VALENTINE’S DAY

by William H. Benson

February 14, 2013

     Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was in court last week. More well known as Lady Gaga, she explained to the judge that she refuses to pay her former employee $390,000 for overtime hours because “she is a hood rat . . . suing me for money that she didn’t earn.” Lady Gaga said that she paid Jennifer O’Neill $75,000 a year, but O’Neill said she worked “virtually 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” One can conclude that there was a breakdown in their employer-employee relationship

     In 2009 Lady Gaga released her pop hit “Bad Romance,” and I would admit that the music is superb. High school and college bands now play it frequently, but its lyrics, which Stefani Germanotta wrote, are inane, repetitive, witless, and vulgar, the exact ingredients necessary for a bad romance.

     Like other oxymorons—such as jumbo shrimp, plastic glasses, criminal law, civil war, and freezer burn—a “bad romance” cannot be. If it is a romance it is hearts, flowers, candy, cards, gifts, and Valentine’s Day all year long. If it is bad, then it is no longer a romance, but an oppressive nightmare.

     I am reminded of an essay entitled Popular Songs vs. The Facts of Life that the semantics professor, S. I. Hayakawa, wrote in 1954. Although dated, the essay makes a pertinent point that is still true today, that popular songs’ lyrics suffer from the “IFD disease—the triple-threat disorder of Idealization, Frustration, and Demoralization—that is often illustrated in the attitudes toward love.”

     Some songs idealize love, that it is instant, magic, forever, that all problems are solved, and that “you don’t have to do anything—the right magic makes all effort unnecessary.” So you hear lyrics that mention a “teen angel” or “just one look.” Inevitably the real world disrupts this idealization, people feel frustrated, and you hear lyrics about “feeling blue, being all alone, and crying a river of tears.”

Then, some lyrics, such as Dione Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” arrive at the third stage, that of demoralization, detachment, and absolute withdrawal from all romance.

     What is missing from the three categories of IFD disease is that inevitability called “change.” Conditions, feelings, circumstances, attitudes, desires, goals, and wishes constantly change. The exterior life does not always match what is changing in the inner life.

     Gail Sheehy, a best-selling author on relationships, said that women today divorce husbands who are physically and verbally abusive, or are chronic womanizers, or are alcoholics. The reverse is also true. Men men wake up one day and acknowledge a fact that the popular songs will not admit, that physical beauty does not equal or even indicate intelligence or a civil and polite tongue.

     Kenneth Burke, an American writer, said that “poetry is equipment for living.” It is tragic that the memorization and repetition of popular song lyrics is the closest that most youth ever get to poetry.

     Hayakawa said that “literature is learning. By literary symbols we are introduced to emotions and situations that we have not yet experienced.” It is further tragic that so few youth read or know of romances gone awry, such as the “two star-crossed lovers” in “Romeo and Juliet,” or how Othello’s need for certainty goaded him into murdering his wife, Desdemona, or how Macbeth’s spouse, Lady Macbeth, convinced him to murder the king. In their case, ambition made romance bad, very bad.

     Edward Tayler, English professor at Columbia, told his freshman literature students, “You’re here for very selfish reasons. You’re here to build a self. You create a self, you don’t inherit it. One way to create it is out of the past.” It is a selfish thing for a youth to devote years to reading literature and history. After all, he or she could be holding down a job, buying a house, getting married, but I say that reading literature and the past is a better preparation for life’s realities than repeating popular songs’ lyrics.

     In his essay, Hayakawa asked the question, “Do popular songs, listened to, often memorized and sung during youthful courtship, make the attainment of emotional maturity more difficult than it need be?” He answers his own question by quoting a therapist, who said, “I am up to my eyes in marriage counseling. I am consulted repeatedly about ill-considered marriages based upon very superficial and inadequate ideas regarding the nature of love and how it is recognized.”

     Some people are so unlucky in love, often through little or no fault of their own, other than poor planning and wishful thinking, and so they endure a series of bad romances. If you happen to have a “good” romance, enjoy it today, of all days, for you are indeed the lucky one. You are the fortunate one.  

