NATIONAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS

by William H. Benson

June 22, 2000

     Those religious leaders from America’s past who achieve notoriety on a national scale are not always well treated and accepted.

     It is a sobering footnote in our nation’s history that on June 27, 1844 a mob broke into the jail at Carthage, Illinois and shot and killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum.  Governor Thomas Ford had promised Joseph safety if he turned himself in, but Ford did not fully understand the level of hatred that had arisen against Joseph that drove the mob to a point they were ready to kill him.  His neighbors around Nauvoo, Illinois hated him because he had such a despotic control over his followers, for they believed him a prophet and did whatever he wanted.  Joseph paid the ultimate price for his actions and his beliefs and died at age thiry-eight years and six months.

     Most religious and cultural historians have considered Joseph Smith a very low character with little ethical restraints; however, most recently that evaluation has been upgraded drastically.  Harold Bloom, the religious critic, has even dared to label Joseph Smith the one true American genius, and that the church he founded is the archetype of the American Religion. 

     Bloom wrote, “Though I do not lack respect for the Mormon religion, and possess a healthy fear of its immense future, as a religious critic I judge Smith to be greater and more interesting than the current faith of the people that he created.  Partly this is because he died much too soon. . . . Partly this is because there has been a falling-away from his teaching and his example . . . in the last century or so.  He had an enormous religious imagination. . . . “

     Nevertheless, Joseph Smith dared to create a new American Religion and dared to challenge existing social mores, and in so doing brought out the very best in some and the very worst in others.  He was divisive.

     Two hundred years before the events in Carthage, Roger Williams, a young Puritan minister, arrived in Boston and voiced his opinion that church and government should not be too closely aligned, as it was being practiced in Boston  The outraged magistrates promptly arrested him, brought him to trial, and convicted him of heretical notions.  Facing sure deportation back to England, he chose instead to flee to Rhode Island and establish his own colony.  So angered were the Boston authorities by his opinions that they permanently banished him from ever living in or even passing through the Massachusetts Bay colony.   

     Then, more than three centuries later, in the early 1980’s, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jim Bakker built the biggest and most influential religious broadcasting system ever, bringing in at its peak $160 million a year.  Millions watched him, and the millions poured in.  Then, came the announcement of the Jessica Hahn affair, Bakker’s resignation, Jerry Falwell’s inept bungling, and the declaration of PTL’s bankruptcy.  In two years Jim fell further than any other American.  He and his wife Tammy Faye became the national laughing-stock, grist for David Letterman’s jokes late at night.

     In the fall of 1989 federal prosecutors tried Jim Bakker, and a jury convicted him of fraudulently selling lifetime partnerships over the television airwaves.  Judge Rober Potter slapped the stunned Bakker with a 45-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.  The judge was very anxious to sever the pipeline connecting Bakker and the people.  Four and 3/4 years later, on July 1, 1994, he stepped out of the prison camp at Jessup, Georgia, a deeply reduced and humbled man, who has deliberately shunned the limelight ever since. 

     Peering into the 21st century and on into the third millennium, I wonder what characters will come to the forefront of future religious movements across America.  Whoever they are and whatever they institutionalize, America will find a place for them, for the first Amendment assures them of that.  But if the past is a prologue, I suspect that the solid–such as perhaps the Billy Graham’s, will probably receive the acclamation and respect that they more or less deserve.  Those who make promises on the airwaves and then fail to deliver on them will probably go directly to jail.  Those who think further and deeper than any others on the religious issues and problems of the day will, no doubt, suffer cruelly at the hands of lesser men. But the fierce extremists–the Jim Jones and the David Koresh’s, they will quickly find themselves in trouble–hated and hunted.

