CHERNOBYL

by William H. Benson

April 26, 2001

     Mount Vesuvius covered Pompei.  An earthquake struck San Francisco.  The Titanic bumped an ice berg and sank, and the Hindenburg was destroyed by fire at a tower mooring.  But the world’s biggest and worst accident to date happened at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986 in the Ukraine near the town of Chernobyl.

     While technicians shut down the fourth unit of the V. I. Lenin nuclear reactor for routine maintenance and testing, the steam pressure increased until the graphite core exploded.  Hundreds of tons of fuel, concrete, steel, and other debris rocketed into the night sky and then rained down over the surrounding area.

     Even more deadly were the several tons of radiation that rose ever upwards into the atmosphere creating a nuclear wind that swept across the Soviet Union and Europe poisoning millions.  Immediately, pilots began performing death-defying and heroic acts flying choppers into the smoke and fire and radioactive cloud to dump sand, boron, and lead onto the burning reactor.

     The Chernobyl accident rendered an area the size of New York State unsafe for human habitation.  A city of 42,000 was abandoned for at least the next 500 years.  It killed, according to the official account, 31 people almost immediately, and 224 others in the next few weeks, but actually the death toll was probably in the several hundreds and may even reach tens of thousands once all that radioactive waste has completed its course.

     People began to die.  First it was the firefighters and the cleanup crews who had been inside the reactor.  Then, men, women, and children across the Soviet Union began to develop radiation-linked diseases.  Since the explosion, cancer rates in the former Soviet Union have risen 300 percent, respiratory diseases 2,000 percent, and the number of babies born with birth defects has soared to record numbers.

     As is true of all accidents, everyone points a finger at another.  Government officials accuse the workers of being inept.  The workers accuse the power plant’s builders of shoddy construction.  Mothers with sick and dying children accuse the government.  Scientists and engineers contradict one another. 

     Actually, the Chernobyl fiasco was a combination of things that came to a focal point on that spring night fifteen years ago.  From the start the power plant was doomed to disaster, for it was poorly designed, poorly constructed, and poorly managed by poorly trained engineers.

     What was remarkable was that the Soviet Union admitted to a failure–the first time ever.  The Soviet Union’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, confessed that mistakes had been made.

     Today a sarcophagus of steel-and-concrete walls and ceiling encloses the fourth unit reactor.  It must stand and remain intact for the next several tens of thousand years.  At the bottom in the basement lies a pool of deadly radioactive material that no one has actually seen, but a photograph suggests it resembles a giant elephant’s foot standing on the floor.

     The sarcophagus was built very quickly by untrained workers more interested in surviving than doing a good job.  Rain leaks through cracks in the roof and then leaks out through cracks in the floor.  It is a continual disaster. 

     Before he became President, Ronald Reagan wrote that communism is neither an economic nor a political system, but a form of insanity, an aberration.  “The Russians have told us over and over again their goal is to impose their incompetent and ridiculous system on the world. . . . How much more misery will it cause before it disappears. . . . It will not survive because it lays the groundwork for its own destruction by suppressing economic, political, and social freedom.  Given the opportunity, people will seek freedom.”

     Chernobyl was the largest nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union’s empire, which had become unmanageable, teetering on the verge of economic collapse, rife with corruption, incompetence, political paranoia, and an unbending bureaucracy.  Reagan was right.  Communism did collapse, and Chernobyl was symbolic of what was wrong with communism–poor quality, hazardous to the environment, shortened human lives, and an accident waiting to happen that unfortunately did.

BRUCE CATTON

by William H. Benson

April 12, 2001

     My favorite writer on the Civil War is Bruce Catton.  He wrote easy-to-read and popularized versions of the Civil War that still line the shelves of most libraries.

     At age 49 Bruce chucked aside his career as a newpaper reporter and did what he really wanted to do–write Civil War history.  He quickly published three books on the Army of the Potomoc–Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomatox, none of which sold very well.  However, the Pulitzer Prize committee noticed them, and he was awarded a prize.  Suddenly, his trilogy became an overnight success.

