Tara Westover’s Educated

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2018

I just finished listening to Tara Westover’s riveting memoir, Educated, an account of her years growing up as the youngest of seven children, in a fundamentalist Mormon family in southeastern Idaho, at the base of a mountain, Buck Peak. 

Tara’s dad, Gene, (a pseudonym) ran a junkyard, and her mother earned money as a midwife, but she also concocted a variety of herbs, oils, and tinctures, potions that she believed healed all ailments.

Dad feared the federal government. He buried gasoline tanks, guns, and ammunition in holes that he dug around his house. He told Tara, “When the feds come to Buck Peak, we’ll be ready.” 

Dad feared hospitals and doctors. “You’re worse off going to the hospital,” he would say. As a result, Tara did not receive a birth certificate until years later, but no one remembered her birth date.

In the home, there was no television, no telephone, no pain relievers, and no vaccinations. 

Dad feared the school system. He pulled Tara’s older brothers out of the public school when they were in grade school. He said, “school was a ploy to lead children away from God.” Mom home-schooled the boys for a time, but Dad needed their help in the junkyard. 

By the time Tara came along, mom had dropped all pretense at home-schooling, and as a result, Tara never received any education. No lessons, no math, no essays, no homework, and no tests. There were books: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and sermons by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Tara wrote, “I understand that it was this fact, more than any other, that made my family different. We didn’t go to school.” 

Instead, she worked in the junkyard. For the children, it was dangerous work: amputated fingers, gashes in arms, and horrific burns. There was a car-crusher, and a set of shears that cut angle iron but sent it flying at heads and arms. Then, Dad would throw things. He threw a steel cylinder once that caught Tara in the stomach. Another time, he almost ran her through the car-crusher.

Later, Dad started to build milk-barns and haying sheds for neighbors, and Tara’s job was to crawl around on the roof thirty feet high, and drill screws into corrugated metal sheeting, in the wind.

The worst though was the abuse she endured from her older brother Shawn (another pseudonym). When riled, Shawn would twist Tara’s wrist back, or he would grab her by the hair and slam her face first into the toilet. This happened again and again, and her parents chose not to see their son’s abusive acts directed at their youngest daughter, despite a broken toe, and a snapped wrist.

Tara wrote, “My family had violence in it, especially violence against women. We did not confront the patriarch, the father. It would have been inappropriate for me to challenge his authority.” She also said, “In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.”

When seventeen, Tara was adamant; she would attend college at Brigham Young University, even though her dad warned her, “You are whoring after men’s knowledge and not God’s.”

At BYU, her ignorance was profound. She knew so little of anything. During a lecture she raised her hand and said, “What is the Holocaust?” She knew nothing of slavery, the Civil War, of Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement. Yet, she was bright, intelligent, and she knew how to work. 

Her roommates had to help her find clothes other than the men’s jeans and work shirts she always wore, and they had to give her lessons on washing her hands after using the bathroom, and on washing dishes, rather than letting them stack up in the sink for later. 

Tara did well at BYU, and earned a semester at Cambridge, in England, but her dad threatened not to attend her college graduation, unless she admit that her success was due to her home-schooling.

Tara won a Gates Scholarship to study at Cambridge, and also a fellowship at Harvard. She has since completed a Ph.D. in intellectual history at Cambridge University, where now at the age of 31, she lives and works. Hers is a Horatio Alger story, a remarkable story, most astonishing. 

Of all the memoirs I have read, including Angela’s Ashes, Glass Castles, and Hillbilly Elegy, I think this memoir exceeds them all, in terms of the terror and powerlessness that she must have felt when a young girl. I wonder if any producer would dare to make this book into a movie. It was so painful to listen to the book, that I dare not imagine what it would feel like to watch it on the screen also.

Tara recently said that she identifies with the lyrics to a Bob Marley song, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. No one but ourselves can free our minds.”

