VIETNAM

by William H. Benson

August 23, 2012

     The Vietnam War began on August 22, 1945, when French paratroopers dropped into southern Indochina to counter a coup by guerrilla forces led by the Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh. This war was less hot, more cold, and more protracted than the war with the Japanese. The French army battled Ho Chi Minh and the Communists for the next nine years, until March of 1954, when the French lost a crucial victory at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

     By then the French had their fill of Vietnam. They met the Communists at a Geneva Conference, and there signed an armistice agreement that divided Vietnam into two states: North and South.

     The Americans stepped in. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter, dated October 1, 1954, to South Vietnam’s new leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and declared American support in light of the North’s aggressive tactics: “The purpose of this offer is to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” The support was limited and intended to only provide arms to the South Vietnamese.

     In the winter of 1959-60, the North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam. In an article that appeared in The New York Times two weeks ago, on August 12, Lien-Hang Nguyen explained the Communists’ rationale for war then. “Revolutionary war was an effective way to deflect attention from domestic problems, including a devastating land reform campaign, a dissident intellectual movement, and an unsuccessful state plan for socialist transformation of the economy.” So they attacked the South.

     John F. Kennedy, the new U.S. President, elected in November of 1960, stuck with Eisenhower’s plan to contain Communist expansion in Vietnam, and he did so by providing more money and more military advisers than Ike had. On May 11, 1961, Kennedy issued Memorandum 52 that reiterated U. S. objectives: “to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam, and to create in that country a viable and increasingly democratic society.”

     One can see the battle of ideas approaching a flash point. The Americans wanted a free South Vietnam, able to defend itself, with periodic elections and private ownership of land and property. The Communists wanted national ownership of all land and property, Communist Party-control of all official governing posts, and absolute control of the media. The two ideologies would inevitably clash.

     November 22, 1963 came and went, and Kennedy’s Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, succeeded him in the White House. Johnson’s military advisers insisted that he accelerate U.S. support for the South Vietnamese, but he waived them aside, knowing that public opinion would frown on a military strike, and so he would wait until after the November 1964 Presidential election.

     On May 27, 1964, Johnson spoke on the telephone to his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy  and indicated his anxiety if he allowed the Communists in the North to overrun the free people in the South. If it fell, so too would Laos, Cambodia, and the rest of southeast Asia. If one domino fell, so would all the others. Publicly, Johnson said, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii , and next week we’ll be fighting in San Francisco.” Because he believed in the “domino theory,” he felt obliged to support the South Vietnamese people.

     The North Vietnamese attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf Tonkin, and on August 7, 1964, Congress gave LBJ authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.”

    Johnson won the election by a landslide over Barry Goldwater in November 1964. On February 24, 1965, just seven weeks after his inaugural address, he introduced Operation Rolling Thunder. American military aircraft would bomb the North Vietnamese into submission. He intended it to last eight weeks, but it lasted for three years. On March 8, 1965, Johnson sent the first 3500 Marines to South Vietnam.

     He never envisaged what lay ahead for him and the American and Vietnamese people.

     James Cameron, a reporter near Hanoi and the Vietcong, wrote on December 10, 1965 that the North Vietnamese people adapted by burying their army under branches and leaves by day and moving at night. When an America jet screamed overhead, the reaction was horror as the people scrambled for protection. Cameron wrote, “There was somehow a sense of outrage against civility: what an impertinence, one felt, what arrogance, what an offence against manners. The people in North Vietnam are agreeable, shy people, and very poor. Will this sort of thing blow Communism out of their heads?”

     Nixon won the White House in 1968, accelerated the bombing, but finally decided to let the South Vietnamese fight their own war as he drew American forces down. Under President Gerald Ford, in April of 1975, the last of the Americans fled Saigon. The war in Vietnam was officially over.

     Question: What war did the U.S. fight for 7382 days? Answer: The war in Vietnam.

PROGRESS AND OPTIMISM

by William H. Benson

August 9, 2012

     Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher of the early twentieth-century, depicted time’s movement—from the future into an immediate present and then settling into a receding past—by describing a painting called “Angelus Novus.” In that painting, an angel faces the past, his back to the future. “His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.”

     The angel would like to turn around and face that impending future, but a storm called progress has “got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them.” He cannot reorient his position. What that angel sees is “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is prevented from stopping this ongoing carnage. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But he cannot. 

     Such a vision of history is certainly pessimistic. Benjamin sees the past as little more than a continual series of unfolding disasters, and that the angel, this divine being who is supposedly in charge of time’s incessant flow, is paralyzed from halting the carnage because of a storm called progress.