     Bruce grew up in Benzonia, Michigan, where his father was a Congregational minister.  As a boy Bruce remembered going to the services in the Town Hall on Decoration Day and seeing the Civil War veterans dressed in their blue uniforms, sporting white beards.  They would then walk out to the cemetary and put lilacs on the graves of the veterans who had already passed on.  Those old men gave a color to village life, and Bruce wanted to know what made them tick. 

     He later realized that those old men in 1910 were either teenagers or in their twenties in the 1860’s and that they had passed through a fire then unlike anything else that had ever happened to them since.  It was an induction into adulthood that surpassed all others.  Bruce began writing to seek out what it was that drove those young men of the 1860’s so relentlessly forward.

     Through the narrative, the attention to detail, and even the maps, Bruce brings the battles and the war to life.  Always Bruce Catton ended up astonished at the courage those farm boys and small town sons from both the South and the North displayed on a battlefield in places like Shiloh, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where the carnage was so ugly and emotionally overwhelming.

     Elbow to elbow in a line one and two miles long they marched forward with their muskets raised, their bayonets poised, their swords rattling while overhead the colorful flags waved and whipped in the wind.  And the enemy, just across a few hundred yards of open field, had lined up in a similar fashion and was coming at them.  They met in terrible clashes.  What strength of desire can propel a young man forward when the odds are so firmly stacked against him?

     After years of studying the Civil War, Bruce concluded that despite the ugly cost of lost men, the war was worthwhile, for it did accomplish something.  It gave to Americans a geographic and a political unity.  It kept the country from fragmenting into a number of separate and independent and uncooperative states.  The North American continent was not Balkanized.  And this single geographic and political unit made possible the prosperity and power of later days.

     Ulysses Simpson Grant was Bruce Catton’s favorite Civil War character.  Bruce admired Grant for his tencity.  No matter how ferocious the battle, no matter how slim the chances of victory, Grant never faltered.  He revealed the qualities of a great military commander in that he took the initiative, fought aggressively, and made quick decisions.

     On a Sunday, April 9, 1865, Grant met Lee in a farmhouse owned by Wilmer McLean at Appomatox Court House, Virginia.  Grant offered generous terms;  the soldiers of the defeated Southern Confederacy could keep their horses for spring plowing.  Lee dressed in full military dress uniform accepted the terms. 

     On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford’s theatre to see the play, Our American Cousin, and there John Wilkes Booth, an actor and a Southern sympathizer, shot President Abraham Lincoln.  He died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 15.  Those dramatic events in our nation’s history appear to us now like a tragedy of Shakespearean quality, all acted out on a national stage and replayed again and again in the history books.

     Bruce Catton captured in words and detail the battles, the surrender at Appomatox, Lincoln’s assassination, and the “great lost cause” which the Southern Confederacy had so relentlessly pursued for four bloody years.

     Once Bruce was asked how he knew about a certain detail of the war, and he wistfully replied, “I don’t know.  Maybe I was there.”

TIME

by William H. Benson

March 29, 2001

     Time travel has always fascinated.  The ancient Egyptian pharaohs’ wanted to preserve their bodies to travel forward into that future world;  hence, the need for pyramids and mummification.

     In H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine, the traveler ventured forwards as well as backwards, but according to Isaac Asimov such travel is impossible.  It is a law of physics that we can only move forward in time but not necessarily at a fixed unalterable rate.

     In 1905 Albert Einstein advanced his Special Theory of Relativity.  He suggested that to  successfully measure distances what is crucial is the relative motion between the object being measured and the device doing the measuring.  Then, by his General Theory of Relativity he stated that motion through time becomes so closely related to motion through space that it is impossible to consider space and time separately.  This thinking reveals the notion that space-time is determined by four dimensions–height, length, width, and time.

     Stephen Hawking  wrote in his A Brief History of Time that “Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time–and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. . . . Space and time affect everything that happens in the universe.”

     Isaac Asimov said, “Space is what makes possible differences in position,” and Albert Einstein said “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

     It is within this parameter of space–time that life occurs.  For the thinker and philosopher time is life.  It is the crucial ingredient, for when it runs short, we grasp most desperately for it..

