JACK KEVORKIAN

by William H. Benson

December 3, 1998

     Western Civilization, more or less, since the ancient Greeks has agreed that life is valued thing, precious, to be extended to as great a length as possible.  Quantity over quality.  Eastern Civilization has not always prized life this way.  For example, when the Spanish under Cortez marched into Tenochitlan, the Aztec’s capital, they witnessed the gruesome extrication of a live and beating heart from a sacrificed slave that was then offered up to the Aztec’s gods.  Horrified the Spanish were at the cheapness placed upon human life by the Aztecs.

     Four and a half centuries later on December 3, 1967 in South Africa,  Dr. Christiian Barnard stood in amazement and watched as a living human heart from a dead 25-year-old woman killed in an accident began beating inside the chest of a 53-year-old grocer, Louis Washkansky.  This, the first human heart transplant, furthered Washkansky’s sojourn until lung complications ended his life on the 21st.  Still it was18 days.

     Now, three decades later Western Civilization’s assumption that life is to be lengthened no matter the cost in terms of pain is being challenged by Jack Kevorkian.  (He cannot be referred to as a doctor because he lost his medical license in 1991 and now only prescribes poisons.)  A week ago Sunday evening “60 Minutes” played a video in which Kevorkian lethally injected Tom Yount, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, with potassium chloride and ended his life.  This time Kevorkian did not assist in a suicide, because Yount did not flip any switch nor pull any plug.

      Fascinated by death, the 70-year-old Kevorkian demonstrates a self-destructive attitude, issuing a blatant and face-slapping challenge to the legal authorities to force a debate and to change the law.  He acts as if he cares not what happens to him personally, and not a few have wondered at his sanity.

     “Our morality is based upon mythology. . . . Either I will go to jail and starve myself to death or my attackers will change their thinking about life and about death.”

     The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates argued that through proper and careful reasoning right and wrong can be known, that truth can be distinguished from falsehood, and that people can determine what is good and best for them–a fundamental tenant of Western Civilization.  But, after a judicial ruling convicted Socrates of misleading the young men, his pupils, away from the gods, instead of escaping, the 70-year-old Socrates willingly drank his hemlock, his poison saying,  “And you too, judges, must face death with a good courage, and believe this is a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.”

     Jack Kevorkian deliberately jumped into the middle of an ethical dilemma forcing the authorities to act, and, of course, they did, serving him legal papers last week. 

      Here we are swimming in “out of bounds” territory and wandering in an ethical wilderness created by a medical pariah, a maverick. Certainly, a Jack Kevorkian should not be the one to lead us through, nor to even formulate the questions around which we must grapple.  I cannot consider him the “hero” the Mike Wallace’s have made of him, for I find his idea to concentrate power into the hands of physicians who will decide who lives and who dies an abhorrent thought.  But, in Kovorkian’s ideal world, doctors would decide when your life is no longer worth living.            

     If given a choice between Dr. Christiian Barnard or Jack Kevorkian for personal medical help, schedule my appointments with the heart surgeon and not the so-called “doctor” of death.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD

by William H. Benson

November 19, 1998

     At 12:30 p.m. the first bullet struck the pavement near the right rear of the the big automobile and then angled toward the curb.  From the shattered concrete a burst of sand hit James Tague’s face, who was standing beyond that same curb.  The second bullet penetrated President John F. Kennedy’s back, exited his throat, entered the Texas Governor John Connally’s back, exited his chest, and struck his wrist.  The wounds for either man were not fatal.

     Another bystander at Dealy Plaza that day, Howard Brennan, looked up to the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository to see the assassin take aim for a third bullet.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five. . . . In those five seconds of dumbfounded immobility on the ground, President Kennedy lost his life, for the third shell entered the right rear of the skull.

     “This one the President did not feel.  The light had gone out with no memories, no regrets.  After forty-six and a half years, he was again engulfed by the dark eternity from which he had come.  For good or evil, his work, his joys, his responsibilities were complete. . . . The heart would stop in a few moments, when blood pressure dropped to zero,”  wrote the author Jim Bishop.

     At exactly 1:00 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy  was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital.

     The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, dropped the rifle, bought a pop at a machine, took the steps to the ground floor, walked some blocks away from the building, caught a bus, and then caught a taxi.  At home he grabbed a snub-nosed revolver and walked along the Dallas streets.  Patrolman J. D. Tippit, cruising the streets, happened to see Oswald who matched the description of a 25 to 30-year-old male wearing a work jacket and slacks.  Tippit got out on the driver’s side, and immediately Oswald fired five shots hitting Tippit four times and killing him.