     Appearing in last week’s edition of Newsweek was a column by the journalist and historian Nial Ferguson that so reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s negative view of history. Ferguson entitled his column, “I wish I were a technoptimist.” Ferguson argues that even though technological advances are spellbinding, they do not always ensure a positive or a progressive future. So he writes:

     “There was great technological progress during the 1930s. But it did not end the Depression. That took a world war. So could something comparably grim happen in our own time? Don’t rule it out. Let’s remind ourselves of the sequence of events: economic depression, crisis of democracy, road to war.”

     Ferguson points out that, “Technology can also empower radicalized (or just plain crazy) individuals and groups.” He then goes so far as to agree with the Chinese in their condemnation of “participatory democracy” as a defective governing model, and next he predicts “a really big war,” an Armageddon, originating in North Africa or the Middle East and drawing in all the major world powers.

     There is a lot of pessimism out there today. One need not look far to find it. The poet agrees, “Hope lies to mortals, but man’s deceiver was never mine.” This negative thinking reminds me of a favorite quote, “I tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept creeping in.”

     Benjamin and Ferguson may be right. The world’s nations may fall off a cliff, drift into an economic maelstrom, and march off to war, but then again they may not. I ask you, “Where is your optimism? Where is your I-can-do-it attitude?” Conditions in the past have been worse. Franklin Roosevelt faced a Great Depression, Adolph Hitler, and the Japanese Empire. Ronald Reagan faced the Soviets and their immense nuclear stockpile, and yet the Western powers whipped the Depression, Hitler, and Japan, and the Soviets disarmed themselves in the face of Reagan’s determination.

     The historian Stephen Ambrose displayed a far better mindset when he wrote of America’s pioneers. “Nearly every American believed in the future, in the doctrine that things were getting better all the time, for individuals and for the country as a whole.” The reason they believed in a brighter future is because they worked hard to make it happen. “Americans worked because they believed it was godly to do so, because of the vastness of the task facing them, and because the work would be rewarded.”     

     The 19th-century French aristocrat De Tocqueville visited North America and observed, “The first thing which strikes a traveler to the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition.” The historian Henry Steele Commager boldly stated that, “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America.”

     This difference between pessimism and optimism was clearly seen in the leadership styles of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Where Carter worked fifteen hours a day trying to untangle a series of knots and a host of seemingly-unsolvable problems, Reagan worked at the most six hours a day and sliced through those same problems with decisions that in hindsight were more correct than wrong.

     I believe that America can set things right in the world by first setting things right at home. In other words, America can lead by example rather than by dictating orders to the world’s other nations or threatening to stomp off to war. Americans can govern themselves effectively now, as they have done so in the past, and they can work hard to prevent wars and economic calamity. Yes, Mr. Ferguson, I agree with you. “It’s a dangerous world,” and we must ever be vigilant and alert, but instead of trucking with pessimism and negativity, let’s shoulder instead a positive and optimistic mindset and let the cheerfulness creep in.

PALEOLITHIC EMOTIONS

by William H. Benson

July 26, 2012

     I happened to read a quote in The Week‘s July 20^th edition. Edward Wilson, the Harvard biologist and twice the Pulitzer Prize winner for his books, once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Now, that is a perceptive observation, but I am not sure that I agree that there is a “real problem.”

     “God-like technology” is a stretch, even though humanity’s technological advances are quite impressive. From Clovis spear points to the bow and arrow during the Paleolithic era; from the crossbow to the catapult during the medieval era; and from the automobile to airplanes, jets, computers, and cell-phones during the modern age, human beings have demonstrated repeatedly their astounding ability to devise tools.

     As for medieval institutions, I think that Wilson was referring to four institutions—the state, the church, the university, and the guild—and that he thinks those evolved during the Middle Ages and have not progressed much since then. If so, I disagree. Where once there was only a monarch, a king or a queen, we also now have a republican form of democracy, and this summer our country, the United States of America, will witness that form of self-government in action at the Republican and Democratic Presidential conventions.

     The medieval church was once a single church, a uni-verse, but today we enjoy a multiple number of churches, a multi-verse. Voltaire said, “Where there is one religion, there is tyranny. Where there are two, they cut each others’ throats, but where there are a multiple number of faiths, there is peace.” The university, as it did during the Middle Ages, still has a teacher, students, a classroom, desks, grades, and a school year broken into semesters, but that too is giving way to new educational developments, such as on-line classes.

