Paul Getty and Ebenezer Scrooge

by William H. Benson

December 15, 2016

On July 10, 1973, kidnappers in Rome, Italy seized J. Paul Getty III, the sixteen-year-old grandson of the oil baron and the reported wealthiest man in the world. The kidnappers sent a ransom note that demanded $17,000,000, but the grand Senior Getty refused to pay. He said, “I have fourteen grandchildren. If I pay one penny now, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.”

Some whispered that the kidnapping was a staged hoax, designed to fleece the Senior. Hence, the kidnappers cut off the boy’s right ear and a lock of his hair, and mailed the two body parts to a newspaper, as proof that they had custody of the grandson.

The kidnappers negotiated down to a rock bottom $3,000,000, but then Senior agreed to pay only $2,200,000, the maximum amount his advisors claimed was tax deductible. Senior then required Junior, the child’s father, to sign a promissory note for a loan of $800,000, the difference, and then charged his own son four percent interest.

This was well within the Senior’s character. A miser to a fault and known for his tight-fisted ways, the Senior Getty had installed coin-operated telephones for his visitors’ use when in his home, in order to prevent them from running up excessive phone bills.

The kidnappers released J. Paul Getty III on December 15, 1973, ten days before Christmas, a wonderful gift for the lad’s mother, who told her son to call Senior and thank him for paying the ransom. He dialed the phone number, but Senior refused to take his grandson’s call.

1976. Paul Getty, the Senior, was married five times and divorced five times. After his final divorce in 1958, he gave up and remained single until his passing in 1976. Of his five wives, he said, “I hate to be a failure. I hate and regret the failure of my marriages. I would gladly give all my millions for just one lasting marital success.”

He and his fifth wife, Louise, had a single son, Timmy, who, when he was six, lost his eyesight because of a brain tumor. Louise said that Senior scolded her for spending an excessive amount on Timmy’s medical care. When Timmy died at the age of twelve, in 1958, Louise sued for divorce, and Senior did not attend his son’s funeral.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Past revealed to Ebenezer Scrooge, he saw himself as a young single man seated beside his fiance, Belle, who had tears in her eyes. He asks her why she cries, and she tells him, “Another idol has displaced me.”

To her he tried to justify his miserly ways, but she said, “You fear the world too much. All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one.” It is no wonder that she broke off their engagement.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Present revealed, Ebenezer saw two children hiding within the Ghost’s robe, a boy named Ignorance, and a girl named Want. Dickens described the two urchins as, “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” Dickens personified children whose parents have neglected and subjected them to emotional and physical abuse.

In a shadow that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come revealed, Ebenezer saw Bob Cratchit’s family mourning the passing of Tiny Tim, his little crutch laid aside. He hears Bob say to his other children, “’I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim.’ ‘Never, father,’ cried they all.”

Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol on December 17, 1843. In it, time is fluid. It backs up, jumps forward, and then races ahead into the future. At the story’s end, time returns to the present, and Scrooge is ecstatic. He now has a chance to rectify his errors, and he does.

The story is a call for a “secular conversion,” and Ebenezer Scrooge did experience an alteration. He purchased the prize turkey hanging in the butcher’s shop and had it delivered to Bob Cratchit’s home. He celebrated Christmas at his nephew Fred’s home. Of the day, Dickens wrote, “Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, wonderful happiness.”

Whereas J. Paul Getty’s story is non-fiction, Ebenezer Scrooge’s is fiction. Both included a lad named Tim with physical ailments. Whereas Getty tried and failed at marriage five times, Scrooge failed to try even once. Getty never experienced a secular conversion, but Scrooge did.

A severed ear, a lock of hair, a ransomed grandson set free at Christmas, a child named Timmy Getty who died, a crutch, a prize turkey, and a child named Tiny Tim Cratchit who lived. These are the elements of two Christmas stories. Both are sad, and yet both include some happiness.

Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis

by William H. Benson

December 1, 2016

     Billy Graham was born November 7, 1918, just four days before Armistice Day that ended World War I’s carnage. Three weeks ago Billy marked his 98^th birthday, alive but not so well.

     Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898, and died on November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It is also coincidental that both C. S. Lewis and John F. Kennedy had the same nickname, Jack.

     Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis were the two most popular Christian authors of the twentieth century. Walk into any religious bookstore—if any remain open today—and you will find Billy Graham’s books on one shelf and C. S. Lewis’s on another, but there were differences between the two men.

     Lewis was an Englishman, a very-well read Oxford scholar, who had studied the Greek and Latin classics, philosophy, as well as English language and literature. He taught at Oxford’s Magdalen College for nearly thirty years, and he described himself as “a jovial man.”

