The Bloody American Revolution

by William H. Benson

June 15, 2017

     On the morning of June 17, 1775, in Boston, British army officers stared up in amazement across the Charles River to Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill, north of Charlestown. “The night before, Charlestown peninsula had been a green, unpeopled knob. Now it swarmed with men.” During the night, New England’s colonial militia had dug into the two hills and were ready to fight.

     The British general, Thomas Gage, chose force, a frontal attack “to storm the rebel entrenchments,” so that all of Boston would witness in action England’s army, Europe’s most powerful.

      That hot afternoon, General William Howe and three thousand British regulars crossed the Charles River and landed on the peninsula. Howe addressed his Redcoats, “You must drive these farmers from the hill or it will be impossible for us to remain in Boston.”

     With Howe in front, the Redcoats advanced up Breed’s Hill, until they were within fifty yards of the rebels. Then, “A hail of buck-shot from ancient hunting guns struck the attackers.” The British fell back to the river, reformed their lines, and advanced up the hill a second time. Again, the rebels fired, and the Redcoats fell back. A third time they reformed their lines, and climbed the hill. By then, the rebels had run out of ammunition and were forced to retreat from Breed’s Hill.

     A century and a half later, Winston Churchill wrote, “The rebels had become heroes. They had stood up to trained troops. The British had captured the hill, but the Americans had won the glory. On both sides of the Atlantic, men perceived that a mortal struggle impended.”

     The casualties appalled everyone: 226 British soldiers and officers killed, 828 wounded; and 115 colonists killed, 305 wounded. On a single afternoon. “John Adams’s friend, Joseph Warren, was shot through the face, his body horribly mutilated by British bayonets.” “Throughout that night carriages and chaises bore the English casualties into Boston.”

     One historian said, “Something intangible died in the British command on that June afternoon. No officer who witnessed the slaughter could ever get the memory out it out of his mind.”

     A year passed. On June 28, 1776, in South Carolina’s harbor at Charleston, ten British warships and thirty transports, all commanded by Sir Henry Clinton, launched an attack on the colonists, who were positioned behind earthworks on the beach. The unhurried colonists aimed their cannon balls at one ship after another, and when ammunition ran low, the colonists rushed in with fresh supplies.

     The British returned fire, but their shots slammed into the earthworks. Soon, the ships’ “hulls showed ragged gaps; masts splintered and crashed overboard; decks were swept by cannon balls and small-arms fire; gun crews and their officers were struck down at their posts.”

     One officer on the H.M.S. Bristol said, “No slaughterhouse could present so bad a sight with blood and entrails lying about, as did our ship.”

     Breed’s Hill in Boston and Charleston harbor in South Carolina sobered the British. They realized that the rag-tag militia, the so-called “farmers” that they had scorned, had the will and means to fight.

     Holger Hoock, the British historian at the University of Pittsburgh, published last month his book, “Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth.” In it, he focused on the carnage, violence, and “blood-soaked fields” that the American Revolutionary War unleashed. Breed’s Hill and Charleston’s harbor were not unusual, according to Hoock, who recounts numerous other “Narratives of atrocity.”

     King George III and his troops believed that Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and the others were not American patriots, but Englishmen who had committed treason. As a result, “Captured rebels were not treated as prisoners of war, whose care was governed by established international norms, but rather as traitors ‘destined to the cord,’” and a hanging.

     Benjamin Franklin said, “We must indeed all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.”

     The Patriots drove out the Loyalists, who lost their farms, houses, and businesses, and were forced to flee to Canada. The rebellion divided communities and families. For example, Benjamin Franklin never forgave his Loyalist son, William Franklin. The two were estranged, their relations embittered.

     By Ben’s will, he left William some land in Nova Scotia and his books and papers, and said, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavo[u]red to deprive me of.”

     The American Revolutionary War. The Patriots shed their bled and died, and they seized Loyalists’ property. It was a chaotic, frenzied time. It was an all-out war, with no room for neutrality. The Patriots fought this bloody war for the right to govern and tax themselves, to create a new nation, and to declare their independence.

George Orwell

by William H. Benson

June 1, 2017

     On June 8, 1949, the English author George Orwell published his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His book continues to startle and warn readers of the dangers of totalitarian governments, and it also identifies what a society will lose once the tyrant denounces intellectual liberty.

     Orwell’s main character is Winston Smith, who works in the Ministry of Truth, where he revises the historical records to ensure that the past conforms to Big Brother’s ever-changing set of false statistics. Winston also deletes all references to “unpersons,” those that the Party has “vaporized” or eliminated. The victim has not only disappeared, he or she never existed.

