STONEHENGE

by William H. Benson

March 25, 1999 

     Another spring is upon us, and with it baseball has arrived.  (Will it be another homerun slugfest this year?)  Green is showing up in the lawns, and the wheat fields already are a bright growing green.  The St. Patrick’s Day parades are behind us, and the Easter parades are just around the corner.  Farmers are working in their fields eager to plant the corn and other spring crops.  Warmer brighter days lighten the winter’s heaviness.  Seasons arrive, and then they leave; their cyclical imprint etched deep upon humankind’s consciousness.

     Last Saturday, the 20th, the vernal equinox arrived.  This is one of the two days each year when the days and nights are of equal length everywhere on the earth.  Last Saturday’s sunrise was at 5:57 a.m., and sunset was at 6:05 p.m., 12 hours and 8 minutes.  People on the North pole, the South pole, the equator, and all points in between had 12 hours of daylight and of night.

     Because the earth tilts 23° 27¢ relative to the plane of the earth’s orbit around the sun, the sun strikes the earth either directly on the equator or above or below it as the earth revolves around the sun.  On the vernal equinox the sun crosses the equator creating equal days and nights.

     Humankind has marked the seasons for millennium.  The attitude that “one day is as good as another” is fine until you want to begin planting the same day every year, and you need to know when that day is. 

     In southern England eighty miles west of London is Stonehenge, a monument of stones built by early Britons beginning as early as 3000 B.C and continuing until 1000 B.C.  Modern archaeologists discovered early on that the stone marker 80 yards east of the megaliths casts a shadow on the altar placed in the center of the stones at dawn on the summer solstice.

     Then, in 1963 the astronomer Gerald S. Hawkins deduced that the monument served as an accurate astronomical calendar.  He first assumed that all of these huge stones had to be placed according to some master plan.  He then discovered that the archways, vistas, heelstone, capstones, and pillars created sighting lines.  But to what?  Placement, he believed, was deliberate to stress viewing.  Bringing in a computer he identified that of the 12 unique sun/moon rise/set points (as of 1500 B.C.), 10 of them were marked by sightings along the stones properly aligned at Stonehenge.  Only two–midsummer moon sets at -29° and at -19°–were not marked.  The sighting lines focused upon the sun and the moon, not to the stars nor the planets.

     Why did ancient man devote so much energy and time to such a difficult project?

     Hawkins offered three answers:  Stonehenge served as a calendar.  It assured the priests of their power.  And, it provided a game for the thoughtful.     

     He wrote: “. . . many people of many different thoughts and cultures came to Stonehenge.  Different rulers, designers, priests, and workmen set their brains and hands to the vast work of alteration, adaptation, change, and creation.  The great monument grew from a simple circle open toward the midsummer sunrise to a rectangle-within-a-circle to a massive and complex cathedral of stones standing in arched circles and horseshoes.”

      Time is the valuable thing of life.  The tools we choose to mark it have varied over the aeons.  Thirty plus blocks of gray sandstone standing 13+ feet above the ground and each weighing 28 tons have been replaced today with daytimers, calendars, charts, tables, scientific instruments, and electronic gadgetry.  The elaborate apparatus tells us its now spring and time to play ball.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by William H. Benson

March 11, 1999 

     On Thursday, March 11, 1302, Romeo married Juliet, according to the English playwright, William Shakespeare.  The newlyweds failed to celebrate even their first anniversary, for in the Prologue to the play, the chorus admits: “A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.”

     Yale University’s authority on Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, wrote recently, “The permanent popularity, now of mythic intensity, of “Romeo and Juliet” is more than justified, since the play is the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature.”

     Juliet, not yet fourteen years old, describes her feelings of love:

     “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.

      My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

      My love as deep: The more I give to thee

      The more I have, for both are infinite.”

     But because of the feuding of their families–the Montagues and the Capulets, the young lovers commit mutual suicide.  In the final scene as the Prince of Verona overlooks the carnage, he ends the play with these words:

      “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.”

     Harold Bloom argues in is his recent book that Shakespeare invented the “human” in literature.  Before him, characters in literature age and die, but they do not change.  “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves.  Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking. . . . The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe.”