     Lewis and his fellow scholar, J. R. R. Tolkein, loved to gather in Oxford’s pub, “The Eagle and the Child,” where they smoked their pipes, drank their pint, laughed, swapped stories, and read aloud their literary creations. Tolkien read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Lewis read his own fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia, that includes The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

     It was during those gatherings that Lewis laid aside his youthful rejection of religion, and accepted Christianity. His conversion was a quiet event, but it transformed his literary style. Thereafter, in addition to his fantasy novels, he wrote nonfiction books that defended and promoted Christianity: Mere Christianity, Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Surprised by Joy. He became Christianity’s chief apologist, who wanted to present a reasonable case for Christianity.    

     On the other hand, Billy Graham was a Southerner, from Charlotte, North Carolina, a traveling evangelist, intense, focused, driven, friend to the Presidents. It is said that he preached Christianity to more people than any other person in human history.

     In his sermons, he insisted upon the absolute need for all men and women to experience conversion. In him there was no doubt and no hesitation on that, and his books dovetail into his Southern Baptist theology: Peace with God, Angels, How to Be Born Again, and World Aflame.

     Although Lewis was far more educated than Billy, but both men’s influence reached far.

     Whereas Lewis made people feel comfortable, with his avuncular and jovial manners, his deep learning, and his thought-provoking literary style, Billy Graham made people feel uncomfortable, because he told people what they must do.

     Billy was a friend to both Democrat and Republican Presidents, but only on rare occasions did he express a political position, either liberal or conservative. The most glaring of those few occasions was when he fell under President Richard Nixon’s bigoted attitude toward the media. Otherwise, Billy steered wide of political controversy.

     Lewis was more forthright, but not much. He saw danger when people mixed religion and politics. In a September 25, 2016 New York Times opinion column, the writer, Peter Wehner, said that Lewis observed that “Christians were tempted to abuse political power in ways that were bad for both Christianity and the state. He believed theocracy the worst form of government, and he detested the idea of a ‘Christian party.’”

     Wehner said further that Lewis perceived that “politics can distort and invert Christianity, turning a faith that at its core is about grace, reconciliation, and redemption into one that is characterized by bitterness, recriminations, and lack of charity.” Hence, Lewis was said to hold “contempt for politics and politicians, and that he steered clear of political controversy.”

     Both Billy and C. S. remained mute on current political issues, mainly because both men’s focus was upon religion. Wehner said that “Lewis saw public matters, and indeed all of life, through a theological lens.” The same is true of Billy Graham.

C. S. Lewis passed away a week short of his 65^th birthday. His decades-long addiction to his pipe shortened his life, when he succumbed to renal failure. So far, Billy Graham has lived thirty-three years more than did C. S. Lewis. Their books are still in print.

A Country Divided

by William H. Benson

November 17, 2016

     On Election Day, the country’s voters split evenly. Half voted for Hillary Clinton, and half voted for Donald Trump. After a contentious, bitter, and hard-fought campaign, we now have a winner.

     In his victory speech, Trump said, “Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division. We have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”

     The American people have experienced “wounds of division” in the past, far worst than this year, and most likely will again in the future. Raging fights are part of the political, as well as, the governing process in a free and democratic country. The Constitution permits contention and disagreement, but it also insists that the people accept the result of a vote and unite. Americans obey the majority.

     At the time of our inception as a new nation in 1776, the English colonists were split, not into two parts, but into three. A third remained loyal to King George III, and were called Tories or Loyalists. A second third rebelled against the king, but called themselves Patriots. The remaining third were ambivalent, not caring for either side, content to live and work.

     The Patriots scorned the Tories. They tarred and feathered them. They rode them out of town on fence rails. They tossed them into prisons. The worst offenders they executed by hanging. They confiscated their estates, divided the property into smaller parcels, and sold them.

     For example, Thomas Paine received a farm at New Rochelle, New York, that a Tory once owned.

     The division over the colonists’ rebellion cut through families. Benjamin Franklin wrote his illegitimate son, William, out of his will, because William had refused to join the Patriots but remained loyal to the king. Benjamin said, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for me leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”

     An estimated 80,000 Loyalists packed up and moved north to live in Canada.

     Decades later the southern states argued with the northern states over their right to own slaves. The southern states called slavery a “peculiar institution,” and thereby justified its existence. The northern states denounced it as a moral outrage, and neither side would yield or compromise.

