DR. SEUSS

by William H. Benson

March 1, 2001

     A couple of weeks ago in her Newsweek column, Anna Quindlen wrote about the importance of pre-school education.  “Children, it turns out, begin learning at an astonishingly early age. . . . Toddlers are constantly seeking out new stimulus and information, their brains working away. . . .What kids learn between infancy and the time they begin kindergarten is, most scientists believe, the bedrock for all the rest of their intellectural development.”

     I think that we would all agree that “readiness” before stepping into kindergarten is a key ingredient for success in school; however, Quindlen goes further when she points out that many poor and middle-class children are today being dropped off at day care centers or propped in front of the televison at home.  “A lot of toddlers are in front of the TV, a lot of moms burned out.”  

     What is the solution for working parents–single or double–to adequately prepare their kids for school?  More government funding for pre-school programs?  Or is there another way that is less costly?

     When Barbara Bush’s husband George was President in the late 1980’s, her program was “Read to Your Kids”.  She thought it important that parents read at least once every day to their children, and she spoke out to parents encouraging them to do so. I would agree.

     March 2nd is Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and the day has become a quasi-holiday, a day for reading–especially to your children.  In 1957 Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote and illustrated “The Cat in the Hat”, combining fanciful illustrations with simple and yet clever verse to describe the antics of a fantastic cat who makes a mess of a house and then magically puts it all back in order.

     The same year he wrote “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, featuring the mean and wily Grinch and innocent little Cindy Lou who live in the town of Whoville.  After decades of the cartoon version on television each Christmas, Hollywood finally obtained permission from Dr. Seuss’s widow to produce a movie version that opened last Christmas, starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch.

     And then Dr. Seuss wrote a model of persistence and salesmanship when he wrote, “Do you like ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ Sam-I-am?”

     These are stories, and I believe that Anna Quindlen and Barbara Bush would agree, that all parents of pre-school children should read to their kids.  All children should experience the magic that only the Cat in the Hat can produce and the amazing things Dr. Seuss could do with words.

     It is ironic though that Dr. Seuss wrote these stories about the time when television began encroaching upon a family’s reading time.  Is television that bad of a stimulus for small children?  It depends upon what is watched.  Those growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s all watched a lot of television at a time when the comedies were truly funny and the mysteries were terribly dramatic.  But at some point some of us realized that we had to drop the huge chunks of time that television demanded and seek out at the university a higher quality experience that television could never offer if we wanted any degree of success as an adult.

     An English professor offered the following critique.  “Television does not always provide all that it is capable of.  It is all too often an easy escape from the hard work of thinking about genuine intellectual or moral complications.  Television only occasionally rises to provocation, complexity, or full dimension.  Story-in-print asks the reader to assume feelings, voices, and postures of narrator and characters.  The story on the tube invites the viewer to disengage.”  That is why it is called chewing gum for the eyes.

     And so we pause on Friday this week and think about a cat, a hat, a grinch, green eggs, and ham, and we will do our kids a big and well-deserved favor.  We will turn down the television, and we will read to them.  Because they are always learning–either from books, from us, or from the television.

PRESIDENTS DAY

by William H. Benson

February 15, 2001

     There is the joke about a guy who asks a taxi-cab driver in New York City how to get to Carnegie Hall.  The taxi-cab driver smiles and replies, “Practice, practice, practice.”

     The joke brings up a good question to ask as we get close to Presidents Day: How does an American get into the west wing of the White House and become the President of the United States?  The simple response “Practice, practice, practice,” yields to another larger and more thoughtful question:  Yes, but how and where?

     Based upon a study of the nineteen men elected President the past one hundred years, the two best ways to win the Presidency is by either being the governor of a state or the Vice-President.  In fact, a careful historian has to go back forty years to John F. Kennedy’s election before finding an elected President who was not either a governor or a Vice-President.

     Of those nineteen men seven were former governors:  George W. Bush from Texas, Bill Clinton from Arkansas, Ronald Reagan from California, Jimmy Carter from Georgia, Franklin D. Roosevelt from New York, Woodrow Wilson from New Jersey, and William McKinley from Ohio.  Six were former vice-presidents:  George Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Harry S. Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt.  One other man–Calvin Coolidge–was both the former governor of Massachusettes and also a vice-president under Warren G. Harding.

     The five remaining Presidents include: John F. Kennedy, a Congressman and Senator from Massachusetts; Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II General; Herbert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce under both Harding and Coolidge; Warren G. Harding, the Senator from Ohio; and William Howard Taft, the Secretary of War in Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet.

     It seems that in recent years, the voters seem to prefer the governors to the vice-presidents.  Four out of the past five were governors;  the one exception was George Bush, who was Ronald Reagan’s vice-president and who then defeated in 1988 Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts.