     These future faceless and nameless characters will be no less astonishing than those whom we have already seen and heard and even endured.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

by William H. Benson

June 7, 2000

     Wednesday of this week, June 7th, is Freedom of the Press Day.  Originally designated by the Inter-American Press Association, it is not a widely celebrated day, but the Founding Fathers understood that their new nation required a strong and independent press.  James Madison put “freedom of the press” in the first amendment of the Bill Rights:  “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . . ”  It is the press’s job to reveal the truth and, in so doing, to restrain the government’s reach for unwarranted powers.

     As a result, government officials have, in the past, disliked, mistrusted, and even hated the press.  Adalai Stevenson, the twice-defeated Presidential candidate during the 1950’s, said, “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”  Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing.  Both Roosevelt and Kennedy had love affairs going on that were known to Washington journalists, but the truth was never revealed while they were President.

     But it was Richard Nixon with his bristling ego and his verbal digs at the media that produced a backlash–the media struck back.  The historian Paul Johnson wrote, “The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful. . . . In the paranoid atmosphere generated by the media’s anti-Nixon vendetta, anything served as ammunition to hurl against the ‘enemy’.”

     Even though Nixon initially knew nothing of the Plumbers breakin of the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, Ben Bradlee, editor at the Washington Post, put Watergate stories on his paper’s front page seventy-nine times during the 1972 election, seeking to make the Watergate burglary a major moral issue.  Two years later Nixon was forced to resign.  In a sense, the media toppled Nixon’s Presidency.

     James Fenimore Cooper wrote: “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”

     And so, in turn, we look to the government to restrain the press’s power.  For example, in 1978 the FCC ruled that George Carlin’s X-rated monlogue should not be aired on radio nor television during the day.  “The Seven Dirty Words” case went to the Supreme Court, and they upheld the FCC’s ruling.  The liberals flew into a rage, for they believed that George Carlin should be permitted to say whatever he wanted and whenever.  But when self-administered restraint fails, we look to the courts, to the laws, and to the government for censorship.  Once again, but in a different manner, it becomes a moral issue.

      Today, the entertainment industry has unparalleled power to produce whatever and whenever.  Fred Friendly, a former television executive said, “Television and movies make so much money at their very worst, why would they ever want to be their very best?’

      A columnist wrote, “We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism and sadism piped into the living room and even the nursery.  The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn’t slugged, raped, and thrown into a Bessemer converter.”

     The historian, Barbara Tuchman wrote, “The cause of pornography is not the same as the cause of free speech.  There is a difference.”  

     So, we witness a dance between the government and the media; the media reigns in the government, and the government pulls back on the media.  It is a dance in which each takes turns leading, searching for an equalibrium.  In this late date of our American republic, we are now looking for stronger means to control the trash flooding our televisions, theatres, and computer monitors.  This low quality substance can and will capture the minds of the young Americans, damaging them forever.  Freedom of the press is one thing; pornography and violence is another.  There is a difference.

 DINOSAURS

by William H. Benson

May 25, 2000

     Human intelligence is naturally fascinated by prehistoric life, especially the dinosaurs, and a child will tell you why.  “They’re big, fierce, and extinct.”  Dinomania peaked in 1993 with the movie “Jurassic Park”, in which Velociraptors, cloned into existence, takeover the park and attack the visitors and zookeepers.

     But Dinomania received a shot in the arm last week when Hollywood released “Dinosaur”, a fantasy, loaded with computer-generated dinosaurs dubbed into virtual reality in scenery shot in Florida, Australia, and Venezuela.  The story revolves around Aladar, a young Iguanodon, raised Tarzan-style by a family of friendly lemurs.  Fantastically, the dinosaurs talk.

     It has only been 150 years since dinosaurs entered into human consciousness when   paleontologists began scientifically cataloguing the fossils–vertebrae, thighs, and skulls.  They identified Stegosaurus with its upright horny plates along its spine, Brachiosaurus with its eighty foot body and long supple neck, and Tyrannosaurus rex with its short forearms and a head and jaws shaped like a bucket on a coal mine crane. 