     In 1856, the Kansas territory was converted into a battle ground over whether it would enter the United States as a slave or a free state. Journalists began to call the territory “bleeding Kansas.” Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts addressed his fellow senators on May 19 and 20, and insisted that Kansas should enter the union now as a free state.

     Two days later, Preston Brooks, a Congressional Democrat from South Carolina, walked into the Senate’s chamber in the Capitol, and with a cane, he beat Sumner about the head and shoulders. The cane broke into pieces, blood splattered across the Senate floor, and Sumner almost died from his wounds. Three and a half years would pass before Sumner returned to his Senate seat. 

     In the election of 1860, the Democrats split apart over the issue of slavery. The northern Democrats selected Stephen Douglas for their candidate for president, but the southern Democrats selected John C. Breckinridge. The new Republican party selected Abraham Lincoln, and the Whigs picked John Bell.

     When Lincoln won the electoral vote, the southern states, one by one, withdrew from the union, and formed their own country, the Confederate States of America. Six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, a bloody civil war erupted that pitted north against south.

     A century later, the war in Vietnam sapped American willpower and resolve. For ten years college students staged protests and mass marches across college campuses. In order to avoid the draft into the military, an estimated 30,000 young American men fled the country to live in Canada, and there they resided, until President Jimmy Carter pardoned them in 1977. Like the Loyalists in the 1770’s, the draft dodgers in the 1960’s and 1970’s fled to Canada.

     The American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War caused bitter and deep divisions in our country, and years would pass before the feelings of outrage and injustice would begin to subside. The rancor and hostility and threats we have witnessed this year, during this Presidential election, is much smaller, when compared to the “wounds of division,” that the citizens of our country felt decades and centuries ago, during the war years. No one has received a caning, and no states have seceeded.

     Yet, in recent days, I have heard that certain American are threatening to move to Canada. That prompts some questions. Will Canada permit them to stay? Will the Federal Government allow them to return if they choose to return? If we want to secure our borders, does that mean a wall along the northern border with Canada, as well as one along the southern border with Mexico? Difficult questions, but no easy answers.

U. S. Elections

by William H. Benson

November 3, 2016

     In the last century, U. S. voters have witnessed at least four lop-sided presidential elections.

     In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt destroyed Alf Landon, Kansas’s Republican governor. FDR received 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8 votes. Only Maine and Vermont voted for Landon. Even Kansas failed to vote for Landon. FDR also received 62.46% of the popular vote to Landon’s 37.54%. By both measures, FDR won “the biggest landslide in U. S. history.”

     In 1964, Lyndon Johnson received 486 electoral votes, to Barry Goldwater’s 52. Johnson was from Texas, where he had earned the well-deserved nickname of “Landslide Lyndon,” for fixing and even rigging elections there, but he won the presidency in 1964 without fraud, and a minimum of gimmicks.

     On September 7, 1964, Johnson’s campaign televised a controversial ad. Viewers saw a three-year-old girl counting leaves on a daisy, until she gets to nine. Then, the camera zooms in upon her right eye, and viewers hear an announcer say “ten,” as if it is a countdown to a missile launch.

     Then, a mushroom cloud appears, and viewers hear LBJ’s voice, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

      The ad was designed to highlight Goldwater’s aggressive military position and his willingness to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, in Vietnam. Johnson’s campaign officials ran the ad that one time, but it swayed undecided voters to vote for Johnson, who then won 61.34% of the popular vote.

     Then, in 1972, Richard Nixon won 520 electoral votes to George McGovern’s 17. Only one state, Massachusetts, and also the District of Columbia, voted for McGovern. Even his native state of South Dakota rejected him and cast its 4 votes for Nixon, who won 61.79% of the popular vote.

     In November of 1972, few American voters knew how low Nixon’s campaign officials had sunk. Most likely Nixon did not know nor did he authorize the plumbers gang’s break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at Watergate, but once he learned of it, he authorized the “cover-up.” Less than two years later, he was forced to resign from the presidency or face certain impeachment.    

      Then, in 1984, the incumbent Ronald Reagan received 525 votes to Walter Mondale’s 13. Only Minnesota, Mondale’s home state, plus the District of Columbia, voted for him. When reporters asked Reagan what he wanted for Christmas, he joked, “Well, Minnesota would have been nice.” He won 59.17% of the popular vote.

     Runaways, lop-sided elections, and landslides, when 60% vote for a candidate, demonstrate that the American people have spoken and that democracy has worked. It is the razor-thin elections that cause people to wonder, “What do the American people want?”

     For example, in the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy “triumphed by the thinnest of margins.” He received 34,226,731 votes to Nixon’s 34,108,157, a difference of only 118,574 votes. JFK claimed 303 electoral votes to Nixon’s 219, but only because Illinois and Texas had cast their votes for Kennedy.

