamed. Despite repeated attempts over the centuries, the cheetah was never domesticated. Jared Diamond wrote, “Prized by ancient Egyptians and Assyrians and modern Indians as hunting animals infinitely superior to dogs,” the cheetah, once in captivity and locked in a cage, will not breed.

     Next domesticated, about 8,000 years ago, was the chicken, a species derived from the red jungle fowl of India and Nepal. Scientists have discovered that the chicken has a mutation at a gene called the TSHR, which they speculate “played some role in domestication.” It might explain why chickens will breed in captivity and more frequently than the red jungle fowl does in the wild.

     In the South American Andes, about 6,000 years ago, both the llama and the alpaca, different breeds of the same species, were domesticated. A llama though has difficulty carrying the weight of a grown man, a fact that held back the progress of those Native American civilizations when contrasted with those of Eurasia.

     Roughly at the same time, but in the Middle East, in the steppes north of the Black Sea, the horse was domesticated, and because it could carry a grown man, it accelerated civilization’s progress. Above all else, the horse transformed warfare. When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his soldiers rode their horses into the Inca town of Cajamarca, the people gaped in astonishment, as if these men were from another planet.

     Jared Diamond wrote, “The shock of a horse’s charge, its maneuverability, the speed of attack that it permitted, and the raised and protected fighting platform that it provided left foot soldiers nearly helpless in the open.”

     But a close cousin of the horse, the zebra, refuses domestication. These animals will not be rode nor roped, and when they bite, they will not let go. Their nasty disposition prevents taming.

     Diamond argues that to become a successful candidate for domestication, an animal must exhibit a series of qualities, and if any one of them are missing, it will not happen. “Of the world’s 148 big terrestrial herbivorous mammals, only 14 have ever been domesticated: sheep, goat, pig, cow, llama, horse, both types of camels, water buffalo, donkey, yak, reindeer, bali cattle, and mithen.”

     Domestication has added much that is good to human existence, and somehow in that work of domesticating plants and animals, human beings have further domesticated themselves.

     Enjoy your summer days! Eat well, pet your dog or cat, and go to the rodeo.   

STEVE MARTIN

by William H. Benson

July 7, 2011

     The funniest comic performance I can remember seeing when a child was what happened one night on The Dean Martin Show, perhaps in the year 1964. Dom Delouise, a young comedian then, came out onto the stage dressed in a full-length silk robe and a turban. In an East European accent, he announced that he was Dominick the Great, the world’s greatest magician, but he told the audience, “No applause. Save it for the end.”

     He then introduced his assistant, a homely gypsy-looking girl with a grin, whom he said was named “Shegoondala.” I learned later that his assistant was actually Ruth Buzzi, who two years later earned a spot of fame on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. But that night every magic trick that Dominick the Great performed Shegoondala tried to help but would unintentionally reveal how the trick was done, and so he would quickly pull the curtain shut.

     Delouise’s act was a parody of a legitimate magician’s performance, a feeble and ridiculous imitation, and in that lay the comedy. To me at the time it was truly funny.

     A dozen years later another young and rising comedian achieved enormous success with exactly that, a parody of a comedian’s and magician’s act, and his name was Steve Martin.

     Recently I read Steve Martin’s short autobiography Born Standing Up, and in it wrote, “I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.”

     Martin’s act was so different than that of the typical comedian—men such as Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Bob Newhart, or Bill Cosby, who told stories or monologues with a series of well-delivered punchlines. Instead, for an hour and a half Martin was wild and crazy, and said so repeatedly, “I am a wild and craaaaaazy guy!” Even his feet would go crazy.

      He did magic tricks that everyone could see how they were done. He twisted balloons into rabbit ears. He wore on his head an arrow that looked as if it had passed through his head. He wore goofy glasses, he played his banjo, and he sang zany lyrics. There were no funny stories with a punchline. His antics were more suited for the middle school-aged, but all of America, of all ages ate it up. “Well excuuuuuuse me,” he would shout at the guy adjusting the spot light, and the crowds would roar.

