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. 

Kim Jong Un

by William H. Benson

December 14, 2017

The news out of Korea is a mix of bad and good, but perhaps more lopsided on the side of bad.

President Donald Trump continues to accelerate his war of words with North Korea, by calling the rogue nation’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, “Little Rocket Man,” and promising him “fire and fury.” 

Late in November, Trump re-designated North Korea as “a state sponsor of terrorism,” an action that unleashed a slew of additional U. S. financial sanctions that will hit hard the already starved and desperate North Korean people.

Trump’s decision enraged North Korea’s dictator, who said, “The hideous crimes committed by the lunatic president of the U.S are a blatant challenge to the dignity of the supreme leadership of North Korea. Those who trample on and make a mockery of North Korea’s dignity can never go scot-free.”

Kim Jung Un fears that the U.S. will dismantle their government and institute a regime-change.

Then, on November 29, Kim Jong Un’s military fired its third missile this year, an intercontinental ballistic missile, a Hwasong-15, that reached an altitude of 2,800 miles, “more than ten times higher than the International Space Station,” that then crashed down into the Sea of Japan.

The fear is that if North Korea’s military would lower that missile’s trajectory, it could reach cities in the U.S. North Korea’s weapons tests have prompted the U. N.’s Security Council “to pass sanctions that block 90% of North Korea’s exports and some of its imports.”

Russia and China, North Korea’s two friends, have had little success reigning in Kim Jong Un’s ambitious military plans. One reporter said, “Neither holds sway there now.” 

Last week, Wang Yi, a Chinese official, said that, “the outlook is not optimistic,” that “all avenues must be pursued to avoid conflict,” and that “all sides must end this vicious cycle of confrontation.”

If North Korea did attack the South, many fear that “it would be unimaginably bloody.” 

Two North Korean figure skaters qualified for the Winter Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, in February, but then North Korea’s officials missed the deadline to confirm their participation. Bad news. 

The good news is that, as of yet, North Korea’s long-range missiles are not equipped with a nuclear warhead. Kim Jong Un’s military officials lack “a re-entry vehicle that will protect a warhead from burning up in the atmosphere,” and they also lack “a miniaturized nuclear weapon small and light enough to fit on an ICBM without reducing its range.”

Jeffrey Feltman, a United Nation’s Undersecretary General, visited Pyongyang last week to try to negotiate a peaceful resolution. On Saturday, December 9, the day he left, North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said, that “his visit contributed to a deeper understanding and that they agreed to communicate at ‘various levels.’”

Another slice of good news is that a few North Koreans choose to defect, either to China or South Korea. On November 13, a North Korean Staff Sergeant, Oh Chong Song, drove a jeep close to the Military Demarcation Line between North and South Korea, jumped out, and ran south. 

Four fellow North Korean soldiers shot forty rounds at him, hit him five times, but he fell unconscious fifty yards inside South Korea. Three South Korean soldiers then pulled him to safety. 

A Blackhawk helicopter carried Oh to a trauma unit at Ajou University in Seoul, where Dr. Lee Cook-Jong removed the bullets, repaired the damage, and stopped the blood loss. He also found and removed a number of tapeworms inside Oh’s intestines, some as long as ten inches. 

Because the North Koreans lack chemicals for agriculture, they rely upon human fertilizer, or “night-soil,” a practice that leads to the transmission of parasites.

Also, three North Korean soccer players, permanent residents in Japan, played against Japan in the final round of the East Asian Football Championship this week. Kim Jong Un could not stop them.

One wonders why the North Korean dictator acts like “a wild-eyed fanatic.” 

A reporter for the Economist said that Mr. Kim “sought nuclear capability not to bring destruction upon himself, but as a deterrent against American aggression. He saw what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi when they gave up their quest for nukes.” Mr. Kim knows though that if he deploys his missiles, it “will invite his destruction.” The sword of Damocles hangs over Mr. Kim. 

As usual, the news in Korea, and everywhere else, is a mix of bad and good. Christmas approaches, a time when we remember the angel’s good news. “I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. On earth peace, good will toward men.” May it be so this Christmas for you, for your family, and for the Korean people.

Mark Twain vs. Winston Churchill

by William H. Benson

November 30, 2017

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. His father, Judge John Clemens, died when Samuel was eleven years old, and his mother then raised her children in poverty and desperation in Hannibal, north of St. Louis, alongside the Mississippi River. 

Winston Churchill was born on the same day, November 30, but thirty-nine years later, in 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, was an aristocrat, an English politician, and a philanderer. He died when Winston was twenty. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite from Brooklyn, New York, who married three times. 

When an adult, Clemens changed his name to Mark Twain, a romantic name that put some distance between himself and his poverty-stricken childhood, but Churchill kept his proud aristocratic name.

Both men loved to smoke cigars, drink hard liquor, and write dozens of books. Twain’s first book, Innocents Abroad, was nonfiction, but his most popular works—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper—were fiction. Churchill wrote history, works on the second World War, and A History of the English-Speaking People. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

When boys, both Twain and Churchill sported bright red hair, but late in life Twain’s turned white, and Churchill’s fell out. 

Twain served all of two weeks as a Confederate soldier, and then wrote a tongue-in-cheek account of his miserable experience. He escaped the Civil War by boarding a stage coach that carried him to Virginia City, Nevada. In essence, Twain dodged the draft. He had no use for political causes or war.

Churchill was a political animal. He fought in battles in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, wrote accounts of his adventures, won a seat to Parliament, and served there with distinction for decades. 

Twain discovered his gift for humorous public speaking in San Francisco, California. He rented a hall, put up posters, and announced, “Doors open at 7:00. Trouble begins at 8:00.” The crowds filled the hall, they howled, and they were astonished at his comic monologue.

Twain never worked another day in his life. Instead, he spoke everywhere, all over the world. People loved his after dinner speeches and his public lectures, and they accelerated his book sales.

Churchill gave the greatest speech by any Briton of the twentieth century on May 13, 1940, during the darkest days of World War II, when Nazi Germany threatened Western Civilization’s survival.

“You ask, what is our policy. I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.”

Twain loved his wife, Olivia, with a passion. She called him, “Youth,” a grown man forever young, forever boyish. When she passed away, he was lost, and never recovered. Churchill loved his wife. He said that the greatest diplomatic coup of his life was when he convinced Clementine to marry him.

Neither of them had happy childhoods, and yet each married well and created stable families.

Churchill avoided religion. Politics consumed him. Twain though scorned religion. He labelled the more committed to their faith, “disciples of the wildcat religion.” Yet, his best friend was a New England Congregationalist minister, Reverend Joseph Twichell. 

Both Twain and Churchill fell in love with the English language at an early age. Twain liked the zinger. He would begin with a solemn thought, but then turn it around in a way a reader would not expect. For example, he said, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” 

Another zinger, “It’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand. It’s the parts I do understand.”

Churchill loved an English sentence. He said that when a child, his instructors considered him a dunce, and they denied him the chance to learn Latin and Greek. Instead he was stuck with an English instructor, Mr. Sommervell. Years later Churchill said of his instructor,

“He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practiced English analysis continually. Thus, I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.”

I would contend that Mark Twain is the premier American writer, better than Emerson or Thoreau.

In 2002, more than a million British people were asked in a survey, “who was the greatest Briton ever?” Lady Diana, Darwin, Shakespeare, Newton, John Lennon, and Elizabeth I all placed in the top ten, but Winston Churchill received the most votes by a wide margin. When asked, “Why?” the voters would say, “He saved our country.”