Lincoln

by William H. Benson

January 31, 2013

     Two weeks ago I saw Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, Lincoln, and came away impressed. Sally Fields did an admirable job playing Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones played Thaddeus Stevens, but it was Daniel Day-Lewis, playing Abraham Lincoln, who was mesmerizing, riveting. It was if I was watching the real Abraham Lincoln, with all of his diffidence, hesitations, awkward mannerisms, ugliness, and squeaky voice fully displayed, with warts and beard and over-sized ears.

     Critics agree that Day-Lewis should win the “Best Actor” award. The movie critic in The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg, was even more daring when he said that “Spielberg has made a very fine film—one that has no equal, no parallel that I know of in the entire movie canon.”

     I think that comment is accurate. Hollywood, I contend, ran out of script ideas decades ago, and is now a closed circle of repetitious romances, westerns, and adventure / spy movies, and few dare to break themselves loose from those molds. It is refreshing to see history—actual American history—acted out on the big screen for the world to witness.  

     Herzberg said, “One of the great Hollywood puzzles—scandals, even—is the paucity of first-rate films about the grand sweep of our country’s history. . . . There are no great movies, as far as I know, about, for example the American Revolution.” Then, the only movie in recent years that dramatized Colonial American history is Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper’s novel of the French and Indian War, and it too starred Daniel Day-Lewis.

     Spielberg begins his movie Lincoln in January, 1865, when Lincoln only has three and a half months to live. He is so utterly determined to get the House to pass the 13^th Amendment that month that he barters behind the scenes, promising Congressmen jobs and money, in order to get their votes, and he wins. On January 31, the House passes the Amendment that abolished slavery for all time from the United States. Spielberg then quickly unfolds the final scenes of Lincoln’s life. 

     At the Hampton Roads Conference, held on February 3 in the saloon aboard the steamboat The River Queen, Lincoln and William Seward, the Secretary of State, meet the three Peace Commissioners from the South, and Lincoln bluntly tells them, “Slavery is dead.” He was correct. It was dead.

     Lincoln meets his real challenge at home when dealing with Mary Todd. He is out of his element in addressing his wife’s attitude and accusations. At one point in the movie, he shouts at her, “I wish for once you would take a more liberal view!” She cannot. The grief and self-blame she feels for the loss of their son, Willie, who died shortly after they moved into the White House, overwhelms her.

     On March 4, 1865, Lincoln gives his 2^nd Inaugural Address. What is remarkable is the discrepancy between his words’ beauty and power and his unpolished manner when he delivers them. Today crowds would laugh such a character off a political podium, but Day-Lewis captured, as well as it can be, Lincoln’s thin, high-pitched voice and his jerky body movements. In that regard Lincoln was truly odd.

     Towards the end of the 701-word speech, Lincoln equated political necessities with religion. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. The Almighty his own purposes. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. With malice toward none, with charity for all.” The words still stir us.

     On April 1, Grant’s troops crushed the Confederates at Petersburg, and Lincoln chose to visit Grant there, but to get to his General, the President had to ride his horse through the battlefield. Lying all around him were the dead, those soldiers killed just the day before, “one man with a bullet-hole through his forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” Lincoln visibly wilts at the carnage.

     As for Lincoln’s assassination, Spielberg fools his audience. We all know that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in Ford’s Theater on Palm Sunday, but Spielberg shows us none of that. Instead, we see a crowded auditorium and a stage production of a magic show. We see Lincoln’s son Tad there, alone, and then someone rushes onto the stage and announces that the President has been shot. Tad screams, and we realize that the theater we were seeing was not Ford’s theater but another.

     Why did Spielberg play such a trick on his audience? Perhaps he understood that to do otherwise would have been too painful and too horrific for audiences to watch the horror play out. Instead, he permits us to watch Tad react to the grim news of his father’s passing. I suspect that this scene is historically inaccurate in that it is doubtful that Tad was allowed to attend a play without his parents.

     Lincoln’s final scene. There he lies on a bed, the blood from his head wound soaking into the pillow, and once the physician pronounces him dead, Edwin Stanton says, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Now that is historically accurate. Stanton actually did say that, and Lincoln does belong to the ages.