     Steve Martin grew up in Anaheim, California, and when just thirteen years old he landed a job at Disneyland, selling magic tricks in a store. At eighteen he moved out of his house, fed up with his father’s consistent sarcasm directed at him, and so he started clowning around at the Bird Cage Theater at Knottsberry Farm. Eventually, he took his solo act on the road and discovered enormous success.

     He admits now that there was a dark side to stand-up comedy. The travel was relentless. The act itself was exhausting. Then, after the show he had to stare at the four walls of a hotel room. He says, “It was the loneliest period of my life. . . . Nowhere to look but inward.” Also, he wrote, “In a public situation, I was expected to be the figure I was onstage, which I stubbornly resisted.”

     He quit cold turkey. After a series of sold-out shows in Atlantic City, he packed his balloons and his head-arrow for a final time and never unpacked them. He was exhausted, and he knew he needed a new outlet for his creative talents. He turned to the movies, a media more to his liking, for he said, “Instead of my going to every town to perform my act, a movie would go while I stayed home. . . . Movies were social; stand-up was anti-social.”

     This year marks his thirty-year anniversary of that decision to quit stand-up comedy.

     I did not care for Steve Martin’s brand of humor nor for his movies, for they truly are zany, but the funniest and the most original act I saw him perform was on The Tonight Show as the Great Flydini. Steve Martin stepped onto the stage that night and never said a word, but his hands, his gestures, his face, the lift of his chin, his fingers, his eyebrows, and the utter outrageous nuttiness of what he was doing made me laugh and made Johnny Carson laugh too.

     Again, it was a parody of an authentic magician.     

     Steve and his parents were estranged from the day he moved out of the house at eighteen. His father snubbed him, refused to support or encourage him, and had even written a series of sarcastic remarks about his son’s comic act in his own real estate business’s newsletter, a thing that pained Steve immensely, bringing him to the point of tears when he tells about it, even now. His father said of his son’s acting, “Well, he’s no Charlie Chaplin.” Oh, yes, the tears of a clown are real.

     Late in life he and his father and mother and sister reconnected: they began eating lunch together once a week and the ruptured relationship began to heal.

     Dominick the Great and the Great Flydini. You can see them both on Youtube, and they are still, I think, over-the-top funny.

THE BERLIN WALL

by William H. Benson

June 23, 2011

     On March 5, 1946, less than a year after the conclusion of World War II, Winston Churchill spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”

     Europe was split between the the East and the West, between the Soviets with their communist governments installed across all of the eastern European states, and the democratic republics in the western European nations. Relations deteriorated. World War III hovered as a possibility.

     Once hostilities in Germany ended in May of 1945, Germany had been divided into four zones: American, British, and French-controlled zones in the west, which became West Germany, and the Soviet-controlled zone in the west, which became East Germany.

      Berlin, Germany’s capital, was also split into the same four zones. The American, British, and French-controlled zones in Berlin’s western districts became West Berlin, and the Soviet-controlled zone in Berlin’s eastern district became known as East Berlin. It was a workable solution, except for one fact: West Berlin, a free city, was stuck one hundred miles within communist East Germany.

     Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s ruthless dictator, saw his opportunity: on June 24, 1948, he blockaded West Berlin, denying all ground transportation. The Americans responded with “Operation Vittles,” the Berlin Airlift, in which U.S. army and navy pilots flew 8,000 tons of supplies every day to the two million people stranded inside West Berlin. After eleven months, on May 12, 1949, Stalin relented and opened the roads and railroads.

     A decade later Stalin was dead, and a new blustering Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev, stomped about threatening, “We will bury you!” His style was called “diplomacy by tantrum.” In November of 1958, he said that West Berlin was “a bone in my throat,” and he gave the Western powers six months to clear out of the city. The deadline arrived, and nothing happened.

     In January of 1961, a new U.S. President was inaugurated, John F. Kennedy, and in June he met Krushchev at a summit in Vienna. When the Soviet leader ranted about a possible war over Berlin, Kennedy tried to interject his own thoughts. Krushchev came away convinced he could bully Kennedy.

     On August 13, 1961, the East Germans began building a wall, not of iron, but of concrete and barbed wire around West Berlin. When an older East Berlin woman asked a policeman what time was the next train for West Berlin, he told her, “That is all over. You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.”