     In Elizabethean English he wrote, and his power to enthral and charm audiences/readers has transcended the four centuries since.  His characters, the wordplay, the audacious ideas, comedy, tragedy, history–he could do it all, the best ever.  His fellow collegue, Ben Johnson, wrote: “He was not of an age, but for all time!”

     The Academy Award nominations are out, and on Sunday evening, March 21st, Whoopi Goldberg will host the presentations of the Oscars.  The favorite to win Best Picture that night is the World War II film “Saving Private Ryan”; however, I suspect that the Italian-produced film “Life is Beautiful” may steal that award.

     For Best Original Screenplay critics are betting on “Shakespeare in Love”, last year’s romantic comedy.  The film is about the young playwright William Shakespeare who is struggling with writer’s block (a fallacious idea for someone who actually wrote like a machine).  It feels like “trying to pick a lock with a wet herring,” he says.  He meets an aristocratic English lady, falls passionately in love, and then in the afterglow sits down and writes “Romeo and Juliet”.            

     It seems that Hollywood has discovered and even likes Shakespeare.  “After 400 years of being merely the greatest of all writers, Shakespeare is suddenly an adorable guy and a pop icon.”

     Until Oscar night, “Beware the Ides of March.”  Julius Caesar failed to heed the warning.  Will we make the same mistake?

PERSIAN GULF WAR

by William H. Benson

February 25, 1999 

     Operation Desert Storm’s aerial campaign began in mid-January 1991 and was immediately a success.  Wave after wave of Allied bombers and missiles pounded Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, and other key targets during those first days of the Persian Gulf War.  The ground offensive then began on February 24, 1991, and one hundred hours later on the 27th, President Bush appeared on nationwide television to announce “Kuwait is liberated.  Iraq’s army is defeated.”

      But before leaving Kuwait, Iraqi troops deliberately set fire to Kuwait’s oil wells.  The smoke darkened the sky ugly.  And now eight years later the United Nations, still trying to bring Saddam Hussein to his knees, is caught somewhere between threats and actual bombing.

      Recently, I read General H. Norman Schwartzkopf’s autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero.  He mentions that in addition to overseeing the military operation, he also had to play the role of a diplomat to the Saudi’s on whose sandy soil he and his forces stood.  At 10:00 pm. most evenings he wandered over to discuss certain matters with Prince Khalid.  He wrote, “To my consternation . . . what loomed largest for them was the cultural crisis triggered by the sudden flood of Americans into their kingdom. . . . The touchiest issues almost always involved religion.”

     For example, American women soldiers were seen working in T-shirts and were accused of disrobing in public;  Saudi women never show their arms.  Prince Khalid demanded that Schwartzkopf stop such brazen behavior.  Then, Christmas in 1990 presented a problem, but there was no way that even he, a General, could halt services from being held.  Christmas trees appeared, but Schwartkopf warned his staff that “even the very sight of a cross is very offensive to them. . . . We have to be sensitive to their desires.”

      A report of a wild party involving women dancing and alcohol being served was verified when CNN broadcasted a clip of it.  That evening a bewildered Schwartzkopf had to assure the distraught and excited Prince Khalid that he would investigate this matter and put a stop to it.

      James Michener in almost a kind of naive innocence once wrote, “I have been studying Islam for many years, and I cannot see any valid reason why this religion and Christianity cannot cooperate.” 

      The historian Will Durant had a different viewpoint.  “Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope.  Therefore, his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed.” 

     The rival religions and civilizations, Christianity and Islam, have clashed for centuries, beginning almost from their birth, continuing through the crusades, and into the modern era.  A third faith, Jewish, was then caught between the main combatants and cut by both swords.  The crusades of a millennium ago were in part the European Christians’ attempt to free Palestine, the Holy Land, from the Muslims.  After several centuries, the exhausted Europeans gave up, and a curtain dropped between the West and the East.