     Spielberg took a gamble, and he won with Lincoln.

DOGS

by William H. Benson

January 17, 2013

     January is “National Train Your Dog Month,” an activity that can lead to a surprising outcome.

     In 2011 a writer named Susan Orleans published a book on Rin-Tin-Tin. In the book she tells of an American soldier fighting in France during World War I who adopted a German Shepherd pup, brought it back to California, trained it, and the dog appeared in 23 silent films for Warner Brothers, becoming the most famous dog in the world and the number one box office star.

     In the 1960’s another Rin-Tin-Tin had his own television show, as did Rudd Weatherwax’s collie, Lassie, a show that appeared in black and white every Sunday evening at five o’clock.

     The most famous cartoon dog is Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy, Charles Schultz’s creation. Snoopy dreams he is the Red Baron, flying a World War I biplane and machine-gunning down the enemy. Dogs do dream, and so who is to say that they do not dream of wearing goggles, a scarf, and manning a gun.

     The best dog movie in recent years is “Marley and Me,” a movie based on the book that the newspaper columnist John Grogan wrote. The dog that he and his new bride purchase soon after their marriage is a yellow Labrador, exuberant, incorrigible, neurotic, and terrified of lightning and thunder. Grogan and his wife have three children, and the dog becomes a fixture in the family, despite his faults.

     One critic called the movie “the single most endearing and authentic movie about the human-canine connection in decades. It’s also something more: a disarmingly enjoyable, wholehearted comic vision of the happy messiness of family life.” The movie opened Christmas Day 2008 and grossed $14.75 million that first day, setting a new record. I recommend it.

     Cesar Milan, host of his own television show on dog training, says that “healthy, balanced dogs require strong pack leadership from their owners, in the form of exercise, discipline, and affection, in that order.” It is a mistake, he says “to give a great deal of affection with little discipline or exercise.” In other words take your dog for a walk, command them to heel, and then rub their ears.

     “What’s A Dog For?” is the title of a new book that the writer John Homans recently published. He answers his question with a single word: “convergence.” Because dogs have lived for millennium with human beings, they have become more like humans, and “the two species forged a brotherhood.”

     Homans quotes James Thurber: “Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.

     Dogs are so dependent upon human beings for their food and shelter. Ages ago, they sacrificed their independence and wildness for human comfort and care. One wonders what they think of their owners. Experts agree that dogs are pack animals, “even when that group consists of other dogs, humans, and cats.” They sort themselves out according to gradations of dominance.

     Their sense of smell overpowers that of humans by a magnitude of tens of thousands. Dogs can detect odors in parts per trillion. Where humans have 6 million olfactory receptors, a dog has 300 million. “The world to a dog is not a visual one but a richly odoriferous one.” It is just a pity that they cannot talk and tell us what their sense of smell is conveying to them.

     And yet, Homans says, a dog has learned to visually recognize human gestures, like pointing, “something that even our primate cousins cannot do.”

     Human beings have harnessed dogs’ unique abilities. There are seeing-eye dogs for the blind, dogs for herding sheep, police dogs for terrifying law-breakers, dogs for sniffing drugs, dogs for tracking lost people, and for those suffering from a peanut allergy, there are peanut-detecting dogs.

     The actor Jimmy Stewart wrote a poem about his dog named Beau, and he read it to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on July 28, 1981, causing even Johnny to tear up. You can watch it on YouTube.

     “And there were nights he would crawl upon our bed and I would feel him between us, and I would pat his head. And there were nights when I’d feel his stare and I would look, and he’d be sitting there, and I would reach out to stroke his hair. And sometimes I would feel him sigh, and I think I know the reason why. He’d wake up at night, and he would have this fear of the dark, of life, of lots of things, and he’d be glad to have me near.

     “And now he’s dead, and there are nights when I think I feel him climb upon our bed and lie between us, and I pat his head. And there are nights when I think I feel that stare, and I reach out my hand to stroke his hair, and he’s not there. Oh how I wish that weren’t so. I’ll always love a dog name Beau.”