     Countless numbers of people tried to escape their stultifying lives in communist East Germany by either burrowing their way under the Berlin wall or pole vaulting or flying over it by kite. All those who dared to attempt to escape to freedom were summarily shot. In the cold war between west and east, the Berlin wall was the flashpoint.

     Kennedy’s political opponents condemned him for not ordering the wall knocked down, but he said, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a lot better than a war.”

     Years passed, and a new President visited West Berlin, and there at Brandenburg Gate, very near the wall, on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed the new Soviet leader, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

     Two years later, an East Berlin official, quite by mistake, announced that travel to the West would be lifted immediately. So, on that evening of November 9, 1989, a throng of thrilled people gathered at Checkpoint Charlie, expecting to cross into West Berlin, into freedom. The captain at the gate tried repeatedly to call his superiors for confirmation of the request, but there was no answer.

     He put the phone down, pondering. Michael Meyer of Newsweek wrote later of that moment. “Perhaps he came to his own decision. Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!‘ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.” The author Adam Goodheart has called it “the shrug that made history. . . . Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions.”

     It all unraveled. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The two Germany’s became one. The eastern European nations denounced communism and formed their own independent democratic republican governments. The Soviet Union’s republics split away from what had been the Soviet Union, and Russia itself renounced the Communist Party. The Iron Curtain dissolved into a pile of rust.

BILL CLINTON’S INDISCRETIONS

by William H. Benson

June 9, 2011

     June is the month for weddings and for celebrating Father’s Day, a season and a day for happily reuniting with family and relatives.

     And yet, for some, the recent news has been less than joy-filled. Steven Richards was hauled into a North Carolina court last week to answer a series of felony charges for secretly spending campaign money, more than $925,000, in 2008 in order to cover up his adultery that resulted in a child. Last month Arnold Schwarznegger, the former Governor of California, admitted to an affair with his housekeeper a dozen years ago that resulted in a child: Maria Shriver, his wife, wants a divorce.

    Jesse Jackson confessed to the same several years ago. Two men—Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy—may have missed their opportunity to run for the Oval Office because of their affairs: Gary Hart with Donna Rice, and Ted Kennedy with Mary Jo Kopeckne.

     Two weeks ago Mitch Daniels, the widely-respected Indiana governor, bowed out of the 2012 Presidential race because his wife had left him years before, married another, and then returned back to him. For her, the scrutiny would have been unbearable “in this sophisticated and transparent age.”

     This fascination with opening up and then gaping at prominent people’s private lives is a new phenomenon in American society. As recently as fifty years ago, the press cast a blind eye to the egregious actions of powerful and rich people: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy would never have withstood an investigation.

     This all changed with William Jefferson Clinton.

     Recently, I came across an interesting interpretation of the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton. In a lecture given by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard legal professor stated that Bill Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, should never have permitted Clinton to testify before the grand jury. However, Bennett never informed Clinton that he did not have to do so, and this, Dershowitz said, was very bad legal advice. In fact, he considers it the number one legal blunder of the twentieth century.

     Paula Jones was suing Bill Clinton, the President, in a civil case for harassment, that occurred when he was Governor of Arkansas. She was asking for $750,000 in damages, which sounds like a lot of money, but was far less than what he ended up spending on legal fees. If Bill Clinton had submitted, that is paid that amount to the court, the case would have closed.

     Dershowitz said Clinton should have made a speech. “You have elected me President twice. I cannot serve as your President if I have to spend an enormous amount of time preparing for a deposition and a trial. I will pay the amount they are requesting, and this is the last time I will speak on this matter.” If he had paid and said that, he may have endured a day or two of bad press, and it would have ended.

     Instead, he testified, and these depositions are far-reaching, bringing in extraneous matters wholly unrelated to the case. Where it ceased being a civil case and became a criminal one, was when he perjured himself when testifying about his foolish relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in the cloak room of the Oval Office.

     Clinton—ashamed, tired, upset, and infuriated—obfuscated and parsed his words when grilled: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he answered one question.