     And in the 2000 election voters had a tough time deciding between the Governor of Texas–George W. Bush, and the Vice-President, Al Gore.  The Supreme Court ended America’s indecisiveness and Al Gore’s frantic pursuit of the White House by squelching the election recount debacle and thus, giving the job to George W. Bush.

     What position offers the best training for the Oval Office:  Congressman, Senator, Cabinet member, Governor, or Vice-President?

     Franklin Roosevelt argued against the Vice-Presidency as a desirable position to train for the Presidency, even though he had run for that office in 1920 along with James Cox, the Democrats’ nomination for President.  They had then lost to the Republican’s Harding/Coolidge ticket.

     FDR later as President wrote, “There is probably no better example of what might be called the industrial waste at Washington than is shown by the traditional conception of the duties of the Vice President. . . . There is no little truth, then, in the witticism that the Vice President constitutes a kind of fourth branch of the Government–a branch condemned by tradition to sit in lonely grandeur with remote responsibilities but very little to do.  If, in fact, there ever was a waste of man power, it would seem to be here.”

     Neither of the two arguably best Presidents–Washington and Lincoln–had served as either a governor nor as a vice-president.  But another great President–Thomas Jefferson–had served as Vice-President under John Adams.

     I heard hints during the 2000 campaign and election that the most capable potential Presidents with vast administrative and decision-making talents have not in recent years sought the job because the pay is relatively poor, the stress and cost to run a successful campaign is ridiculously high, and the job carries enormous risks and pressures.  The very capable and the very ambitious prefer business or the media or entertainment.

     Practice, practice, practice.  Unfortunately, there is no school to train for the Presidency.   

THE SUPREME COURT

by William H. Benson

February 1, 2001

     With his left hand on the Bible and his right hand raised, George W. Bush stood before Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and swore to uphold the Constitution while members of Congress and the nation watched.  Here, once again, was visual proof that the Founding Fathers’ idea of separating powers through differing branches of government and a system of checks and balances was still working, for all three branches of the federal government were represented there on that Saturday morning.

     The Supreme Court came into existence through Article III of the Constitution when the Founding Fathers determined that government would be ruled by laws–words written down in formal documents–rather than by men.  It was the duty of the Supreme Court to apply those laws to humans–their circumstances and situations.

     The Court was a unique American contribution to governmental science and it first convened on February 1, 1790 during George Washington’s administration.  It did not have a permanent home until 1935, its 146th year of existence when Chief Justice William Howard Taft, a former President, persuaded Congress to authorize the construction of a Supreme Court building.

     There have been some sad moments in the Supreme Court’s history.  For example, by the 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court defended the constitutionality of racial segregation and paved the way for the “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws of the south.

     Then, in the 1930’s the Supreme Court stood alone in opposition to FDR’s New Deal legislation and even struck down the NRA and the AAA as unconstitutional.  FDR came upon a scheme to pack the Supreme Court with his own appointees, and so he threatened the separation of powers and the checks and balances system.  Fortunately, his ploy failed.

     Another sad moment came in 1991 when Anita Hill testified before Congress, slurring Clarence Thomas’ character.  Whether her testimony was true or not, the damage was done.

     But there have been proud moments also.  In the 1803 decision Marbury v. Madison  John C. Marshall’s court assumed the power to declare laws unconstitutional, a power not explicitly granted by the Constitution; the Court from then on claimed “judicial review” as its own. 

     Then, in the unanimous 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court argued that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and that they violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  This led to the unraveling of segregation in all areas of public life.

     There have also been controversial moments.  In the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade the justices decided that government should not interfere in a woman’s decision to choose an abortion during the first trimester.  Thus, abortion became law, and the controversy is still with us.

     Also in the 1960’s the Court set forth stringent interrogation procedures for criminal suspects through Escobedo v. Illinois and Miranda v. Arizona.  The Court had swung far to the left in protecting the criminal.

     The 2000 Election decision to stop the recount in Florida will also go down as controversial.  What were they thinking?  Newsweek said, “It is a tricky business to read the minds of Supreme Court justices, who operate in one of the last truly secret precincts in Washington.”

     The day after the decision Clarence Thomas spoke to high school students and said that Congress and the Supreme Court exist in “entirely different worlds. . . . We happen to be in the same city.  We may as well be on entirely different planets.”    

     One of the four dissenting justices John Paul Stevens said, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear.  It is the nation’s confidence in the judge [guarding] the law.”

     That may be so; however, Al Gore closed the campaign, the election, and the controversy with his stepping down speech.  “Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken.  Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”

AFGHANISTAN

by William H. Benson

January 18, 2001

     Afghanistan was again in the news in a small blurb on the back page.  The ruling group, called the Taliban, imposed the death penalty for anyone who converts from Islam to another religion.  Also, any non-Muslim found trying to win converts would be killed.  To an American living in the 21st century with a tradition of separation of church and state, these laws are absolutely baffling.