     Orwell attached an Appendix to the novel, and in it he explained “Newspeak,” the Inner Party’s attempt to control and limit people’s language. The Party divided language into three vocabularies. The “A” words included those “needed for the business of everyday life, for eating, drinking, and working.”

     The “B” words were compounded words, like “goodthink,” “crimethink,” “doublethink,” “oldthink, and “oldspeak.” Each was a shorthand version of a former idea. For example, Orwell writes, “concepts of liberty and equality were contained in the single word crimethink, and concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink.”

     “Words such as honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and in covering them abolished them. Greater precision would have been dangerous.”

     The “C” words “consisted of scientific and technical terms.”

     By “Newspeak” and its three vocabularies, the Inner Party dumbed-down people’s skill with language. “The expression of unorthodox opinions was well-nigh impossible. It would have been possible to say, ‘Big Brother is ungood,’ but the necessary words beyond that were no longer available. Its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid.”

     Big Brother achieved total control by changing historical records, and by diminishing language.

     In Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” he points out how our language has declined. He provides five short quotes, and then says that “two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English, and of any political writing.”  

     Bureaucrats write now by “gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” For example, a party official might say, “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that,” rather than say, “I think.”

     Orwell writes that the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” “Political writing is bad writing.” If it is good writing, then “the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line.’ Orthodoxy seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”

     In his essay, “Prevention of Literature,” also published in 1946, Orwell argues that the bureaucrats who attack intellectual liberty “always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.” In other words, they see the free-thinker as a single rebel, a heretic, without party affiliation, who needs his or her thinking corrected, and then brought back into the fold. “The issue of truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.”

     How does a rebel vanquish a Big Brother, a tyrant, a dictator, an Inner Party? Orwell says that it begins with language, with intellectual liberty, and courage. He quotes a Revivalist hymn: “Dare to be a Daniel. Dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm. Dare to make it known.”

     The world’s Big Brothers need scientists, lawyers, statisticians, economists, officious clerks, middle managers, generals, lieutenants, and foot soldiers. They may even need easily-bent journalists willing to write the party’s line, but they do not need writers who recognize the truth, and who use Anglo-Saxon words to describe the tyrant’s actions. “He did this.” “She said that.” “This is what I saw.”

     Tyrants do not need historians who base their histories upon facts, upon credible evidence, on eye witness accounts, on testimonies, and on impartial written documents. The historian is like the little child who tells true tales of what happened to whoever will listen, and who dares to open the closet door and point at the skeletons dangling in the closet.

     The Inner Party scared people with the words, “Big Brother is watching you,” but Winston Smith, alone in his dingy apartment, wrote in his diary the “crimethought” words, “Down with Big Brother.”

     June 6, 1944, D-Day, the day the Allies began their assault upon Europe’s Axis powers.

To the Graduates

by William H. Benson

May 18, 2017

     On August 10, 1979, there appeared in the New York Times, Woody Allen’s article, “My Speech to the Graduates.” He began, “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Here we see on full display Woody Allen’s sense of humor.

     The comedian’s article is a parody of the standard commencement speech. He refuses to repeat the oft-repeated platitudes: “Don’t be afraid to fail.” “Remember that you are the future.” “Always appreciate your parents.” “Enjoy this time in your life.” “Follow your dreams.” “Never stop learning.”

     Instead, he adopts a tongue-in-cheek approach. He says, “We realize that science has failed us.” “Religion too has unfortunately let us down.” “The trouble is, our leaders have not adequately prepared us for a mechanized society,” and, “Instead of facing these challenges, we turn instead to distractions.” Although his words sound serious, his mood is light and funny, as he turns each cliché on its head.

     Today, the most overused word in the English language is “perfect.” We hear the words often, “That is perfect!” Yet, except for perhaps calculus, most things in life are not perfect.

     Raising kids, teaching kids, passing laws, winning the Super Bowl, taking our case to court, winning a Presidential election, declaring and conducting a war, and forging an independent life are all messy affairs. Nothing about any of them is perfect. It is haphazard, slipshod, go-along in order to get-along. Life is more messy than perfect.

     To the graduate, I say, surrender “perfect,” and instead adopt a “try to achieve” approach.”

     You may have heard it said, “Strengthen your emotional intelligence: your resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability.” Those are big words, but how do you do that? One way is to try a really hard thing, just for a short time.