     The guild, such as those for vinters or physicians or lawyers or barrel-makers, permitted only master craftsman into its membership, but only after those masters had completed training first as apprentices and then as journeymen. Today we have similar requirements for entry into most businesses: required hours of education, hands-on training, a license, and an overseeing board. Competency is the goal.

     The state, the church, the university, and the guild may have had medieval origins, but they each have advanced well beyond their starting points, all for the betterment of humankind. People now can discover their careers in either the church, the state, the university, or the guild, and they can move freely from one to another.

     As for Wilson’s reference to Paleolithic emotions, I think that he meant that human beings still feel that same set of emotions that the stone-age people felt: anger, rage, jealousy, greed, sensuality, fear, sorrow, bewilderment, kindness, generosity, surprise, delight, love, and hate. I would agree. Human nature has not changed in several millennium.

     That slate of emotions that assaults you and me every single morning upon our awakening has done the same to all living Homo Sapiens since the first human beings stood upright on the African savanna. Before those emotions’ onslaught we are rendered helpless. It is only with civilization, plus those medieval institutions, and our own internal self-control mechanisms that we have learned to manage.

     It is not a negative thing to feel and experience emotions, both the pleasing kind—love, kindness, gentility, hospitality, compassion, and generosity—as well as the detestable kind—hatred, guilt, fear, hostility, sadness, and regrets. It is both kinds that make us truly human. Some people display more of the good than the bad kind, but for others, the reverse is true. Not all of us can be as saintly as Mother Teresa, nor as awful as Joseph Stalin.

     Without our Paleolithic emotions, our lives would resemble those of ants or bees, social insects who act according to their instincts, who work for the colony’s betterment, rather than for their own.

     Yes, we all feel those Paleolithic emotions, and yet human beings have learned to blunt and thwart their ill-effects, to work around and with them. In our modern-day caves, most of us want the same things: a comfortable dwelling, a steady supply of food and clothing, the fire that brings us light and heat in the winter, the breezes that cool us in the summer, security from predators and enemies, agreeable and loving companions, and a hope for a better future.

     Surrounded by the modern versions of the medieval institutions—the state, the church, the university, and the guild—and blessed by the amazing tools that technology has provided for our use, we can work to fulfill our deepest wishes and overcome that supposed “real problem of humanity.”

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

by William H. Benson

July 12, 2012

     William Falk, the editor at The Week, described his busy life one day last week. “I am in the 15^th hour of a day that began at 6 a.m. with some work at home, a 9 a.m. trip to the doctor, more work on my laptop in the waiting room, some text updates to my wife Karla, a work-filled commute, a full day of pedal-to-the metal cranking on deadline, a commute back home, a rushed dinner with my daughter, and a few more hours on the laptop, pecking out this editor’s letter.”

     Such a schedule sounds relentless, and it is, but it is not a-typical, not uncommon. Many American people push themselves to work that number of hours daily for five, six, or even seven days a week.

     Tim Kreider, a writer for The New York Times, wrote a column last week that he entitled “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” In it he argued that people’s “busyness is purely self-imposed. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.” He may be right.

     Kreider works only four or five hours most mornings, rides his bike in the afternoons, and reads books or watches movies evenings. He says, “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.”

     Henry David Thoreau, that eccentric resident of Concord, Massachusetts in the middle of the eighteenth century, argued that even four or five hours of work every day is too much. He turned the whole scheme of work and living upside down, arguing that a person should only work one day a week and live the other six, or work two weeks a year and vacation the other fifty. Few people in today’s modern society would dare follow his prescription for living, and yet he did.

     On July 4, 1845, his Independence Day, he moved into a rustic cabin that he had built near Walden Pond, and eight days later, on July 12, he marked his birthday, turning twenty-eight. Near his cabin he planted a garden, and so he fed himself. For the next two years, until September 6, 1847, he lived at Walden Pond, proving two propositions: first, that a person can live with a minimum of things, and second that a person can live with a minimum of labor. There, he wrote his book, Walden.

     In it, he asked pertinent questions, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life.” “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?” He challenged and rejected society’s basic premises. He would not hurry; he would slow down and savor life’s pleasures.

     He belonged to no church, having rejected most theology. He detested government’s intrusion into his life, saying that “the best government is that government which governs least.” He had no use for family, marriage, or friends. He had no ambition to acquire personal comforts, and he looked askance upon technology. For example, Henry derided the post office, saying, “I never received more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.” One wonders what he would say about e-mail.