      Oswald ran off, pistol in the air, and ducked into a movie house where minutes later he was arrested and eventually charged for the murder of John F. Kennedy and of J. D. Tippit.

      On Sunday November 24 at 11:21 a.m. at police headquarters, Jack Ruby, an unstable Dallas nightclub owner, then shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. 

      Since those horrible days of 35 years ago, the American public has wanted to believe in a conspiracy.  Just a week afterword, a poll showed that only 29% believed that Oswald acted alone.  All the factors were there to create suspicion and mystery.  Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine who had defected to Russia and then returned.  He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and pro-Cuban.  Jack Ruby, a minor thug, had ties to the Mafia.  Fingers pointed at the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, and Jimmy Hoffa.  Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie, “JFK”, built and elaborated on the conspiracy theory to a degree that virtually many government institutions were guilty.

      Walter Cronkite recently in his book dismissed all these theories as “pure bunk”.

       The Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes and all 10,400,000 words concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, without help, without coercion, nor at anyone’s suggestion.  That conclusion has been backed up and confirmed by numerous investigative journalists and has never been effectively challenged.

     This efflorescence of rumor and surmise, of speculation and hypothesis, of falsehood and distortion, of fantasy and fabrication, and of hallucinogenic colors has only now begun to fade after 35 dizzy years.

FATHER CHARLES COUGHLIN

by William H. Benson

November 5, 1998 

    The election is now behind us, and the results are known.  No matter the outcome, Rush Limbaugh, I am sure, is peeved.  The king of day-time radio, Rush hates the liberals and especially Bill Clinton and will not rest until Clinton is booted out of the Oval office.  On any given day some 20 million listeners tune in to Rush’s Excellence in Broadcasting (EIB) Network to hear him bash the President and throw out his opinions.  “Entertaining” it might be; “wise in its approach” is another story.

     “This is just another example of the left’s stereotype of the conservative party in our nation. . . . This is a battle for the very soul of democracy. . . . Prepare your minds to be challenged as they have never been challenged before. . . . Megadittoes, dittoheads! . . . My show works because people are tired of having their intelligence insulted.  They enjoy a show which respects their intelligence. . . . A quick break and then back to the phones.”

     Recently, I read a book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, in which the author, Al Franken, pokes fun at this 300-pound opinionated radio personality.  Franken points out some obvious inconsistencies in Rush’s bold statements.

     For example, Rush could not have voted for Ronald Reagen, because he never even bothered to register to vote until in the 1990’s when someone shamed him into doing so.  Rush says the feminist (which he pronounces “feminazi”) movement was designed only to give unattractive women a position in our society.  And yet, Franken reveals that Rush has been married three times.  His last wife he supposedly met through e-mail.  And Rush, who hates all government programs designed to help the downtrodden, once collected unemployment insurance.

     Franken ends up labelling Limbaugh the world’s biggest hypocrite.

     But other Presidents have had their critics.  For example, Franklin Roosevelt had Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in Detroit, Michigan.  Father Coughlin vented his bitter opposition to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs through a radio show which, like Rush, quickly caught on and was heard by millions.  A self-proclaimed champion of the poor, Coughlin believed that FDR was doing too little for the disadvantaged.

     In the 1936 election, which Roosevelt won by a landslide, Coughlin helped form the Union Party and support its candidate for President, William Lemke, who received about 2% of the popular vote.  Through his radio show and magazine, Social Justice, the radio priest bitterly denounced Roosevelt.  In fact, the accusations went so far that, just prior to the vote, Coughlin received a severe criticism from the Italian newspaper, the “Obsservatore Romano”, which usually reflected the Vatican’s opinion.

     “Father Coughlin had violated proprieties in his harsh attacks on President Roosevelt’s efforts to aid the poor.”

     On November 7, 1936, just days after the election Father Coughlin said good-bye to his radio audience, stating that his Union party was thoroughly discredited by the recent election.  “The Union is not dead; it merely sleeps,” he said.  From now on his Union Party would adopt a “policy of silence”.  But his extremist views continued in his magazine, going so far as to accuse Jews and Communists for the nation’s problems.

     Father Charles Coughlin continued as a priest, retiring in 1966, and passing away on October 27, 1979.  Today, he remains a footnote in history books as one of FDR’s opponents, known and remembered by only a few, which is probably more lasting notoriety than Rush Limbaugh will ever have.

     Who is Rush Limbaugh?  Who is Father Charles Coughlin?  In sixty years the answers will be the same, “I don’t know.  I never heard of them.” 