     Twenty-one years ago Afghanistan made headline news.  Two days after Christmas in 1979 the Soviet Union attacked its southern neighbor with MI24 helicopters, MIG jets, tanks, and heavy artillery, ostensibly on invitation from Afghanistan’s Communist party.  Soon, over 100,000 Soviet troops had flooded this poor Asian country.

     The rest of the nations flew into a rage.  It seemed that the Russians wanted to conquer the world.  By mid-January President Jimmy Carter had declared economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, particularly a grain embargo, announced a boycott of the summer Olympics to be held in Moscow, and recalled Ambassador Thomas Watson from Moscow.  The grain embargo hurt the American farmers, and the Olympic boycott bitterly disappointed the American athletes.

     Carter’s popularity plummeted, but what else could he do?  A direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union was out of the question, coming right on the heels of Vietnam.  The world considered the situation hopeless, for it seemed that the Russians would have their own way upon the Afghan people. 

     The extraordinary battles turned vicious, fought between armies of modern tanks, and ragged men, women and children armed with home-made grenades, catapaults, stones, ancient rifles.  The Afghans even brought down helicopters with hand grenades tied to kites.  The Russians soon controlled the cities and the transportation routes, but the Afghan rebels, called the muhjahidin, with their own fierece brand of guerilla warfare, possessed the countryside.  These unflinchingly hard tribesmen won again and again.

     During the eight years of war some one million Afghan people, both rebels and civilians, died, and the Soviets drove another five million into exile in Pakistan and Iran.  One muhjahidin commander, Abdul Haq Afghani said at the time, “The only really hard thing is this: in the beginning we felt the whole world was with us, now we know we are alone.”  Alone they fought.

     In February of 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted defeat and announced that his troops were leaving Afghanistan, and within a year they were gone.  The Communist government they left behind hung on to power, amazingly enough, until 1992, but eventually, the Taliban, with their harsh brand of Islamic fundamentalism, took the reins of government.

     The Soviet Union’s experience in Afghanistan is often compared to the United States’s debacle in Vietnam, and a lesson is to be learned.  People fighting for their own country on their own land, even without technologically-advanced weapons, possess a strong enough reason that they can defeat the enemy–even a superpower.

     The outcomes in Afghanistan and Vietnam did not exactly fit into the standard geopolitical model of the Cold War that Americans of the mid-twentieth century perceived the world.  And in these early days of the new millennium Americans find themselves bewildered by the world’s new crop of “isms”–such as Islamic “fundamentalism”.

     The Taliban ruler, Mullah Mohammed Omar, announced on Radio Shariat last week, “The enemies of Muslims are trying to eliminate the pure Islamic religion throughout the world.” 

VINCE LOMBARDI

by William H. Benson

 January 3, 2001

     As a boy growing up in the 1960’s, I believed that there was really only ONE great professional football team–the Green Bay Packers.  I also believed that there was only ONE great quarterback–Bart Starr, and I further believed that there was only ONE exceedingly and extraordinarily great coach–Vince Lombardi.  Those beliefs, I am convinced, I shared with many other football fans during that era.

     On the sidelines stood Vince Lombardi, one of the former Seven Blocks of Granite, wearing a suit, tie, overcoat, a silly hat, a gap-toothed smile, thick-lens glasses, a square head atop a square block of a body, but quickly he would flash to the boiling point.  Once enraged he turned on his team, invariably hollering and yelling at his players.  “What kind of football are we playing today?” he would shout. 

     Boys in their pre-teen years almost forty years ago knew those players, knew their faces, their names, their numbers, and their positions–like Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Willie Davis, Elijah Pitts, Max McGee, Fuzzy Thurston, and of course, Bart Starr.  Vince Lombardi had the knack of taking ordinary professional players and making them winners year after year.

     The emotions he conjured up in his players were always the same: awe, respect, love-hate, admiration, a measure of gratitude, and fear, especially fear.  Before his players Vince Lombardi was never uncertain, never afraid, and never dominated by anyone.  He oozed confidence. Whatever they may have felt toward him was offset by what they knew, that the difference between being a good football team and a great football team was him and only him. 

     In the training room Vince Lombardi would stand before his team and with chalk he would diagram on the chalkboard his plays.  Those X’s and O’s meant something to Vince Lombardi, and he could communicate his enthusiasm for the game to his players.  For some players who had been in the pros for a few years, it was like learning the game for the first time.

      Bart Starr later wrote, “For nine seasons, I watched him get up in training camp and diagram his favorite play, the sweep, and talk about it, and I never once got tired of his performance.  Every single time I was captivated. . . . I literally owe my life to that man.”

     The power sweep was Vince Lombardi’s play.  His entire offense revolved around it.  He transformed it into something singular.  It was his bread and butter play.  Its simplicity approached Lombardi’s sense of perfection.  It was the play that his teams practiced again and again and again and little else.  With that repetition came confidence and then passion.  They knew they could win ball games with that one play.  And they did.