     What does a person have left if he or she has challenged and rejected religion, government, family, career, a home, and society? Two things remain, and the first is nature: trees, air, sunrises, muskrats, squirrels, birds. So he wrote, “I am monarch of all I survey.” He kept appointments with a birch tree. The second is paper and pencil, and so in his cabin he pushed words around on paper, making known his counter-arguments about life and writing what literary scholars today consider great literature.

     It is quite true that our lives today are hectic, packed with the pursuit of things we may or may not need, things we have already bought on the installment plan and now need to pay for. Our jobs require exceptional effort in the name of productivity, and Henry David Thoreau laughs at us. His words still     haunt us, and they puncture many of our cherished dreams, especially our love affair with busyness.

     Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep.”

     Yes, Henry, you were right, and you are still right. You saw a lot more sunrises and sunsets than I will, and the squirrels and birds ate out of your hands. But if given a choice between my comfortable home and your rustic cabin near Walden Pond, on these suffocating hot July days, I will choose my home every time. I like air conditioning, and I think you would too.

MASSACHUSETTS VS. MISSISSIPPI

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2012

     Bob Kerrey wants to return to the Senate. He left in 2001 after completing two terms there, and now after ten years of living in Greenwich Village near Washington Square Park, he wants to return to Nebraska and run for the Senate. Democratic leaders, such as Harry Reid, the majority leader, have  pleaeded with him to come back, but, Kerry said, “just about everybody else who lives in Washington told me not to do it. They just said the place has become too toxic and you can’t get things done.”

     “Too toxic,” they told him. The Republicans paint the Democrats as free-spending and irresponsible liberals, and the Democrats accuse the reactionary Tea Partiers of daring to close down the federal government. The bitter partisanship is like a whirling cyclone pulling some in and ejecting others out. No one governs. “You can’t get things done,” he was told.

     As bad as it is, it could be worse. This time the political polarization is not necessarily as sectional as it was over 150 years ago, and we have not witnessed a breakdown in the rule of law on Congress’ floors. That happened once. On May 22, 1856, a South Carolina Representative named Preston Brooks walked into the Senate chamber, stepped towards the Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner who was writing at his desk, read a statement, lifted a cane, and then beat Sumner about the head a dozen times.

     Sumner lived through the bloody ordeal but was absent from the Senate for the next two years, suffering from headaches and memory loss, but his Senate chair was kept vacant until his return.

     What had provoked the assault was Sumner’s two-day speech on May 19-20, in which the Massachusetts Senator had denounced in the most vile language the advancement of slavery into Kansas and also ridiculed the South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, who happened to be Preston Brooks’ uncle. People in the Southern states lived by an honor code, and to resolve issues people resorted to dueling or assaults. Not extracting revenge for a slight was considered cowardly.

     Most Congressmen suspected that if compromise failed between the slave South and the free North, then the Union would be lost, divided, and that a bloody Civil War would follow. Sadly, tragically, unfortunately, it all happened, and no one stopped it. No one person could stop it.

     The American people are proud of their country, but so too are they proud of their state, that state  where they live now or where they were born and grew up in. There is an unwritten rule in every one of the fifty states. “Do not belittle another person’s state.” A person cheers for his or her college football or basketball team, and so cheers for his or her state. U. S. citizens defend the honor of their own state.

     The news magazine, The Week, published two short articles next to each other on May 25. On top was an article on Massachusetts, saying that it was “The healthiest state in the nation,” and immediately below it was another article on Mississippi, claiming that it was “Where race remains relevant.”

     The first article proclaimed how rosy and wonderful things were in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s state. “Its schools have produced the best scores on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests, with the lowest gap between poor and wealthier kids; on average, our students even outperform those from Singapore and Japan. Our per capita income is the second highest in the nation.”

     Eli Hager, an eighth-grade teacher in the rural Mississippi Delta, wrote the second article, detailing how awful things are there. “The schools here are as ‘fundamentally separate and unequal’ as they were in the 1950s. White students are sent to prestigious private academies and have every opportunity to succeed, while the state’s failing public schools are 95 percent black, churning out students who are ‘functionally illiterate’ and destined for poverty or jail.” His words are harsh, even biting.

     Hager states that “folk music historians note that the word ‘Kumbaya’ mispronounces a blues lyric that urged listeners unaware of injustice to ‘come by here’ and see it.” It is there, if you look for it.

     How can it be that a New England state has so much, and yet a Southern state has so little? Again, it is the age-old discrepancy between rich and poor, between haves and have-nots, between urban and rural, between advantaged and disadvantaged. Sadly, tragically, and unfortunately, it is so, and one person can do so little to improve the differences.