     Dogs do not understand that this wonderful thing called life will end some day. Homans said, “It’s not that a dog accepts the cards it’s been dealt; it’s not aware that there are cards.” James Thurber said, “If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very very few persons.” It is a pity that dogs live such short lives. So train your dog today.

GEORGE ORWELL AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

by William H. Benson

January 3, 2013

     Every year since 1976, a college in Michigan, Lake Superior State University, publishes late in the year its List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English. Examples from past years include “first time ever,” and “dot.com.” Among the recently-announced winners for 2012 are: “amazing,” “shared sacrifice,” “occupy,” “man cave,” “the new normal,” “ginormous,” and “thank you in advance,” a phrase that “is a condescending way to say, ‘Since I already thanked you, you have to do this.’”

     The American Dialect Society approaches words differently. Instead of banishing words, it meets early in January each year and votes on the Word of the Year. Last year’s winner was “occupy,” and previous winners include: “app,” “tweet,” “bailout,” and “subprime.” The society will meet on Friday evening this week in Boston and vote. Possible winners are: “YOLO,” (you only live once), “selfie,” (a photograph that you take of yourself), “malarky,” “superstorm,” “double down,” and “fiscal cliff.”

     Looking back at 2012, I think we can agree that because it was a presidential election year, we were inundated for twelve months with words. We heard arguments for and against the issues: healthcare, the budget, the deficit, taxes, spending, and the fiscal crisis. We listened to debates, and infrequently we heard words filled with substance. More often we heard vapid words filled with air.

     Whenever the focus is upon words, I gravitate repeatedly back to the British writer George Orwell, who wrote in 1946 a most perceptive column, “Politics and the English Language.” Although seldom applied to our English prose, his column deserves frequent re-reading.

     He begins by saying that “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” and that, “Our civilization is decadent and our language must share in the general collapse.” Orwell points out “the slovenliness of our language,” and that all bad writing, he contends, has two common qualities: “staleness of imagery,” and “lack of precision.”

     “Prose,” he writes, “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a henhouse.”

     Orwell then mentions four categories of bad writing. Examples of dying metaphors he lists are: “an axe to grind,” “ride roughshod over,” and “toe the line.” Verbal false limbs are empty words, such as “render inoperative,” “be subjected to,” “give rise to,” “have the effect of,” and “make itself felt.”

     Pretentious diction are words designed to impress, such as the words “phenomenon, objective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, exhibit, utilize, and eliminate,” Then, there are the meaningless words used especially in art and literary criticism: “romantic, plastic, values, human, sentimental, natural, and vitality.” Difficult to define, such words evade meaning.

     Orwell calls these four categories a “catalog of swindles and perversions,” an apt description.

     Instead, he cites an example of excellent English prose: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” For those unacquainted with the King James Bible, one can find those words in Ecclesiastes.

     Orwell then translates the same words into modern English: “Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

     Everyone, except perhaps a government official, would rather read the King James version.

     Orwell ends his article with a frightening thought. “One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” Although he does not say it, he implies that if we dared to use imagery and precision in our language, we will clear the chaos, find our way, and solve issues.

     With a new year beginning, it is now the goal-setting season. Included among my goals for 2013: to strengthen my vocabulary, work imagery and precision into my language, avoid the trite and hackneyed cliche, and perhaps coin some new words. For a first example, how about “inrageous,” a less strident form of “outrageous?” Instead of being outraged, people might be “inraged.”

     Above all else, I will avoid those words I find most disagreeable, such as “24-7,” “seriously,” “going forward,” and “as you know,” a phrase writers frequently use as a forerunner before giving their opinion. I say that a writer should not assume that a reader knows what the writer is about to write.

     Today the most overworked word in the English language is “excited.” The words “I’m excited” cover a lot of territory. Is anyone ever agitated, disturbed, fretful, confused, bewildered, enthused, pleased, or are we all just excited? We are definitely not “excited” about our less than “amazing” political leadership, and we would hesitate to “thank them in advance,” “as you know,” “24-7.”