     The Persian Gulf War was another crusade and yet, different.  Although the liberation of Kuwait, rather than Palestine (Israel), was the primary objective, Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles were sometimes aimed at Israel.  Schwartkopf, the Christian, and Prince Khalid, the Muslim, hammered out agreements in which the Islamic culture was not polluted but remained pure.  Together, they learned to work together to fight and defeat a wildly aggressive Muslim brother, Saddam Hussein.  That curtain dividing East and West had opened but only for a brief moment.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

by William H. Benson

February 11, 1999 

     We now celebrate Presidents’ Day rather than individually honoring either Abraham Lincoln’s or George Washington’s birthdays, and yet, what they each achieved is sufficient reason for pausing for at least a day and reflecting.  Lincoln, the giant among the Presidents, casts a long shadow which still falls across the land called America and upon all Americans.  His birthday, February 12, 1809, is tomorrow.  We pause, and we reflect.

      Lincoln’s law partner in Springfield, Illinois, Billy Herndon, who knew him best, said, “Mr. Lincoln always told enough of his plans and purposes to induce the belief that he had communicated all, but he reserved enough to have actually communicated nothing. . . . Mr. Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America.”

      Lincoln believed in human rights, in individual dignity, in person liberty, and in civil justice.  His political ideas he derived straight from the Declaration of Independence, from which he often quoted.  A liberal democrat, his genius was in stating familiar ideas in striking and symbolic form.

      But the essential Lincoln cannot be understood apart from his stance toward slavery.  That institution tempered his soul and gave direction to his life.  It was the overriding reality of his time.  There was no escaping it.  It was the American national tragedy, a gigantic anomaly.  It mocked the Declaration of Independence.  Lincoln hated the idea of one man owning another.

      He spoke of the time he took a boat down the Mississippi River into the South.  “There were on board, ten or a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons.  That sight was a continual torment to me, . . . a thing which has the power of making me miserable.”  The cruelties of slavery bruised Lincoln’s tender soul.

      Decades before, Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; his justice cannot sleep forever.”

      Lincoln forced himself to think through the harsh realities of the slavery problem, and by his relentless logic, he arrived at two fundamental ideas.  First, he concluded that slavery threatened American democracy.  Unless it was eradicated, it would end by wrecking freedom all together. “Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.”  A worm in a beautiful apple will eventually rot from within the entire apple.

      Second, he wanted a solution to ending slavery that would not lead to the destruction of the nation.  But, alas, in part because he was elected President in 1860, the Southern states in a fit of passion and frenzy withdrew from the nation and created their own, the Confederacy.  The resulting Civil War, North against South, brother against brother, family against family, gathered up everything ugly and hideous that war can muster up and dumped it squarely upon the American continent.  Lincoln’s nightmare erupted into a reality he was forced to live through.

      But there in the midst of the vicious contest on January 1, 1863, he issued a proclamation.  “Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln . . . , do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States . . . are, and henceforward shall be free.”  He and the federal government declared that slavery was illegal, and he said, “If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”

     “I want every man to have a chance,” he said repeatedly.  The American system of government, he believed, was set up for that very purpose.

      Lincoln’s words and ideas are worth saying again and again.  We pause, and we reflect.

THREE ATHLETES

by William H. Benson

January 28, 1999 

     Three people figured prominently in the news this month: Michael Jordan, John Elway, and, of course, President Bill Clinton.

      About Michael Jordan one radio commentator said, “Arguably he is the greatest basketball player ever.”  But another countered, saying that we should drop the word “arguably”.  “Jordan is the greatest player to ever put on basketball shoes.”  Jordan’s six NBA championship rings eclipses Magic Johnson’s five.  In the final seconds of a close game, everyone knew that the ball would invariably end in Jordan’s hands, and his last second jump shot would win the important, must-win games.  Competitive to the utmost, he was.

      John Elway unofficially played his final game at Mile High Stadium two weeks ago in the AFC championship game, and will probably announce his retirement sometime after the season ends this Sunday.  On that afternoon he and his Broncos will appear in yet another Super Bowl, his fifth, to play the Atlanta Falcons coached by none other than Elway’s nemesis, Dan Reeves.  Starting at the one yard line in the final minutes of a game and then driving 99 yards to win is Elway’s specialty.  Absolutely competitive he is.

     As a political player Bill Clinton has endured constant turnovers, fumbles, interceptions and fouls.  The referees are continually throwing flags, and yet, he is still in the Oval Office and in the White House, delivering a “knockout” State of the Union speech to Congress two weeks ago.  Despite his enemies’ repeated attempts to have him ejected from the game, he has written and added entire new chapters into the playbook of political suvival.  His coaches standing on the sideline have dreamed up and sketched out more plays to gain yardage and score points than even Mike Shanahan.