     Daylight savings time begins on Sunday, April Fool’s Day.  In a sense it is not time we are saving but only daylight, for time cannot be saved back into a depository institution to be withdrawn later for use.  It can only be either wasted or used constructively.

     The columnist Charley Reese wrote, “It’s said you can tell what people care about by what they buy, but I think a better indicator is how they spend their time.  Time is an unrecognized treasure.  Time, once spent, is forever gone.  Our store of time on Earth is limited.  We don’t know when it will run out, but we do know that it will.  The value of time is equivalent to life.”

     The child psychologists tell us that the amount of time a parent gives to a child equals that parent’s depth of affection for that child.  In other words for a child time is love.

     Not just on April 1st do fools waste their time on trifles.  The wise devote time to their families, to their jobs, to their careers, to their accomplishments, in other words, to constructing a quality life.  As usual, the ancient Greeks said it the best, “Life is a gift that comes to us from nature, but beautiful living is a gift that comes to us only from wisdom.”

     In a similar vein, Charles Darwin finished his Origin of the Species with this sentence.  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

     So we can wisely use or foolishly waste Sunday’s extra hour of daylight, a small slice of time.

FRANK McCOURT

by William H. Benson

March 15, 2001

     On St. Patrick’s Day we ordinarily think of green, an Emerald Island, shamrocks, four-leaf clovers, and leprechauns that dispense lucky charms.  We understand that, except for the green, this is all largely a myth designed to cover over the actual desperate circumstances and the raw existence that many Irish experienced growing up. 

     A good example is Frank McCourt who wrote Angela’s Ashes, the story of his growing-up years.  It not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for Biography, but was on the best-seller list for two years.  He tells a story of absolute deprivation and powerlessness as a child.

     Born in New York City to Irish parents–Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank was the oldest son of an ever-expanding family that soon included three brothers: Malachy Jr. and the twins–Eugene and Oliver, and also a sister–the baby Margaret.

     The major problem with the family is that Dad is an alcoholic who refuses to ever hold a steady job and provide for his children.  If he occasionally does get a paycheck, he spends it on his “pint” at the pub.  Neither he nor Mam are prepared for family responsibilities.

     One night the boys are awakened, and they soon realize that the baby Margaret has died during the night.  Mam suffers a complete breakdown, and relatives back in Ireland send them enough money to return to Limerick, Ireland on the Shannon River.

     Frank understands now that their return to Ireland was a big mistake.  He begins his book with these words, “My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.  Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.”

     In Ireland Dad continues his excessive drinking, singing foolish songs about the Irish patriots–Roddy McCorly and Kevin Barry, finding work and losing it days later, and going for long walks in the countryside.  The family is forced to live in a deplorable home where water floods the house every winter.  Sanitation is nonexistent, and typhoid and tuberculosis take a heavy toll.

     Oliver, one of the twins, dies.  The doctor explains to Dad and Mam that Oliver was sick and that he should have been in a hospital.  They plead innocence that they did not know.  And then weeks later the other twin, Eugene, also dies.  Mam is devastated.  Dad drinks himself into a stupor.  Frankie, six-years-old, endures.

     Two more boys are born into the family–Michael and Alphie.

     Dad finally goes to England to work in the munitions factories with the promise that he will send money home every weekend.  No money arrives, and the realization dawns that Dad has abandoned them.  They are desperately hungry.  Little Frankie understands that if he and Mam and his brothers are to avoid starving it is up to him, and this is the amazing point of the book.  Even though he had such a poor role model for a dad, Frank bravely assumes the responsibility.

      He drops out of school and gets a job delivering telegrams on a bike about the wet and slippery cobbled streets of Limerick.  He also writes dunning letters for a loan shark, and he delivers newspapers for the protestant newspaper.  Throughout his teen years he works and he saves, putting nickels and dimes into a savings account until at age nineteen, he has enough to buy a one-way ticket back to New York City.  And so the book ends.

      He puts those fifteen years growing up in Ireland into perspective.  “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.  It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.  Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.  People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version.”     

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.