AMERICAN CRISIS NO. ONE

by William H. Benson

December 20, 2012

     By mid-December of 1776, George Washington was despondent. The American War for Independence was not going well. His troops were undisciplined, often bootless, lacked firearms and ammunition, had little access to food and clothing, and faced two well-equipped substantial European armies: the British red-coats, plus their mercenaries from Germany, the hated Hessians.

     William Howe, the British general, had chased Washington out of New York, had pursued him hotly across the state of New Jersey in the fall of 1776, and then forced the Virginian to hole up that winter on the west side of the Delaware River just inside Pennsylvania. Convinced that he had crushed this silly American rebellion, Howe departed the battlefield for the comforts of New York City, intending to return next spring to finish off George Washington and his pitiful army.

     It was accepted in Europe that during the winter season, generals and armies would retire. George Washington though had not received his military training in Europe.

     One soldier in Washington’s rag-tag army then was Thomas Paine, the famed writer of Common Sense. He had joined the American army in New York, at Fort Lee on the Hudson River, and had watched in dismay as Howe chased Washington across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. At night “on a drum-head by campfire” he would write down his thoughts, and in early December he left the army and returned to Philadelphia where he published his first American Crisis.

     “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

     Of all of Paine’s literary works, those words from his first American Crisis are his most quoted. Their imagery is enlightening: some soldiers will fight only in the summer, when the sun shines, but the fight is upon them now in the gloom of a December cold.

     Washington read Paine’s words and decided. He would not wait all winter and allow Howe to bully him next spring. He would seize the initiative now. He understood that a number of his troops were set to leave his army on December 31, their term of enlistment expiring. Tradition has it that on the afternoon of December 25, Christmas Day, Washington had his men assemble and listen as their officers read to them Paine’s powerful words.

     Feeling energized, the troops gathered up their muskets, what little ammunition they had, and followed Washington as he crossed the Delaware River, back into New Jersey, that night. The rain, sleet, and snow chilled them. A strong northeast wind cut through their coats. Some had no boots or shoes. Ice sheets and chunks of ice formed in the water. Conditions were most inhospitable.

     After a brief rest on the New Jersey shore, Washington marched his troops a dozen miles south towards Trenton where at eight o’clock in the morning, in a raging snowstorm, the Americans surrounded the Hessians. In two hours, it was all over when the surprised Hessians surrendered.

     On January 4, Washington attacked a British garrison at Princeton, New Jersey and claimed a second victory there. These two battles—at Trenton and Princeton—gave Americans the hope that they could defeat the Europeans. Washington though would need another six years before the British signed a peace treaty that recognized American independence.

     Americans recollect Washington’s daring raid on Trenton because of the impressive painting Washington Crossing the Delaware that Emanuel Leutze painted in 1850. Leutze has Washington standing up, facing the New Jersey shore. Seamen are rowing their small craft across a river filled with chunks of ice, and Lieutenant James Monroe stands behind Washington holding the American flag.

     The painting represents a historical fact that symbolizes what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls a “discovery about the human condition—that people could organize a society on the basis of liberty and freedom and actually make it work.”

     Early in the war Washington struggled to find his own leadership style, so different from that of the British or Germans. He said, “Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no control, cannot brook the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good Order and Government of an Army.” Because his troops were volunteers, he knew he could not bully them. He said, “A people unused to restraint must be led; they will not be drove.” So he stood in the boat with his troops and led them.

     Christmas is not the usual time to think of war and battling an enemy, and yet Washington, pinned down on the Delaware’s west bank, decided that he would raid Trenton on December 26. Fortunately for him and his American soldiers, his gamble succeeded.

EARTHQUAKES

by William H. Benson

December 6, 2012

     John Bradbury, a Scottish naturalist, came to the United States to float down the Mississippi River and collect botanical specimens. On December 15, 1811 he tied up his boat at Chicksaw Bluffs—the site of the the future Memphis, Tennessee—and retired for the night. At 2:15 a.m., he was awakened because the earth was shaking. Bradbury said that “All nature seemed running into chaos as wild-fowl fled, trees snapped, and river banks tumbled into the water.”