MASH

by William H. Benson

February 22, 2018

The Korean War and the draft swept up Richard Hornberger into the U.S. Army in the early 1950’s. A recent graduate of Cornell University Medical School, Hornberger operated on wounded American boys in the the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. A colleague said Hornberger “was a very good surgeon with tremendous sense of humor.”

After he returned to the States, he settled in Waterville, Maine, and established a surgical practice there. He retired in 1988, and then passed away died from leukemia in 1997 at age 73.

Horberger’s single claim to fame was the book that he wrote and published in 1968, MASH: A Novel of Three Doctors, a fictional account of his days in Korea. Only 219-pages long, it appeared on bookshelves in 1968, sold well, but under Hornberger’s pen-name, Richard Hooker. 

Instead of the 8055th, Hornberger changed it to the 4077th, and the three doctors included Captains Duke Forrest, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, and “Trapper” John McIntyre. The three live in a tent that they dub “The Swamp,” that was “hot in the summer and colder than cold in the winter.” 

The three manufacture their own still to ensure a steady supply of alcohol. Then, showing no mercy, they tease the nurses, especially Margaret Houlihan, whom they nickname “Hot Lips,” and they make life miserable for the pompous Major Frank Burns.

One of the characters, “Painless” Waldowski, the 4077th’s dentist, suffers a bout of depression. The three doctors stage a “Last Supper” for Painless. They give him a sleeping pill, rather than a poison pill, and Father Mulcahy performs last rites. The next morning Painless awakes, and reports to Hawkeye that his depression has subsided.

Hornberger made a mistake when he sold the film rights to his book for only a few hundred dollars. “He was so furious that he never signed another copy of his book.” Too late he realized that he should have demanded a percentage of the movie’s revenue.

Robert Altman earned $70,000 for directing the movie, MASH, that appeared in theaters in 1970, the year’s biggest comedy. Donald Sutherland played Hawkeye, Elliot Gould played Trapper John, and Tom Skerritt played Duke Forrest. Sally Kellerman played Hot Lips Houlihan, Robert Duval played Major Frank Burns, and Gary Burghoff played Corporal Radar O’Reilly.

At one point, Altman instructed his son, Michael, to write the lyrics for a song for Painless’s “Last Supper” scene. “It has to be the stupidest song ever,” Altman told his son. In about ten minutes Michael wrote “Suicide is Painless,” and Johnny Mandel added the music. For his ten minutes of work, Michael earned over two million dollars, far more than Robert Altman did for directing it.

Four years later, the producer Larry Gelbart broadcast MASH on television. He picked Alan Alda for Hawkeye, Wayne Rogers for Trapper John, McLean Stevenson for Lt. Col. Henry Blake, and Gary Burghoff for Radar. The show first aired on September 17, 1972, and Gelbart played the movie’s theme song “Suicide is Painless,” at the beginning and ending of the 256 episodes. A very recognizable song.

An estimated 121.6 million viewers watched the final episode, “Goodby, Farewell, and Amen,” that aired on February 28, 1983, thirty-five years ago this month, the most watched television broadcast in American history, until the 2010 Super Bowl surpassed it. In the final scene as the helicopter ascends, the doctors and nurses have arranged a series of white rocks that spells out the words “Good-bye.”

Richard Hornberger liked the movie, but he did not watch the television show much, because he did not like Alan Alda’s portrayal of Hawkeye, whose constant anti-war remarks irked Hornberger.

The book, the movie, and the television episodes reveal dark humor at its best. The reality is tragic. The United States military bombed the northern part of the Korean peninsula back into the Stone Age. This ugly war tore bodies apart, spilled blood, and causes millions of needless deaths, but the three surgeons crack jokes, tease nurses, and humiliate other officers. 

Comedy is comedy, and tragedy is tragedy. The two do not mix well. To insert comedy into tragic events requires imagination. “Comedy is the thinking person’s response to an experience, either good or bad, but tragedy records the reactions of a person with deep feeling to a tragic experience.”