     Right away accusations surfaced that Chicago’s autocratic mayor, Richard Daly, had stuffed the ballot box there to ensure a Kennedy win in Illinois, and that Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-presidential running mate, had played similar tricks in Texas.

     Eisenhower urged Nixon to demand a recount in the two states, but Nixon instead “conceded defeat very early the morning after the election.” It is uncertain if a recount in the two states would have resulted in a win for Nixon. At a Christmas party, Nixon said, “we won, but they stole it from us.”

     In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote, 51,003,894 to George W. Bush’s 50,459,211, but Gore lost the electoral vote, 266 votes to Bush’s 271. This was the fourth time in U. S. history that the popular vote’s winner lost the electoral vote; this anomaly had occurred also in 1824, 1876, and 1888.

     The 2000 election hinged upon Florida. Bush needed 270 votes to win a majority, and he did so because he won Florida’s 25 votes, after the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 on December 12, to stop the recount there. It “ruled that the state of Florida’s court-ordered manual recount of vote ballots was unconstitutional,” because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment.

     Some candidates win or lose by a wide margin, others by a slight margin. Nixon did both. In 1960, he lost the closest race ever to Kennedy, but in 1972, Nixon crushed his opponent, George McGovern, and was re-elected to a second term. It was Nixon’s flawed judgement during that second campaign that led to his downfall. “Mistakes were made,” he said. It is wise to remember that the size of the win bears little relationship to the candidate’s performance once installed in the Oval Office.

Dualism

by William H. Benson

October 20, 2016

     Human beings see opposites. They divide the world, its citizens, and its ideas into just two camps. Instead of pointing to a series of gradations between two extremes, they tend to see only the extremes.

     They see good and evil, positive and negative, the truth and the lie, love and hate, men and women, heaven and hell, capitalism and communism, democracy and tyranny, war and peace, conservative and liberal, tragedy and comedy, disasters and blessings, innocent and guilty, Democrat and Republican, right and wrong, zeros and ones, black and white, Trump and Clinton.

     Philosophers call this division between two opposites “dualism.” According to the dictionary, dualism is the state of two parts, co-eternal binary opposites, two diverse ways of thinking, one set against the other.

     For example, Descartes struggled with the philosophical problem between mind and body. The mind, he argued, is distinguished from the body. Each is composed of different substances and display different attributes. The body is a physical presence, but without feelings or thoughts. The mind has no physical substance, but it is within the mind where ideas originate and feelings are felt. 

     Novelists use dualism to build their stories. First, they construct a protagonist, who represents the good, and then an antagonist, who represents the evil. As the antagonist moves behind the scenes, he beats up the protagonist. Then, in the novel’s final pages, the protagonist rises to the occasion, and subdues the antagonist. For a classic example, consider how Ian Fleming pitted James Bond against a most despicable series of enemies, including Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

     In a James Bond story the protagonist wins, but in history, the tyrant or the bully often wins.

     In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, he sees only two options after he learns that his uncle has murdered his father and then married his mother. He asks, “To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them: to die, to sleep no more.”

     Throughout the play he hesitates, unsure of which to choose, but then he decides “to take arms against a sea of troubles,” and rights them, but then he dies, as he had predicted.

     George Bernard Shaw took a swipe at teachers in his play Man and Superman, when one of his characters says, “He who can does; he who cannot teaches.” That is most ungenerous. Teachers work hard, and not everyone has the talent or patience to teach others a portion of all that he or she knows. Those who lack the talent or the patience find other things to do, rather than teach.

     This highlights dualism’s problem. It divides people into just two camps. Shaw split people between those who can demonstrate employable skills and those who cannot. I say that the work force needs all kinds, both skilled and unskilled.

     Woody Allen said, “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” He also said, in his 1979 address to the graduates, “More than at 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 that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

     Taoism, China’s ancient philosophy, thought a little deeper about dualism. They constructed the yin and the yang, a circle that contains equal amounts of black and white, as a way to demonstrate the interrelatedness of all things. The yang represents the sun, masculine, positive, light, warm, dry, and forceful; but the yin represents shade, feminine, moon, negative, dark, cold, and passive.

     The yin and yang are contrary to each other, but they also complement each other, are interconnected, and interdependent in a natural world. The shadow cannot exist without the sunlight. We could not see the moon if the sun failed to shine upon its surface. On occasion, tragedy turns into comedy, and disasters can become our biggest blessings.