     Amazed at what they found, they studied more, and the facts gave way to theories.  Slowly the light dawned, and the paleontologists realized that these animals were from “deep time”, not just thousands, but millions of years ago.  The theory holds that the dinosaurs ruled Earth for 150 million years, up until 65 million years ago, at which time they disappeared.

     Often we refer to a failed business or a defeated politician as a “dinosaur”, which is an unfortunate and inappropriate image.  Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard’s paleontologist, argued that “Dinosaurs were among the most successful creatures that ever lived, and any comparison with them should be viewed as a badge of honor.  While they ruled terrestrial environments for 150 million years, the domination of mammals, by contrast has endured only for 65 million.”

     However, with the fascination comes the controversy.  First, were they cold or warm blooded?  Thirty-six years ago in the summer of 1964, John Ostrom first suggested that dinosaurs may have been warm blooded, unlike our modern-day reptiles that are slow-moving, lethargic, and unintelligent.  Ostrom argued that dinosaurs may have been active, capable of running and expending large doses of energy, and even intelligent.  The jury is still out on this question.

     But the biggest controversy centers about Luis Alvarez’s theory that a five kilometer extraterrestrial asteroid slammed into the North Atlantic 65 million years ago completely changing the climate and ultimately wiping out the big animals, especially the dinosaurs.  Even Stephen Jay Gould buys into this theory.  But others argue that there were multiple extinctions during those 150 million years and that a goodly number of differing reasons can explain each one, including the final one.  So we have theories, and each very well may be true.  Perhaps we will never know why they completely disappeared.

    Yes, Brachiosaurus was very “big”, and Tyrannosaurus rex had to have been very “fierce”.  But fortunately for the mammals, such as homo sapiens, they are all “extinct”.  Those are the facts, but then we are forced to turn to theories and novels and movies and even fantasies to understand deeper what those big animals’ lives involved and meant and what kind of a world they inhabited.  Along with astrophysics, dinosaur study is an interaction, or rather a collision, constantly between facts and theory, and human intelligence, sensing the challenge, works hard to sort it all out.  Inevitably and with a measure of danger, human concepts and values overlay the science and the study of dinosaurs.  And then to bring those big and fierce animals, dead for millennium, back to life, Hollywood gives the dinosaurs voice and language and feelings and even meaning.    

BOOKS

by William H. Benson

May 10, 2000

     We need the stimulus of differing opinions and opposing ideas.  Human beings are mortal; they die, but the ideas and thoughts that they can conceive and propose can then live forever.  Certain ideas that transcend a human being’s position and that uplift and enhance and spur that person on toward a greater future are ideas that should and must live forever.  Optimism, encouragement, and achievement are ideas permanently stored on the shelves of the libraries around the world.

     But not everyone has always agreed.  For example, on May 10, 1933 the Nazis celebrated their contempt for learning by building an enormous bonfire of 20,000 books, incinerating works on psychology and philosophy and all were written either by socialists, liberals, or Jews.  This is a sad anniversary, for book burning falls into the same category as does censorship and other forms of ruthless conformism.  It is a reversion or a step backwards from Western Civilization’s ideals.

     Friedrich Nietzche said that the final lesson of history is, “Let’s never go back there again.”  Indeed, book burnings are grim events.  There are no welcome signs.  Let’s not go there.

     Seven years later, tense discussions and long faces adorned England’s War Cabinet after Germany attacked Belgium, Holland, and France.  The English-speaking people on the British Isles understood that they were next.  So, on May 10, 1940 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered his resignation to King George VI.  The King then summoned Winston Churchill to Buckingham Palace and asked him to form a new government to deal with Germany’s threat to England.

     Churchill was a professional politician, who had served off and on for four decades in the House of Commons.  He was also a journalist who wrote lengthy essays for journals about the issues and governmental policies that he either opposed or favored.  Also, he wrote dozens of books, primarily histories but also about his adventures.  Both friends and political opponents loved to hear him give a speech, for he was labelled the best speaker in Parliament.