     Bob Kerrey wants to leave New York, live in Nebraska but work in Washington, in the Senate, and make a difference. A reporter asked him what the Democratic leaders will think of him “slashing trillions of dollars from entitlement programs” or of banning party caucuses. “My guess is,” answered Kerry, “is that they’ll think my proposals are wrong. So we have an argument, that’s all. Nobody’s going to die. Nobody’s going to haul me across the river and shoot me, like Burr did Hamilton.”

     Hopefully, no one will step up to him in the Senate chamber and break a cane over his head, either. That is, if he wins the election. I wish him well.

Sunday in the Park with George

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2012

     Georges Seurat, the French artist, worked for two years, from 1884 until 1886, on his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is a large painting, almost seven feet wide and over ten feet long, and today it hangs in the Art Institute in Chicago. Instead of painting with the usual brush strokes, Seurat pointed his brush’s tip at the canvas and dotted it with thousands of dots until the picture emerged, an art style now called pointillism.

     The scene that Seurat painted is that of a park on the shore of an island in the middle of the Seine River near Paris. The park is a grassy area that slopes downward to the left to the river, and one can see in the painting’s upper left corner a sail boat and a canoe on the water. In the scene’s upper right corner stand the trees. In the foreground on the green grass, are the people, both adults and children, who are either standing or sitting, and most are peering to the left, towards the water. Some hold umbrellas. Most wear hats. The women wear bustles. There are two dogs.

     The only person missing in the painting is the artist himself, Georges Seurat.

     Thirty years ago a writer named James Lapine wrote a fictional account of the artist Georges Seurat when he was painting that scene. Lapine and a dramatist named Stephen Sondheim then joined forces, and together they wrote the Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George.

     The story centers around George, a self-absorbed, inattentive, and consumed artist, who simply cannot ever stop painting long enough to connect with the people he meets in the park. He will not let down his guard for one moment. Dot, his mistress and model, is with him in the park and begs him to speak and listen to her, but he will not. The writer Roger Rosenblatt says, “He ignores her, leaves her high and dry. He’s an artiste, after all.” She finds him attractive but not great company.

     An old woman and her nurse join them in the park. They leave. Others walk in and try to visit with George. He will not. They leave. Finally, Dot leaves him for another man, and the two sail to America.

     “But then, in the very last scene [of Act 1],” Roger Rosenblatt writes, “the separate parts of Seurat’s painting coalesce before our eyes. Everything magically comes together. And the audience gasps, weeps in wonder.” Those people whom George dismissed throughout Act 1 take their respective place on stage as they appear in his painting.

     Rosenblatt then asks a curious question: “So who is the superior character—the man who attends to the feelings of his loved ones, or the artist who affects eternity?” That question I think is unfair in that it creates a false dilemma, insisting that a person must choose one or the other: be a family man or be a professional. Yet, a man or a woman can actually choose both. Also, I insist that the family man can affect eternity, and that not everyone would agree that a distinguished work of art does affect eternity.

     For nearly fifty years now, my mother’s side of the family has gathered for a picnic at the park each year on Father’s Day, a Sunday afternoon. At that picnic in the park, there is no river, no sailing boats, nobody brings an umbrella, the women do not wear bustles, no one brings his mistress, and no artist brings out canvas and easel and paints a picture. But there are trees, green grass, at least two dogs, and plenty of people—men, women, boys, and girls—and they talk to each other. They are not all looking in the same direction, to the left.

     A sad personal note: my dad passed away on Monday morning, June 4, in the emergency room at Sterling Regional MedCenter. He suffered a ruptured aorta. He was eighty-four. The well-attended funeral service was held on Friday, June 8. My dad loved that Father’s Day picnic every year, just as he  loved all the times when his family gathered: at Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, or any other occasion. I miss my dad even now, and I will miss him at the annual Father’s Day picnic.

     My dad was the opposite of the fictional George Seurat. My dad was a great talker who connected extremely well with people. He loved my mother. There was no mistress in his life. He had no use for creating art, mainly because he worked hard to provide for his family. He was an active participant in life, not just its observer.

     Who is the superior character in this existence called human life? That is a crucial question, one worth thinking through until we each arrive at our answer. Is it the celebrity, the abundantly talented, and the over-achiever? Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. Or is it the dad, mother, grandparent, brother, sister, aunt, or uncle who is ultra-sensitive to the feelings of others? Again, perhaps yes. Perhaps no. 

     This Sunday afternoon I will be in the park on Father’s Day, not to paint a picture, but to visit and connect with friends and family. My best wishes to all.