      What is most amazing is how each side in the impeachment proceedings have grabbed for the rule book, the Constitution, quoting the intentions and thoughts of its writers: James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton.  It is hoped that these people, dead for almost two centuries, and their ideas, still alive, will lead us, the living, through this ugly contest to victory.  Each side appeals to the framers.

       Months ago when a reporter asked President Clinton if he would ever consider resigning, he instantly replied, “No, never.”  His competitive drive approaches that of Jordan and Elway. 

      Talent is a disposition or aptitude of mind or body which “qualifies a person for a certain kind of action.”  No one is born to be great, to break to the top.  Extraordinary mental/physical prowess is not necessarily strong enough to push a person upwards.  What is needed is a start, an opportunity to deepen one’s knowledge.  Michael Jordan was handed a basketball.  John Elway was given a football.  At age 17 Bill Clinton strode onto the White House grounds and shook hands with President Kennedy.

       That “certain kind of action” is denied to many people who have the apptitude;  they were never allowed to play the game.  Forced by either economic, social, or political reasons to do something else, they become disgruntled, discouraged, and end in failure.  To end up at the top where Jordan, Elway, and Clinton reside is the happy result of a combination of many circumstances, an infinite capacity for taking pains.

        Two forecasts I offer: Denver will win by a touchdown in the Super Bowl, and the Senate will not have the needed 2/3’s vote to eject President Clinton.

THE MILLENNIUM

by William H. Benson

January 14, 1999 

     Because the Roman numeral system lacked a zero, Dionysius Exiguus, the sixth century monk who devised our B.C./A.D. division of time, failed to include the year O A.D. in his chronology.  He actually started with year 1 A. D.  As a result, if we insist that all decades must have 10 years and all centuries 100 years and all millennium 1000 years, then 2000 A.D. remains in the second millennium and not the beginning of the third.  According to pure logic, the new century and the new millennium will not begin until January 1, 2001.  Common sensibility dictates otherwise.

     But the same clamor arises every 100 years, and so, who is right?  George Washington died on December 31, 1799.  Did he miss the 19th century by a few hours or 365 days?  Did Arthur C. Clarke get it right with “2001: A Space Odyssey”?  Samuel Sewall, one of the infamous judges at the Salem Witch Trials, hired four trumpeters to herald the “entrance of the 18th century” by sounding a blast on Boston Common right at daybreak on January 1, 1701 and not 1700.

      One hundred years ago a letter to a newspaper editor commented, ” I defy the most bigoted precisian to work up any enthusiasm over the year 1901, when we will already have had twelve months experience of the 1900’s.”  But, the passing of the twentieth century really counts this time around because this is the blockbuster, the passing of the second millennium into the third.

      “The focus on 2000 is basically a fascination with the triple zero and the flipping of the cosmic odometer,” said Jay Gary, an editor of an online newsletter.  “In popular cultrue around the world, 2000 has eclipsed 2001 as a date of significance with the help of modern communications in the media, which have zeroed in on the former.” 

      Someone suggested to Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Paleontology at Harvard, that we should begin the new millennium on January 1, 2000.  Let us assume that “the first decade had only nine years,” he wrote, adding that he considers this to be an elegant solution.  Perhaps.

      He further writes, “Many of our most intense debates, however, are not resolvable by information of any kind, but arise from conflicts in values. . . . Ultimately trivial, but capable of provoking great agitation, and thus the most frustrating of all, they have no answers because they are about words, rather than things, and therefore phenomena of nature have no bearing upon potential solutions.  The century debate lies within this vexatious category.”

      The Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time equates time with space, calling it “space-time”, implying that they are one in the same.  An equally good corelation is between time and life, for time is the valuable thing, that which measures the beginning, ending, and length of our lives.

      In the introduction to Hawking’s book, Carl Sagan wrote, “We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.  We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.  Except for children, few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is.”

      A seventh century monk named Dionysius Exiguus applied a faulty number system to that aspect of physical nature called “time”, and thirteen centuries later we, the living, have a problem.

 My New Year’s Resolution–to devote very little of my time worrying more about that problem.