The North Koreans have not forgotten America’s bombs. Their country was leveled, their citizens massacred. The Korean War killed an estimated five million people, and of those almost three million were civilians, “about ten percent of Korea’s prewar population.” For the Korean survivors the war was an apocalypse. It is doubtful that many who lived through those dark days would laugh at MASH, either the book, the movie, or the television show. 

Whistleblowers

by William H. Benson

February 8, 2018

In December of 1773, near the time of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin admitted that he had passed on to the Boston Gazette twenty letters that the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchison had written, calling for an “abridgment of the colonists’ rights.” In so doing, Franklin acted as a whistleblower, before the word was a word, or our country was a country.

In 1777, during the American Revolutionary War, ten naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, signed a petition that they addressed to the Continental Congress that stated the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy, Ezek Hopkins “treated British prisoners of war in the most inhuman and barbarous manner.”

On July 30, 1778, Congress responded to Shaw and Marven’s petition by passing a resolution that stated, “it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, to give the earliest information to Congress of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

This was the United States’ first attempt to protect those who reveal to the public damaging information. July 30 is now marked as National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

In the last fifty years, we have witnessed a number of “whistleblowers,” a word that the activist Ralph Nader may have coined. As in a basketball game, the referee blows the whistle to call a foul.

On April 25, 1970, Frank Serpico, a New York City policeman, contributed to the New York Times reports that stated that the New York City Police Department was rife with corruption and fraud.

Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND corporation employee, copied 7000 pages of top secret documents when he worked at the Pentagon. The documents indicated that an early date—in the Kennedy and Johnson years—Pentagon officials and the presidents suspected that the U.S. military could not win the war in Vietnam, even though they continued to assure the American public that they could.

In mid-June, 1971, Ellsberg delivered the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Some historians consider W. Mark Felt—the former FBI agent and informant known as “Deep Throat” during the Watergate crisis—as the most famous of all whistleblowers. For months in 1973 and 1974, Felt passed on secret information about President Nixon’s coverup of the burglary at the Watergate Hotel to Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters at the Washington Post.

Karen Silkwood, an employee at an Oklahoma nuclear facility, raised concerns about the health and safety of the employees who worked with plutonium. Witnesses stated that the documents that she had lifted from her employer lay in a binder on the seat beside her the day she was killed when another driver rear-ended her, November 13, 1974. The documents were never found.

Harry Markopolos alerted authorities three times—in 2000, 2001, and 2005—about Bernard Madoff’s scheme, but they did nothing. Markopolos entitled his book, No One Would Listen.

On April 10, 2010, Bradley Manning, a U. S. Army soldier in Iraq, working as an intelligence analyst, stole from the military and then downloaded to WikiLeaks 734,119 diplomatic cables and Army reports. He was sentenced to 35 years at Fort Leavenworth, but served only 7, after Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence for time served.

In June of 2013, Edward Snowden stole 1.7 million classified documents from the National Security Agency that revealed the Federal government’s continuing surveillance, through the computer and internet, of American citizens. Fearing an imminent arrest, Snowden fled to Russia, where officials have granted him asylum ever since.

On a TED talk in 2014, remote from Russia via computer, Snowden made a series of startling statements. “NSA breaks privacy rules thousands of times per year.” “Your rights matter because you never know when you are going to need them.” “You have a right to privacy.”

In 2015, an anonymous individual, who calls him or herself John Doe, passed on to a German newspaper, 11.5 million documents taken from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian legal firm that specializes in setting up shell corporations in the British Virgin Islands to hide money from legal authorities. This treasure of documents revealed how the rich and powerful shelter their secrets.

Other journalists from across the globe received private invitations to look at the Panamanian Papers, and then on April 3, 2016, together the 100 plus journalists published their stories.

Whistleblowers face a variety of fates. Some are shot. Some are killed. Some are imprisoned. Some are not believed. Some remain anonymous. Some seek asylum elsewhere. Some suffer no consequences for their actions. One thing they all share though is moral strength and bravery. Edward Snowden said it best, “I am comfortable with the decision I made.”