     Try cold-call selling at the door or on the telephone. Work in a slaughter house. Ask to give a speech. Study a hard foreign language, like Japanese. Take an evening class in trigonometry. Write a thousand-word essay.  No doubt you will stumble and fail, but you will discover inside of you untapped and unknown reservoirs of strength, energy, and will power that will astonish you and your friends.

     Also, try to find smart people at work, at play, at home, and talk with them. But how can you know if someone is smart? Smart people welcome others, they make people around them feel great, and they accomplish the impossible.

     The fictional Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” He meant that if a person does a series of stupid things, he or she is stupid, no matter his or her intelligence quotient. Consider Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. In his early twenties, he achieved a PhD in mathematics, but then he decided to mail bombs to unsuspecting people. Not very smart.

     Ignorant people are so self-absorbed that they do not know the effect they have upon other people. They play cruel tricks, manipulate, dominate, and stun others by their merciless actions. Avoid those who make you feel awful inside. A quote I read, “On occasion, we have to see the good in ‘good-bye.’”

     Last week in the New York Times, the British novelist Penelope Lively said, “I have six grandchildren, in their early twenties, and I look at them now and think they’re making the sort of decisions that are going to determine the rest of their lives. It’s quite alarming.”

     She is correct, but people also can take control of their life at any age and redirect it to where they want it to go, in order to try and achieve something grand, whether in their forties, sixties, or eighties. If, in your twenties, you made a decision that you now regret, I say, try to achieve something else. 

     Also, limit your choices. Too many, and we feel overwhelmed. Too few, and we feel slighted.

     One psychologist said, “We are biologically unprepared for the number of choices we face in the modern world. People worry that once they make a choice, they should have chosen a different one. Repeated tests have shown that people are more satisfied when they have less choices, even when the quality is not as good.”    

     Life is less than perfect. Often it is messy. But it is our life, and it is a work-in-progress.

     Woody Allen concluded his speech to the graduates. “Summing it up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get home by six o’clock.”

     To the graduates of 2017, congratulations. Well done. You are now free to try to achieve something else.

Germany Reunited

by William H. Benson

May 4, 2017

      The Iron Curtain split Europe into two parts: the free countries to the west, and the Soviet-controlled bloc to the east. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill stated in blunt words the case that, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.” Two Germany’s, Western and Eastern; and two Berlin’s, West and East.

     Because West Berlin was situated inside East Germany, and accessible by train from West Germany, it was a free island, inside Communist, Soviet-dominated East Germany. Between the end of World War II, in 1945, until 1961, 3.5 million young and well-educated East Germans poured into West Berlin, and from there, they boarded the train that carried them to a free West Germany.

     That escape route ended in August 1961, when East German and Soviet workers constructed an imposing concrete wall that encircled West Berlin. It stood 3.5 meters high, ran for 156 kilometers, and guard patrolled the wall from 300 watchtowers and 50 bunkers. Guards shot at all those who attempted  to cross the wall. For forty-four years the Berlin Wall, that symbol of oppression, stood tall and mighty.

     The first fissure in the Iron Curtain appeared on May 2, 1989, when Hungary’s officials began to dismantle the barbed-wire fence that separated Communist Hungary from free Austria. On August 19, 1989, Hungary’s officials began to allow the few East Germans who resided in Hungary to pass also into Austria. Over the next few months, 13,000 East Germans escaped to the west via the Hungary / Austria border. “Then the tide was unstoppable.”

    Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, that it was in Hungary where “the first stone was removed from the Berlin Wall.” It is now called “Der Erste Riss in der Mauer,” or “The First Crack in the Wall.”

     On November 9, 1989, guards opened the Berlin Wall’s Brandenburg Gate and allowed East Berlin’s citizens to cross into West Berlin. On June 13, 1990, officials began to dismantle the wall, and on October 3, 1990, East and West Germany reunited. The days of Soviet control over Germany ended.

     The exodus out of East Germany alarmed its officials. A writer for the Economist stated the situation, “Nearly 30 years after unification the region still suffers the aftershock from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when millions—mostly young, mostly women—fled for the west.” Those young women chose freedom and opportunity in the west, rather than babies and motherhood at home.

     Some 1.7 million former East German citizens, or 12% of the East’s population, chose to flee to the West in those first months, and demographers predict that eastern Germany’s population will continue to slide throughout this century. “Those women who remained in the former East Germany had record-low birth rates.” By 1994, the east’s total fertility rate fell to .772, “far below the natural replacement rate of 2.1.”