     Members of the House of Representatives voted by a simple majority to impeach him, but in the trial in the Senate, the two-thirds majority failed. In his book My Life, Clinton wrote, “The vote on the perjury count failed by 22 votes, 45-55, and the vote on the obstruction of justice count failed by 17 votes, 50-50.” Clinton was allowed to serve out the remainder of his term. He won.

     Dershowitz believes that Clinton’s case broke the impeachment mechanism, that it was never the intent of the writers of the Constitution to permit private indiscretions to serve as the basis for an impeachment. That was reserved solely for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” outrageous dereliction of duties, and treasonous behavior.

     This case, Dershowitz argued, set a dangerous precedent. We are a country of common law. We look to past cases for guidance into the future. Was Bill Clinton’s conduct justification for removal? Will Congress and the Court dare to impeach a future President? He was an extraordinarily divisive President: Some loved him; others hated him. Much of this division fell along political lines.

     Despite his personal faults, in 1997, he signed the Balanced Budget Act, which Congress presented to him, and two years later the government projected a surplus of about $100 billion. Amazing.

MAJOR GENERAL BENJAMIN F. BUTLER

by William H. Benson

May 26, 2011

     On Wednesday, May 22, 1861, Major General Benjamin F. Butler arrived at his new command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, a fortress under Union control and located at the mouth of the James River in the Chesapeake Bay. A lawyer from Lowell, Massachusetts, but not an abolitionist, Butler was known as one who could find his way around a legal problem.

     The next day three young men—actually slaves named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend—rowed a boat north across the James River in the hope of finding freedom at Fort Monroe. Their owner, a Confederate colonel named Charles Mallory, had pulled them from field work and forced them to assist in building an artillery post that was aimed directly at Fort Monroe.

     On Friday, the three men were escorted into Butler’s office for questioning, and they understood that their fate, their future, and their very lives depended upon what Butler decided that day, May 24, 1861. If returned to their master, they would receive a beating, most likely be sold, and then shipped south.

     The war, North versus South, had begun just weeks before, on April 12, with the firing on Fort Sumter. Slavery had bitterly divided the Republic for decades, and with the election of Abraham Lincoln the previous November and the rapid secession from the Union of several Southern states in the weeks afterwords, the two regions had accelerated rapidly toward war. It was now upon everyone.

     As Butler quizzed the three slaves’, his legal mind was racing through the implications of each alternative decision. Return them, or keep them? Either decision would make him enemies. The Constitution, and also the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 emphatically stated that the slaves must be returned. But, he reasoned, they were helping to build a battery with guns aimed at his own fort.

     Still, the new President, Abraham Lincoln, had said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

     While Butler was deciding, a Major in the Confederate States army, John Baytop Cary, was knocking at Fort Monroe’s front gate, carrying a flag of truce, and he wanted the three slaves back.

     Adam Goodheart, a historian, has recently published a new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, in which he describes the poignant scene of Butler and Cary, each seated on a horse, meandering away from the fort into rebel territory, and each stating their respective legal positions.

     “I intend to hold them,” Butler said to Cary.

     “Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?” Cary asked.

     “I mean to take Virginia at her word,” Butler said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

     “But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot detain the Negroes.”

     “But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

     Union forces would use the word “contraband” throughout the war as a practical solution to the problem of what status to give to the runaways. Like a fire, word swept among the slaves that Major General Butler would not return them. On Sunday eight more showed up, on Monday another forty-seven, and by Wednesday, they were arriving hourly: men, women, children, the young, and the old.

     What most shocked everyone was the former slaves’ reaction to life once living beyond the iron grip of slavery: there was no bloodbath, no wild-eyed vindictiveness, which for centuries the whites in the South had predicted would happen if the slaves were suddenly freed. Instead, these fugitives worked, they cooked, they built, and completed those jobs expected of people living in a fort.

     A soldier watched and said, “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free.” 

     One Northern visitor to the fort observed them. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day. Somehow there was to my eye a solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

     This trickle of slaves became a flood as tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands sought sanctuary among the Union’s forts.

     Goodheart noted that Fort Monroe, Virginia, “this spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the same spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia colony.”

     Last month, April 12, marked the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and once it concluded, exactly four years later, slavery was gone from the American Republic.