Norway

by William H. Benson

January 25, 2018

On January 11, President Trump met with Senators in the Oval Office to discuss immigration. 
At one point a Senator mentioned that the U.S. should also “admit people from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African nations,” a suggestion that enraged the President.

“Why,” he asked, in caustic and unprintable terms, “are we having all these people from those countries come here? It would be better to get immigrants from places like Norway.”

Norway? 

In a vindictive act aimed at the President, Dick Durbin, a Democratic Senator, leaked the President’s comment to the press. Commentators jumped with both feet onto the President, and not for the first time they pinned the label “racist” on him.

World leaders condemned his words. Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moïse, said that he was “deeply shocked” by Trump’s “abhorrent and obnoxious” comment. Fifty four African nations said they were “extremely appalled at, and strongly condemn, the outrageous, racist, and xenophobic remarks.” 

Donald Trump is not the first U. S. president to rank a certain country’s people as desirable for immigration to the U.S., and another’s as undesirable.

In Woodrow Wilson’s fifth and final volume of his A History of the American People, published in 1901, he wrote that in the eighteenth century, “men of sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland.”

These new immigrants, Wilson wrote, “had neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence,” and that these southern and eastern European countries “were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”

Then, a writer at Norway’s newspaper, Aftenposten, pointed out the ironic fact that beginning two hundred years ago, Norway sent its poor to the U.S., and that “fully one-third of Norway’s population left to start new lives in America,” and that these were “poor, toothless fishermen, and peasants.” 

Those words describe my paternal great-grandparents, Ben and Martha (Larsen) Berentsen, who came to America in 1888, he from Tromso, and she from Oslo. They farmed first at Sioux Rapids, Iowa; then at Niobrara, Nebraska; and then in 1910, they moved for a final time to northeast Colorado, where they built a sod house and barely survived, becoming “poor, toothless peasants” here. 

A hundred plus years and four generations later, their heirs have advanced above peasant status.

Two hundred years ago, “Norway might have been on the president’s so-called manure pile,” writes Andrew Dam, a Washington Post columnist, because “the Norwegians arrived in the U.S. with the lowest earning potential of any national group, due to their rural work in farming, fishing and logging.” 

Now the Norwegians are idealized, but they were not the “fast-assimilating group” that others would want you to believe. Assimilation for any group, Dam writes, is a “difficult and gradual process.”

Dam further writes, “Norwegian Americans are doing well, but perhaps not as well as those in Norway.” Today, the Norwegians are rich, because of their North Sea oil. As a result, Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund of any country in the world, equal to one trillion in U.S. dollars. 

Also, Norway ranks first on the United Nations’s 2017 World Happiness Report, based on “real GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption,” plus the best in “education, health care, and good governance.” 

Is it any wonder that only 502 Norwegians chose to migrate to the U.S. in 2016? “Sorry, Mr. Trump,” the Norwegians might say, “we pass. We prefer our own country.”

Here is another ironic fact that few have dared to point out. Donald Trump’s current wife, his third, Melania, is an immigrant from Slovenia, a country in south and east Europe, the same region that Woodrow Wilson said its people lacked skill, energy, initiative, or quick intelligence. 

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist, said that “Melania came to the U.S. on a visitor visa and then earned money as a model, before she was authorized to work,” the same legal loophole that President Trump wants to stop.

The ambitious, wherever they are born, “self-select” themselves. They have a burning desire to improve their own lives and their children’s. They want to escape vicious warlords and corrupt politicians. They want to move to a country, like the U.S., where they too can experience the American miracle. Who dares to fault them for that?

Bad Weather

by Bill Benson 

January 11, 2018

     People on the West Coast endure droughts and forest fires. People on the Northeast Coast endure minus degree temperatures and a foot of snow. People in the Southeast endure the ferocious winds, rain, and flooding that hurricanes bring. People who live in Tornado Alley—Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri—suffer from those spinning cyclones’ destruction.