    The forecasts appear grim. Social scientists predict that, “The east’s population will shrink from 12.5 million in 2016 to 8.7 million by 2060.” Frank Swiaczny from the Federal Institute for Population Research in Wiesbaden said, “Kids not born in the 90’s, also didn’t have kids in the 2010’s. It’s the echo of the echo.” The schools suffer. “Two-thirds of kindergartens and over half the schools in the east have closed since 1990.”

     Mayors, town councils, and school boards across eastern Germany face a difficulty: a lack of children in the schools, and yet an overabundance of senior citizens. As a result, care for the elderly has boomed in Germany’s eastern section. Nursing homes are “desperate for more geriatricians, nurses, and trainees.” It is a dilemma: “when does a community turn its school into a care home?”

     Care unit officials refuse though to rely upon recent immigrants from Syria or Afghanistan, due to “educational, religious, and ethical barriers for care jobs.” Germany struggles with the second highest number of migrants worldwide, second only to the United States. At least sixteen million immigrants reside in Germany, but 96.1% of those reside in Germany’s western sections. If a recent immigrant arrives first in Germany’s eastern region, “those who do have the right papers leave quickly.”

     Each year on the eve of April 30, Germans in both east and west celebrate Walpurgisnacht. Local folklore believes that on that night witches meet on Brocken Peak in Germany’s Harz Mountains. Children dress up in witch and devil costumes, and at midnight, a fireworks display drives away the witches and welcomes in May Day.

     The German-speaking people define resilience. Of all peoples, they have suffered the very worst: defeat in two World Wars, the terrors of a Nazi Germany, a Holocaust, a Cold War, an Iron Curtain, and a concrete Berlin Wall. Their current difficulties—a massive influx of Syrian immigrants and a declining population in the east—appear less than significant. Whether split or unified, Germans come together each year on the eve of April 30 to remember Walpurgisnacht.

It Happened in April

by William H. Benson

April 20, 2017

     Tragic events happen in April. For example, Confederate cannons fired on Union soldiers at Fort Sumter in April 1861, and the American Civil war began. Four years later, also in April, an assassin’s bullet killed President Abraham Lincoln.

     In April 1906, an earthquake struck San Francisco and ignited a fire that burnt 28,000 buildings in a 520-block area, and nearly 3,000 residents lost their lives.

     In April 1912, the Titanic struck an iceberg and more than 1,500 passengers drowned.

     Seventy-five years ago, in April 1942, some 5,200 Americans and far more Filipinos lost their lives in the Japanese soldiers’ death march across Bataan.

     The Warsaw ghetto uprising began in April 1943, and when it ended weeks later, German Nazi forces had killed some 13,000 Jewish men, women, and children, who had resisted deportation.

    At Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, in April 1961, a fiasco unravelled, and another assassin’s bullet killed Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968.

     The North Vietnamese Communists ran over Saigon in April 1975, and forced the last Americans to flee the country, via a helicopter atop the American Embassy. That same month Pol Pot’s vicious Khmer Rouge party seized the reins of Cambodia’s government and instituted mass murder as a state policy. The Khmer Rouge killed somewhere between one and three million Cambodian people.

     The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl imploded in April 1986.

     Because the jury at a trial in April 1992 had failed to convict the four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, rioters ran wild on Los Angeles streets, where they looted and set ablaze countless numbers of businesses.          

     On April 19, 1993, Federal government authorities fired tear gas canisters into Mt. Carmel, the Branch Davidian’s compound near Waco, Texas. A fire broke out, and seventy-six men, women, and children died that day. “The nine people who survived the fire cannot say with any certainty how the fatal blaze started. None of them saw it begin.”

     Two years later to the day, Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck filled with explosives next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and detonated the truck. The blast blew away the face of the building, hundreds received injuries, and 168 people died.

     In April 1999, two Columbine High School students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, unleashed a reign of terror, bloodshed, and murder inside their high school before they shot themselves.

     Then, four years ago, in April 2013, Dzhokhar and Tamerian Tsamaev set off two pressure cookers near Boston Marathon’s finish line on Boylston Street, and three people died.

     In all fairness, some wonderful events have also occurred in April. In 1789, George Washington was inaugurated as our country’s first president, a good thing. Congress established the Library of Congress in 1800. Thomas Jefferson bargained with the French and received the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

     In addition, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan in April 1948, twelve nations ratified the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949, and American astronauts released the Hubble Space Telescope into its orbit in April 1990.

     That is the nature of human history: a long series of wars, deaths, miscalculations, massacres, and poor judgment, interspersed with a few wise decisions by a fewer number of grand thinkers.

     Walter Benjamin, a twentieth-century philosopher, said, “Cultural treasures have a ghastly origin; they only exist because of the ‘toil of the great geniuses, who created them, but also to the nameless drudgery of their contemporaries.’” The geniuses perceive of a better way than the mass of men.