     But he was considered a gadfly, a nuisance, and a pest who invariably pointed out the British government’s faults and mistakes, more than he offered a solution.  He was not the logical choice for Prime Minister at this grave hour in England.

     Three days later on the 13th, Churchill stood before the House of Commons and challenged the English:

     “I would say to the House, as I have said to those who have joined this Government:  ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’  You ask what is our policy?  I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us.  That is our policy.  You ask, what is our aim?  I can answer in one word:  It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

     His words rallied the British, and eventually after a very costly war he realized his victory;  Western Civilization he helped preserve.

     The choice remains today.  Do we burn the books or do we write the books?  Do we empty the library shelves of their books or do we add to the collection?  Do we search out and eradicate ideas that do not conform to our own or do we listen and, at least, try to tolerate others’ opinions.

H. L. Mencken said, “It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.” Book burners are so absolutely and thoroughly convinced that they are right that they are, of all things, most dull.  Socrates, the first of philosophers, suggested that “truth” is not usually ever possessed, but that it can only be found in its pusuit.

     And what was the victory that Churchill so pursued with a promise of blood, toil, tears, and sweat?  He simply wanted to secure the right for others to voice their opinions without fear of reprisal.  In other words, he wanted to end all future book burnings.  

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by William H. Benson

April 26, 2000

     Because William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, historians hypothesize that he was probably born on either April 22 or 23.  But they definitely know that he died exactly 52 years later on April 23, 1616.  He grew up in Stratford on the River Avon in England, a pleasant community of about 2000 people then.  At age 16 he graduated from Stratford’s school, but did not go on to either of the two universities–Oxford nor Cambridge.  Then, at age 23 evidence exists that he was in London working as a playwright, beginning his brilliant career.

     No one knows what he did in those intervening seven years, but he must have had access to books and read extensively.  He had detailed knowledge of royalty’s pageantry and decorum, and he also understood the mechanics of the courts, the lawyers, the judges, and the law.  And what he read he remembered.

     Recently, I picked up Harold Bloom’s book on Shakespeare–“The Invention of the Human”.  The title serves up Bloom’s thesis–that Shakespeare brought human character into creation.  Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging, but with Shakespeare his characters develop rather than unfold.  And they do so by listening to their own speech.

     Bloom puts Hamlet at the apex of Shakespeare’s writing talent, and indeed considers Hamlet the highest leterary art ever produced before or since.  Consider Hamlet’s words.

     “Our wills and fates do so contrary run

       That our devices still are overthrown:

       Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.”

In other words, what we want and what actually happens to us run on two different paths.  Our desires are thrown over, pushed aside, and trampled into the dirt.  We can take ownership of our thoughts, but what actually befalls us, our fate, that is not of our doing nor of our choice.  So says Hamlet in a philosophizing moment.

     Shakespeare holds up a mirror to see ourselves, and sometimes the mirror shines so brightly that we are blinded.  Our eyes are unaccustomed to such piercing light.  For example, Shakespeare created Lady Macbeth and the hunchback King Richard III, both murderous and desperately evil.  Shakespeare peered deeply into their hearts and drudge up the blackness therein.  For a moment audiences peer blindly into savage behavior and a brazen thirst for power.

     But then, at other times the mirror shows softlight and colorful–of a forest outside of Athens on a warm midsummer night where fairies named Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardsee flitter about, and where love potion douses people’s eyes.  These comedies revolve about getting the right girl with the right guy, and the awkward misups to get there bring out the gentle laughter.

      Through his characters, Shakespeare put on paper and then on stage and ultimately brought into life a galaxy of human natures and emotions, global in scope and multicultural in depth: sadness, discontent, happiness, staisfaction, despair, and horrible sorrow for despicable acts.

     Thomas Carlyle said, “If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that.”  Harold Bllom says that Shakespeare’s intellect is superior to that of all other writers, both in the East and the West.  No other writer approaches his stature, for he stretches to the limits and even beyond human intelligence.