     Here on the Great Plains, in fly-over country, we suffer from droughts, prairie fires, hailstorms, grasshoppers, and winter blizzards.

    The drought of the century occurred on the Great Plains in the early thirties. Beginning in the summer of 1931, the rains failed to appear, and the same continued year after year. Weather officials consider the year 1934, the driest ever. One official said, “Things really dried out.”

     Federal legislation had encouraged thousands of inexperienced farmers to migrate to the Great Plains, from Texas, north to the Dakotas. Once there, they plowed up the grass. Without rainfall, the wheat and corn crops failed, and without the native grass or a cover crop, high winds would pick up the bare top soil, and form billowing clouds of dust, hundreds of miles wide and thousands of feet high.

Suddenly, without warning, a dust cloud would appear, obscure the sun, and roll forward for miles. 

     The worst dust storm occurred on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935. This dust blizzard devastated southeast Colorado, southwest Kansas, and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, and carried away thousands of tons of topsoil. An Associated Press reporter referred to it as “life in the dust bowl of the continent.” Since then, people call the dirty thirties the Dust Bowl.

     Prairie fires ignite during high wind conditions, often in March. They need a single spark and dry grass. Once started, the wind carries the fire forward. It races ahead of itself in a flash, jumps over roads, engulfs homes, surrounds and traps cattle and horses, and leaves a trail of destruction behind it, before the fire fighters can head it off and stop it.

     Hailstorm season on the Great Plains occurs in June, July, and August. The combined action of high wind and hailstones will beat down wheat, corn, millet, and bean crops. A hailstorm will break window glass in homes and cars, and pock-mark and strip bare roofs and walls. Few who experience a hailstorm can ever forget the noise that the wind and the hailstones produce when battering a house. 

     Although rare in recent years, grasshopper infestations have occurred on the Great Plains in the past. Because certain grasshopper species can fly and are ravenous, they will join together, take to the air, and form clouds that will fall upon anything colored green. People today cannot imagine this plague.

     The worst year for grasshoppers happened in 1874. A Kansas farmer said that year, “I lost sixty acres of wheat, eaten into the ground in less than an hour. I thought I had seen locusts two years ago, but I was mistaken.” Another said, “Our garden is perfectly cleared; beans, cabbages, tomatoes, melons, everything utterly gone. The vines to the potatoes are gone.”

     The Great Plains’s worst winter blizzard during the last century began on Sunday afternoon, January 2, 1949, sixty-nine years ago this month. “Temperatures dropped from the mid-30’s in the forenoon to 10 below zero or colder by evening. Winds gusted to 66 miles per hour, and snow blew everywhere.” 

     The snow fell for three days. It covered the ground, but the high winds would drift it into gigantic mounds ten, fifteen, and twenty, or even fifty feet tall. All transportation on railroads and highways and roads ceased for days. Vehicles, including snow plows, were buried under huge layers of snow. 

     On Wednesday, January 5, the snow stopped, the sky cleared, the sun appeared, and people began to try to dig out. Across southeast Wyoming, northern Colorado, western South Dakota, and western Nebraska, hundreds of people were stranded. The official death toll in the region came in at 76. 

     The cattle faced starvation. Pilots loaded bales of hay into their planes and dropped them near their cattle, but that was insufficient. As a result, tens of thousands cattle died in the ’49 blizzard.

     Few people, if any, alive then had seen a blizzard of this dimension, this severity, this massive, and none since. Other significant blizzards occurred in March of 1977, and on Christmas Eve of 1982.

     Which is worst? A drought, a dust storm, a prairie fire, a hailstorm, a grasshopper invasion, a tornado, or a winter blizzard? None are expected and none are pleasant. I say drought is the worst. It is agonizing to plant crops and then watch them burn up. A drought lasts the longest.

     We live as human beings on planet Earth, on the Great Plains, where Mother Nature rules, and where everyday she brings you and I a surprise, not always pleasant.