     Benjamin tells of a painting, It is of “the angel of history, who faces backwards at the chain of historical events, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage. The angel would like to awaken the dead and make whole all that has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from Paradise and the angel cannot close his wings. The storm is progress, and it propels the angel into the future, while the pile of debris behind him grows skyward.”

     An appropriate analogy for history: “the pile of debris.”

     We are almost through April. The battles in Syria continue, as they have for millennium. North Korea threatens war, as well as nuclear annihilation. Thousands of people are sitting in prisons all over the world, accused of crimes that they never committed. Injustice is rampant, but this is not new news.  

     Tragic events happen every month of the year, but April has more than its fair share. 

Willie Lincoln

by William H. Benson

April 6, 2017

     Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid fever, on Thursday, February 20 1862. The most likely cause was from drinking contaminated water drawn from the Potomac River. His mother, Mary Todd Lincoln, was hysterical with grief, and the President suffered his own private agony.

     He said, “My poor boy He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so much. It is hard, hard to have him die.”

     Four days later, the Lincoln family laid Willie to rest in a vault at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, a Washington D.C. district. In the days ahead, the grief-stricken President returned again and again to the crypt to lift Willie’s body out of his vault and hold him, a strange and unusual action.

     The modern-day author, George Saunders, writes short stories, mainly of the supernatural. He took the historical facts associated with Willie’s passing and then wrote a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, now a best-seller that he first published on February 14. To the historical characters, Saunders adds a full cast of fictional characters, spirits of those buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery.

     “Bardo” is a Tibetan word from Buddhism that refers to a state of existence between death and rebirth, that varies in length according to a person’s conduct in life. It is the son Willie who is in the bardo, and not the father Abraham.

     In each chapter, Saunders offers a series of quotes—most are a line or two, but some a page—that he lifts from countless historical documents and then provides attribution, as to where he found each.

     For example, “’Willie was burning with fever on the night of the fifth, as his mother dressed for the party. He drew every breath with difficulty. She could see that his lungs were congested and she was frightened.’ In ‘Twenty Days,’ by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt.”   

     The dead gaze at the lad, and talk amongst themselves. For example, one of the dead, Reverend Everly Thomas, says, “’The newcomer was a boy of some ten or eleven years. A handsome little fellow, blinking and gazing cautiously about him.” Then, after Lincoln visited the crypt, the spirit Hans Vollman said, “And yet no one had ever come here to hold one of us, while speaking so tenderly.”

     Rather than build a plot or a storyline, Saunders paints a collage, a verbal work of art. He intersperses the words of the those who witnessed Willie’s death and burial, with those of the walking, and talking, dead. One book reviewer said, “Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, a theatrical panorama of voices.”

     In a “Letter to the Editor,” dated Sunday, March 12, 2017, Jay H. Lefkowitch of New York points out how similar Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo is to an episode of The Twilight Zone, called “The Passerby.” (Season 3, episode 4.) Rod Serling wrote the story, and it first aired October 6, 1961.

     Serling begins, “It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomattox. It’s littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams. In just a moment, you will enter a strange province that knows neither North nor South, a place we call The Twilight Zone.”

     A woman named Lavinia rocks back and forth on a chair on the front porch of a burned out house somewhere in the South. A stream of wounded and crippled soldiers pass by her house, each anxious to get to the end of the road, obscured by fog. She soon realizes that they are dead, Civil War casualties.

     Lavinia sees her husband Jud, and he tells her that he too is dead, killed in a battle, and that she also died of a fever. He wants to walk on, into the fog, but she hesitates, falls to her knees, looks up, and sees Abraham Lincoln standing over her, his stove-pipe hat atop his head.

     Lincoln helps Lavinia up to her feet, and then he quotes Shakespeare’s words from his play Julius Caesar. “Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” Lincoln tells her that he is the final passerby, “the final casualty of the war.” She races ahead to join Jud, in the fog, at the end of the road.

     Rod Serling concludes the episode. “Incident on a dirt road during the month of April, the year 1865. As we’ve already pointed out, its a road that won’t be found on a map, but it’s one of many that lead in and out of The Twilight Zone.”

     George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Rod Serling’s “The Passerby.”

     The actor James Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington D. C. on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, and he died on Saturday, just hours away from Sunday morning, Easter. A funeral train carried the President’s body, and that of his son Willie, back to their home in Springfield, Illinois, where they were buried side by side in the family plot on May 4, 1865.