     Four aftershocks quickly followed, and then two more actual earthquakes shook the earth on January 23 and February 7, 1812. These quakes killed few, if any, mainly because of the sparse population in Arkansas and Missouri then. One can imagine the destruction if another earthquake equal in magnitude struck Memphis, Tennessee today.

     With larger human populations covering the Planet Earth, earthquakes now are deadly. Buildings collapse killing the occupants therein. Gas lines break causing fires, and if the quake occurs at sea, giant tsunami tidal waves flood the coastal lands for miles inland. 

     Japan’s recent earthquake struck on Friday, March 11, 2011. The floor of the Pacific Ocean, at a point 43 miles east of Japan’s coastline, was suddenly shoved upward, in what is called an “undersea megathrust earthquake.” With a magnitude of 9.03 it triggered a tsunami that caused immense property damage, swamped a nuclear reactor, and drowned 19,334 people.

     Haiti’s earthquake occurred on Tuesday, January 12, 2010. Its epicenter was 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, and its magnitude was only 7.0, but it killed between 220,000 and 316,000.

     Nearly as many were killed on Sunday, December 26, 2004 when another undersea megathrust earthquake triggered a tsunami that propelled a series of waves that washed ashore in Indonesia, the Sumatra Islands, Thailand, and India. This 9.3 magnitude earthquake killed 230,000.

     Then there was the earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska on March 27, 1964 that shook buildings and homes for nearly four minutes, killing 143 people. That quake reached a magnitude of 9.2.

     The worst natural disaster in United States history occurred in San Francisco on Wednesday, April 18, 1906 at 5:12 a.m. Some 3000 people lost their lives, and the quake destroyed 80% of San Francisco’s buildings and homes. Fires turned the city into a burning inferno.

     The Lisbon earthquake struck on November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, at 9:40 a.m. Its epicenter was 200 miles west of Portugual’s coast out in the Atlantic, but the quake destroyed Lisbon, killing perhaps as many as 100,000 people.

     Then there are the natural catastrophe’s above earth’s surface. Just days ago we witnessed the incredible power that Hurricane Sandy unleashed when it struck New York and New Jersey, bringing with it high winds and floods. It is only natural that human beings crouch in terror whenever they hear of such disasters, wondering when their turn will come.

     People react differently to disasters. Some journalists will spiel off wild predictions. Last Sunday in the New York Times, James Atlas predicted, “Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there is a good chance New York City will sink beneath the sea.” Really? Why make such a statement without offering proof?

     Others will blame the gods. The 1811-1812 earthquake “reinforced the evangelical religious notion that the end of the world was at hand.” Others will forecast future disasters. A character named Iben Browning predicted that another earthquake would occur on December 3, 1990 again in Arkansas and Missouri. The public was sufficiently alarmed, and so people stockpiled food, water, and batteries. Now it is called the Great Non-Event of 1990.

     The thinkers write novels. The Lisbon earthquake so disturbed the French writer, Voltaire, that he wrote Candide, or Optimism. In this rollicking satire, Voltaire has Candide’s instructor, Dr. Pangloss, teach the young Candide that “things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end; they must necessarily be created for the best end.” Candide goes out into the real world and experiences endless misfortunes. He walks through Lisbon days after the earthquake flattened the city. Through it all, Dr. Pangloss preaches that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”   

     In Candide Voltaire is objecting to the German philosopher Liebnitz, who argued that “our universe is the best possible one that God could have created.” Voltaire knew, and we know that it is not the best possible world. Earthquakes and tsunamis kill innocent people. Bacteria and viruses kill children. Old people suffer from arthritis. Cancer strikes young and old. House flies torment us.  

     We may live on this planet, but we do not rule it. Earth moves and acts according to its own rules that are far removed from our own interests. What human beings do best is adapt to whatever Earth tosses at us. After a flood and after our house collapses, we rebuild. We kill houseflies, and we find cures for diseases. We strive to make this planet more comfortable, in spite of the earthquakes.