Odysseus and Paul

by William H. Benson

December 28, 2017

“Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy.” These are Homer’s words, and they open The Odyssey, his poem from the sixth or century B.C.E., the first great adventure story in the Western Canon.

Emily Wilson, a classical scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, became the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey, when she published her book last month. Like the men before her, she chose to translate the poem in iambic pentameter—an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, and five of them per line—rather than in Homer’s more difficult rhythm, dactylic hexameter.

Critics are praising Wilson’s translation. One said, “Never have I been so aware at once of the beauty of the poetry, the physicality of Homer’s world, and the moral ambiguity of those who inhabit it.” I agree. Emily uses simpler, less classical words, an easier-to-read style, and the story comes alive. 

When a small child seated in a church pew, I studied the colorful maps I found at the back of the Bible. I noticed three lines—one in blue, one in red, and one in green—that traced Paul’s three missionary journeys around Asia Minor, the Aegean Sea, and Greece; and also a black line that traced his fourth trip, a one-way journey from Palestine to Rome.

Then, when in junior high school, an English teacher introduced our class to The Odyssey and suggested that we read a juvenile version. I did, and in that version I glanced at the map of Odysseus’s travels. It struck me then that Odysseus’s and Paul’s journeys more or less approximated each other. The two men traveled around the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas.

There are obvious differences. Odysseus is a fictional character that Homer created. His story includes men and women involved in wars, bloody battles, struggling marriages, while the gods and goddesses observe them and try to interfere. Paul though wrote letters to the Christian believers in the churches that sprang up at Corinth, Philippi, Thessaloniki, Ephesus, Galatia, and Rome. 

Also, Homer wrote in an “epic literary dialect’ of the ancient Greek language, between 600 and 800 B.C.E., but Paul spoke and wrote in first century Koine Greek, the Greek’s common language. 

Homer’s fictional character, Odysseus, longed to return to his home in Ithaca, back to his wife Penelope, and to his son Telemachus, after a twenty-year absence because of the ten-year war at Troy and another decade of misadventures with gods, goddesses, and monsters.

Athena, a Greek goddess, sees Odysseus’s trials and his longing for home, and she pleads his case before Zeus, who grants Athena permission to assist Odysseus. 

Paul though was an actual person, a missionary, a traveling evangelist, who was overcome with a fierce determination to spread the Christian faith across the Greek-speaking world around the Mediterranean Sea. We know the mind of Paul because he wrote thirteen, or perhaps fourteen, letters to the Christian churches, and a very kind soul decided to save those letters for posterity.

Paul faced enormous opposition, first from a Greek and Roman world devoted to Homer’s gods and goddesses. The Greeks built temples dedicated to their gods. At Corinth there was the temple to Apollo, at Cyrene there was the temple to Zeus, but Paul hated the Greeks’ idolatry.

When at Athens, Paul explained to the Athenians that he believed in their Unknown God, the one that the Athenians knew must exist, but they did not know his name.

In addition, the Jewish leaders in the synagogues were determined to crush Paul’s message, that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah. In Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders had the Romans arrest Paul and ship him to Rome for trial and most likely an execution.

Odysseus and Paul were indeed “complicated” men.

Neither the Greeks, or the Romans, or the Jewish leaders knew then, in the first century, that Western Civilization would adopt Paul’s Christianity in another couple of centuries, and that Zeus and Athena would find themselves tossed into the dustbin of history, ignored and no longer believed.

Today scholars at universities study mythology, translate Homer’s Odyssey, and teach his poetic techniques, but no scholar believes in the Greek gods and goddesses. Yet, Christians in the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches still read Paul’s letters and believe his theology.

Travelers today can sign up for a Mediterranean cruise that follows either Odysseus’s or Paul’s travels, depending upon their allegiance, whether to classical or theological scholarship. 

“Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.” So Emily Wilson translates Homer’s immortal words.