     Paul Hornung or Jim Taylor carried the ball.  Forrest Gregg, the tight end, took out the defensive end.  The two guards, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston, pulled back, ran along the line of scrimmage, and blocked for the running back.  The play was unstoppable simply because each offensive player knew in detail what his assignment was given the defense’s choices.

     Given the players he was handed, he pushed them into a realm of playing beyond their abilities, where the total was far greater that the sum of the parts.

     His pre-game speeches were legendary.  “Winning is not everything.  It is the only thing,” he told his team.  “I will demand a commitment to excellence and to victory, and that is what life is all about. . . . The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.”

     Vince Lombardi coached 204 professional football games in ten seasons–nine in Green Bay and one for the Washington Redskins, 150 wins, 48 losses, and 6 ties.  He won the first two Super Bowl Championships. He said, “We never won as many as I wanted–which was all of them.”  Intestinal cancer got him at the age of 57.  He died in September of 1970 at the beginning of another football season.  “You never lose.  But sometimes the clock runs out on you.”

     When the winner of the Super Bowl holds aloft the trophy on Sunday night, January 21, 2001 with the cameras flashing, it will not be the George Hallas Trophy nor the Paul Brown Trophy.  It will be the Vince Lombardi Trophy.  There is a reason.

JOHN WALKER LINDH

by William H. Benson

January 3, 2001

     Born on January 3, 106 B.C., Cicero, the Roman orator, politician, and philosopher sent his son, Marcus, to study in Athens, the center of Greek learning.  Soon, reports floated back to Cicero in Rome that Marcus was drinking heavy, typical of college students, and he was failing in his studies.  Incapable of doing anything else, Cicero wrote a lengthy letter to his son which later earned the title of De Officiis (On Moral Obligations).

     Written as a moral guide, Cicero urged his son to consider the ethical teachings of the ancient Greeks and see if he could apply them to his own life, especially the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

     Information is simply facts and figures, but knowledge is the analysis and the weaving together of those facts.  But wisdom is the application of knowlege to our own personal lives, to teach us how to live.  And justice revolves around the concept that good deeds do not ever go unrewarded and that bad deeds do not go unpunished.  Courage is the stamina required to forge ahead with what is right and true and proper.

      Moderation, Cicero explained, was the Greek’s philosophical gift to the world–that too much of anything is wrong, in either direction.  For example, between the two extremes of total selfishness and absolute selflessness lies a balance, a Golden Mean, the correct posture in this life.

     All of this was obviously good advice, but Cicero’s son Marcus failed to heed much of it; the heavy drinking continued after his college days were over, deeply disappointing his father.

     Now over the past few weeks we have witnessed another strained father-son relationship that has become the focus of international attention–that of Frank and John Walker Lindh, and questions about this case jump out at us.

     How did an American boy from California end up hanging out with a gang of terrorists in Afghanistan intent on killing Americans?  Why was John Walker so attracted first to Islam and then to the most vicious strain of that religion?  What do we do with John Walker now? A Congressman on “Larry King Live” recently said that “this young man certainly deserves more from us than a shave and a haircut.”  Perhaps a bath?  or a change of clothes? or a change in attitude?

     Where were the parents in all of this?  Where was the dad?  Why would he pay his son’s way to go live first in Yemen and then in Pakistan to study and memorize all 6,666 lines of the Koran?  Why did he not cut off the money?  Did he not know that this would end up badly, as it has?

     The words of the dad, Frank Lindh, are revealing, if not disturbing.

     “He was always intellectually coherent, and he had a wonderful sense of humor.  And none of that changed when he converted to Islam.  I never had any major misgivings. . . .  He’s a victim who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . . I was proud of John pursuing an alternative course. . . . I wanted to support my son’s passion and his committment to learning. . . . My son’s message [about the attack on the USS Cole] raised my concerns, but my days of molding him were over.”

     Wisdom?  Justice?  Courage?  Moderation?  Both the father and the son committed some very unwise acts.  Participating with a crowd bent on killing innocent people is not seeking justice nor a courageous venture.  “Faceless cowards” is how the President described them.  And at some point both John and Frank threw moderation out the window when the dad watched the Muslim religion overtake his son’s life to the exclusion of everything else, and the dad did not say nor do anything to counter such obsessive behavior.

     Also born on January 3, but in 1892, was the English writer J.R.R. Tolkein.  One of his major characters, Bilbo Baggins, said, “Sometimes it is a dangerous thing to go out your front door.”  Of course it is, but to be easy on yourself, you do not have to go to Yemen, nor all the way to Afghanistan, nor do you have to join up with a crazed madman, such as Osama bin Laden.  After all, stupidity is evil’s dimwit half-brother.