NIKITA KHRUSHCEV and the UNITED NATIONS

 by William H. Benson

October 22, 1998

     United Nations Day is Saturday, October 24.  My awareness of a meeting place in New York City for representatives from all the world’s nations dawned on October 12, 1960 when I (stuck in the first grade) was told how the Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had taken off his right shoe and pounded the table.  “Because he was mad,” was the answer I got to the question, “Why?”

     Later, I learned that what had enraged him was a speech by a Phillippine diplomat who accused the Soviet Union of depriving the Eastern European nations of “political and civil rights”, warning that they would be soon “swallowed up by the Soviet Union.”  Then later, Khrushchev banged his fist when the Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold spoke up, and finally he topped things off by shouting at the dignified British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

     The American public, the journalists, and even the comedians never forgot this outrageous display of public behavior by the Soviet Union’s leader;  Nikita became the focal point of a lot of jokes.  Gauche, inappropriate, rude, inpolite his behavior was, like arguing with the minister during a sermon on Sunday morning at church.  Adults just do not do such things. 

     Khrushchev was short, red-faced, balding, with a wide smile that revealed gapped teeth.  It was he who had denounced Stalin in a 50-page speech in February 1956 to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party.  Khrushchev admitted the truth finally to the Soviet citizens that Stalin was a brutal, psychologically deranged torturer, who committed atrocious acts of mass murder creating a powerful reign of terror. 

      Then, it was Khrushchev who met his match in Vice-President Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.  At the “model kitchen display” sharp exchages between the two men escalated into an argument over capitalism and communism.  Each seemed unwilling to back down in this verbal confrontation of one-upmanship.

      At one point during his public posturing Khrushchev boasted that “we will bury you.”

      Exactly two years after the shoe-pounding display, in October of 1962 the United Nations found itself in the middle of an eyeball to eyeball showdown between Khrushchev and the 45-year-old U. S. President, John F. Kennedy, over certain missiles on Fidel Castro’s Communistic Cuba.  Khrushchev blinked.  He agreed to a United Nations proposal that the Soviet Union would stop sending missiles to Cuba and ship all the weapons back to the Soviet Union if the U.S. would end its blockade of Cuba.  Once again, the Soviet Union’s citizens felt the stings of this public humiliation.

      (Thirteen months later police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with murdering President Kennedy.  The 24-year-old Oswald once had defected to the Soviet Union and had been active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  Sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s cause and to Communism, he was angered and troubled by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missiles.)

      Exactly two years after the missile crisis, on October 17, 1964, the Kremlin’s bosses kicked Nikita Khrushchev out.  Pravda called his leadership one of “harebrained scheming, immature conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality.”  Seven years later on September 11, 1971, Khrushchev died a nonperson in Moscow and was not permitted a state funeral, far removed from the powerful at the Kremlin as well as at the United Nations, where he had embarrassed himself and his country

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 8, 1998

     On August 2, 1492 the three vessels were ready to sail.  At the Church of St. George every man and boy confessed his sins and received absolution and Communion.  Christopher Columbus, the Captain General from Genoa, Italy, went on board the Santa Maria during the early morning hours of August 3, and at dawn made signal to leave.  The three vessels floated down the Rio Tinto on the morning ebb, bound south and a little west to the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean.

      The same tide on the Rio Tinto that carried the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria also floated ships carrying Jews out of Spain north to the Netherlands or to the east to Turkey.  August 2 was the deadline that Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had issued months before permanently ejecting the Jews from Spain or face immense persecution.

     On September 6 Columbus lifted the anchor on the Canary Islands and gave out the course, “West, nothing to the north, nothing to the south.”  The seas were remarkably calm and the weather peaceful during those days of September.  The men turned to griping after week upon week of nothing but ocean.  Finally, on October 1, the wind increased and the rain fell in torrents, replenishing the sailors’ depleted water casks.

     On October 6 Columbus realized the three vessels had sailed more than 2400 miles, and had they known, they were due north of Puerto Rico.  The next day flocks of bird passed over the ships relieving the monotony, and on the 11th signs of land, branches of trees with green leaves and even flowers became so frequent that the complaining among the men died out.  At 2:00 a.m. on October 12 Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta, saw something like a white cliff shining in the moonlight.  He sang out “Tierra!  Tierra!”

     At dawn they passed the southern point of the island and sought an opening on the west coast through the barrier reef.  By noon they had found the opening, sailed into a shallow bay, and anchored.  The commander went ashore in the long boat and named the island San Salvador, claiming it for the King and Queen of Spain.  Columbus’ story is one of daring and adventure and so we, Americans, 500+ years later recognize October 12.

      The other half of the story is not so noteworthy for Columbus defined the meaning of the word “exploit”, both its positive and negative meanings.  On his return trip to Spain he took with him some of the native Arawak Indians, several of which died enroute.  Those living to see Spain endured the leering stares of the Spanish.