     I happen to like his Elizabethan language, described as “jewels in the mouth”.  For an example, consider the Prince’s final words at the end of the play after the two major characters are dead.

     “A glooming peace this morning with it brings;

      The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

      Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;

      Some shall be pardon’d and some punished;

      For never was a story of more woe

      Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

FLAGS

by William H. Benson

April 13, 2000

     Last week the two major news items continued to puzzle.  Elian Gonzalez’s father arrived on Thursday in Miami demanding his son’s return to Cuba with him.  And then, the Confederate flag is still popping in the wind high atop South Carolina’s capitol dome.  Neither issue comes with a ready-made answer.

     The battle over Elian underscores the forty years of hostility between Castro’s Cuba and the United States.  Elian’s Cuban relatives who live in Little Havana in Miami want him to stay with them and enjoy America’s opportunities, for they have nothing but scorn for Castro’s poverty-stricken experiment with socialism in Cuba.  The father simply wants his son, and Janet Reno agrees that they should be together.  The hostility simmers for a season and then boils.

     In mid-April of 1961 the Cuban anti-Castro forces in the U.S. were so unhappy with the situation in Cuba that they landed on Cuban soil at the Bay of Pigs with the naive intention of overthrowing Castro, all done with the Kennedy Administration’s backing.  The forces shouted, “We must conquer or we shall die choked by slavery.”  Castro easily routed the invading forces; hence the phrase–the Bay of Pigs Fiasco.  Castro vowed defiance.  “The organizers of the aggression against Cuba are encroaching on the inalienable right of the Cuban people to live free and independently.”  The resulting suspicion and rancor between the two governments has marred their diplomatic relationship ever since.

     As for the other news item, the NAACP wants the Confederate flag removed, and to force the issue, the organization sanctioned a boycott against South Carolina until the flag comes down.  The Confederate flag represents a government, defeated and destroyed 135 years ago, that supported the enslavement of entire families–men, women, and children, from birth until death.

     This boycott underscores the hostility between the North and the South.  On April 12, 1861 the Confederate forces fired upon the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War began.  Four years later on April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, and the next day he died.  Those four years sapped the nation’s resources, turned villages into blood baths, and scarred innumerable families.  Thousands of children lost their dads.

     April 13, 1743 was Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.  Last Saturday a thirteen-member panel at the University of Richmond agreed that results from a DNA test link the Jefferson family to Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, verifying the claim that Sally was indeed Jefferson’s mistress.  One person in the audience argued against the conclusion:  “This is not the truth.  This is a man’s reputation.  If (Jefferson) said there was no relationship, there was no relationship.”

     It is difficult to get into another person’s head and understand his or her thought processes, especially a Southern plantation owner in the the latter half of the the eighteenth century.  What Jefferson read, said, and wrote was one thing, for he set forth “inalienable rights” and included “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” among them.  But what he did was quite another thing.  He bought slaves to work his fields, even expanded his farming enterprise to include more slaves, and probably took for himself Sally Hemings.

     Flags represent an allegiance to a government that is attached at a point in time to a geographical region.  We say the words, “We pledge allegiance to the flag . . . ”  Apparantly, Elian Gonzalez’s father pledges his allegiance to Castro’s flag, a socialistic government.  Then, that Confederate flag atop South Carolina’s capitol dome represents a diminishing of Thomas Jefferson’s principles for the children of future generations.

     In these two issues we have seen battle lines drawn, people taking positions, and each side is convinced that they are on the right side, and that the opposing side is wrong.  And the issue is really about what to do with the children.  When we finally come around to face the issues of family (children) and of country (flags), we find that they can be inextricably woven together, joined at the elbow, and to pull on one pulls at the other.  What is best for Elian?  What is best for the children of South Carolina?  Rhetorical questions such as those do not yield simple answers, but I return again and again to Jefferson’s words: “. . .  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  We cannot go too far wrong if we stick with those inalienable rights.