     It came as a surprise earlier this month when the Nobel committee awarded its prize for literature to Bob Dylan for the lyrics he wrote to accompany his music. For example, he wrote and sang, “Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the door way, don’t block up the hall, for he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled. There’s the battle outside raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. For the times they are a-changing.”

     The election is just days away. The campaign, unlike any other in modern history and disgraced by a raw and brutal dualism, will come to an end. This laborious process has now presented us a flawed choice between, what some might say, is “the horrible and the miserable.” Like Hamlet, we too have wondered aloud, “To be or not to be. That is the question.” And like Bob Dylan, we have concluded that “the times they are a-changing,” especially after we heard Donald Trump insult and threaten to lock up his political rival. I trust the American public has “the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Justice

by William H. Benson

October 6, 2016

     In the fall of 1838, Georgetown University in Washington D.C., was the preeminent Catholic and Jesuit university in America, but it had fallen on hard financial times. Its president then, Thomas Mulledy, decided to sell the slaves who worked the Maryland plantations that Georgetown owned. Several school officials disagreed with Mulledy’s decision, because he could have sold the land. Instead, he sold the workers who worked the land.

     When the slaves—272 men, women, and children—heard the sad news that a sale was imminent and that their new owners would transport them by ship to New Orleans, fear and panic gripped them. Some ran away. Others hoped for the best, but the sale was completed. Families were ripped apart. Mothers never saw their children again. The school received “$115,000, or the equivalent of $3.3 million today,” and with it, Mulledy paid down the school’s debts.

     Two weeks ago, officials at Georgetown University announced that the university would issue an apology “for its historical role in the slave trade.” In addition, officials removed two men’s names from their buildings, including Thomas F. Mulledy’s, and also announced that they would recruit students who were descended from those transported to New Orleans.

     Justice moves slow in this world; in this case it required 178 years.

     Bryan Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative, announced that his organization will build a memorial dedicated to the 4075 black individuals he has identified who were lynched in the Southern states between 1877 and 1950. It will open next year in Montgomery, Alabama.

     “I don’t think we can afford to continue pretending that these aren’t really troubling chapters in our history,” Stevenson said. “I think we’ve got to deal with it.” Stevenson also said, “The moral arc is long, but it bends toward justice. Instead of lynchings, we now have police shootings.” That is a point worth considering in light of the 991 citizens who police shot in 2015, and the 719 shot so far this year.

     Last week, on September 24, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall in Washington D. C., in the shadow of the Washington Monument, the former dedicated to the slave, the latter to a slave-owner. President Obama was there, and said, “This national museum helps to tell a richer and fuller story of who we are. This museum can help us to talk to each other, and to listen to each other, and to see each other.”

     A federal appeals court judge named Alex Kozinski recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “our legal system has convicted hundreds of thousands of people of crimes based on ‘voodoo science.’”

     To support that statement he points to a report that the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology issued. It “concluded that most forensic-evidence—including fingerprint, bite-mark, firearm, footwear, and hair analysis techniques—have high error rates,” and that much of this evidence is “rank guesswork.” “Bite-mark analysis,” he says, “turns out to be totally unreliable.”

     One wonders how many convicted of crimes based upon “voodoo science” are sitting in prison now. How many were executed? Brian Stevenson said, “We treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent, and so we base justice more on wealth than on culpability.”

     Legislatures pass laws, presidents sign them, and they then appear in the law books for courts to interpret. Those laws are civilized societies’ attempt to spread equitable treatment upon all its citizens.

2001. S. citizens saw law-making in action recently. On Friday, September 23, President Obama vetoed the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which would permit the families and survivors of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia for damages for that country’s “role in the terror attack in 2001.” Obama justified his veto because, he argued, it “would infringe on the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.”

     The House thought otherwise and on the following Wednesday voted 348-77, enough for the 2/3’s necessary to override the President’s veto, and the Senate voted the same way, 97-1. The Act is now law. In his eight years in the Oval Office, Obama has vetoed 11 bills, but this is the first override. After fifteen years, those who lost family members on 9/11 may now sue for compensation for their loss.

     Two questions arise. Can society build a better model to achieve justice than the one we have now? Should the system of punishment for crimes committed be harsh or lenient? These are difficult questions to answer, and the solutions are not obvious. Thinkers have argued and wrestled with those two questions for millennium. I say that the Pledge of Allegiance says it best. “And justice for all.”    

     The Romans named their goddess for justice, Justitia, who held in one hand a sword, and in the other the scales that weighed the evidence and circumstances to determine guilt or innocence. Often sculptors or artists will blindfold the goddess, but not all do. One wonders if Justitia should see or not see.