      Columbus returned in 1493 this time to the larger island of Hispaniola equipped with cannons, attack dogs, and guns ready to subdue the Arawaks.  That he did, forcing them initially into heavy labor searching for gold and finally into outright slavery.  When the Arawaks had had enough and revolted, Columbus crushed them.

      Conservative estimates place about three million Arawak Indians on the Carribbean islands just prior to Columbus’s arrival.  By 1516 thanks to a sinister Indian slave policy including the cutting off of hands, noses, and ears as the common form of punishment, only 12,000 remained.  By 1542 fewer than 200 still lived, and by 1555 they were virtually all gone.

     Perhaps it is unfair to judge what Columbus did by 1998’s world standard of what is right and what is wrong.  The world had not decided in 1492 that slavery was unethical and improper.  One commentator described the situation,

     “When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. . . . Perhaps worst of all, when textbooks paint simplistic portraits of a pious, heroic Columbus, they provide feel-good history that bores everyone.”

      The simple truth is that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the ugly truth is that Queen Isabella hounded the Jews out of Spain, and Columbus’s ruthless policy annihilated the Arawak Indians.

50TH BIRTHDAY

by William H. Benson

September 25, 1953

     Eleven years ago on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday George Will wrote that writing his biweekly column for Newsweek over the previous many years had been the thing in his life that he most especially enjoyed; “a real kick,” he called it.  And it was reading that comment that prompted me to make a phone call and ask about writing my own biweekly column.  Now I can say after eleven years that it has been enjoyable, a real kick.

     And now it is my turn to celebrate my fiftieth birthday today, which means of the allotted three score and ten, I have completed two score and ten with another yet to go.  It is a day to reflect.

     In 1977 when George Will was only thirty-six, he admonished that year’s graduating class at San Diego University that they should live with a crick in their neck, figuratively speaking, a crick in their neck from looking backward at what happened and what was thought in the past.”That may not be a heroic posture,” he said, “but it is prudent.  After all most new knowledge is false.”

     I have tried to follow that sage, if not startling, advice when writing this column, for I have looked backward at what was said and written and done in the not too distant past, coming up every two weeks with a crick-in-the neck column.  Harry Truman said that the only thing new in this world is the history you have not yet learned.  I teach history when I write.

     Eleven years ago I wondered if I would eventually run dry, out of things to write about, but now I find myself discarding more ideas than those that I put down on paper.  The Muses have been kind and not yet drifted away to pay attention to someone else.

     Why continue to write a column?  Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, likes to quote Rabbi Tarphon from The Sayings of the Fathers, who said, “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”  That same attitude prods some of us to get up, drive to work, think, and act, and then, when we find the time, write.   

     And then there is the element of surprise, the spice of life.  Like a serendipitious turn, it happens when the words and the ideas fall together, or we meet a new and interesting person with a different story, or we pick up a book with ideas that we have never thought before.  That moment of surprise, or that tingle of anticipation that the surprise will happen, like receiving an unopened birthday present, is one reason why people step out the door and face the day.

     In the Middle English language Geoffrey Chaucer described that sense of surprise in the “Knight’s Tale” in Canterbury Tales:  “It is ful fair a man to bere hym evene, for al day meeteth men at unset steven.”  Translated into modern English, it reads:  “It is a good thing for a man to bear himself with equanimity, for one is constantly keeping appointments one never made.”

     We, the living, are travelers on the road to Canterbury, and we each have a story to tell.  It is a prudent and wise thing to listen to others’ stories, which Chaucer advised, “For truly, joy or comfort is there none to ride along the road dumb as a stone.”  In those dual acts of moving and listening, a person is constantly keeping appointments one never made.  Surprise happens.

     A last reflection.  Some peoples’ stories are very bad, filled with trouble and lies and deceit and treachery–the 673rd episode of a poorly-produced soap opera.  To actually live such a life a person must suffer a series of heart-wrenching experiences, but if that same life is then played out on the stage or on screen or written into a novel, it can make for great entertainment.

     Then, other peoples’ stories are very good and responsible and wholeseome, filled with peace and harmony and love, but they would prove very poor entertainment if seen on a stage or written into a book.  We will defer to the psychologists to answer “how can this be?”

     Today begins another decade of life, my sixth, another segment on that road traveling to Canterbury, listening and finding surprise in other peoples’ stories, and there is a crick in my neck from looking backwards at the past, at the older events and ideas and people.  And I cannot desist from that work, even though I know it will not be completed, for there are many appointments to keep which I have not even made.