JOHN ADAMS AND INVASION

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2012

     At nine o’clock on the evening of March 5, 1770, a single British sentry was standing at his post in front of the Custom House in Boston when a rabble of several hundred hooligans gathered about that single guard and began to taunt him. Eight additional British soldiers rushed out into the cold and snow to assist him, carrying with them their loaded muskets, bayonets, and drawn swords. The mob pelted the Redcoats with snowballs, oyster shells, and sticks, and then shouted, “Kill them! Kill them!”

     The soldiers fired into the mob, and five men dropped dead. This, the Boston Massacre, was the opening salvo in the American Revolution.

     John Adams, a thirty-four-year-old attorney in Massachusetts, was appointed to defend the soldiers and their captain. At the first trial, for Thomas Preston the captain, the jury found him not guilty. At the second trial for the soldiers, Adams told the jury, “Soldiers quartered in a populous town will always occasion two mobs where they prevent one. They are wretched conservators of the peace.”

     “Facts are stubborn things,” Adams said, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

     Facts are indeed stubborn things. They get in the way of our prejudices, they disturb our own pet theories, they block our false hypotheses, but, if permitted, they will point to the truth.

     Thomas Gradgrind, in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, shouted repeatedly at his students, “In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

     To that I respond, “Your facts tell you one thing; but what about those facts you do not know. What do they tell you?”

     The jury found two of the eight soldiers guilty of manslaughter, but Adams saved their lives: their punishment was that their thumbs were branded.

     If there is one fact that emerges from that bit of history, it is that people resent invasion. They will react badly to soldiers from distant lands marching upon their ground, even if the invasion is considered a defensive move or a liberation. Territories are fixed, boundaries are drawn upon maps, and those that dare cross those lines invite retribution.

     For decades the British living in America defended themselves, fought their own wars against the French and the Indians, and now they resented the King dispatching Redcoats to do for them what they had always done for themselves. Those Redcoats never felt welcome in Boston.

     Human beings’ minds are hard-wired to react negatively to attack and invasion. Citizens of the Confederacy in the South deeply resented the North’s invasion of their territory, and so for them, it was not the Civil War but the War of Northern Aggression.   

     The countries of Europe in 1940 deeply resented Nazi Germany’s march across the European continent. Asians across the Pacific chafed under the Japanese empire’s ruthless domination, but the  war was on with the United States when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. North Korea invaded South Korea. First, the French and then the United States invaded Vietnam, and both were trounced and evicted. In 1980 Russia invaded Afghanistan and experienced a similar fate.

     Saddam Hussein swept into Kuwait and claimed the country for Iraq, but the first George Bush drove him back out. Al Queda and its suicidal terrorists invaded New York City and Washington D.C., and the second George Bush invaded Iraq, nine years ago this month, only to meet the rawest forms of opposition, and they were not snowballs, oyster shells, and sticks.

     Each of these instances demonstrate the push and shove that takes place at the global level, but is felt at the individual and personal level. That individuals resent invasion and assault is a fact.

     In the twentieth-century the historian Arnold Toynbee published his ten-volume work, A Study of History, in which he argued that “sooner or later every civilization encounters a challenge that threatens its very existence.” Lincoln faced that kind of a challenge in 1861, and so did Winston Churchill in 1939. Vietnam did not threaten the United States’ existence in 1964, and neither did Iraq in 2003, despite fallacious claims of weapons of mass destruction.

     Israel has continually felt its very existence has been threatened ever since its independence in 1948, and today the Israeli’s want to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities. However, the Palestinian people feel resentful that the Israelis settled upon their own land. Two different people claim ownership to the same land, a similar situation that the Native Americans faced.

     Arguments can quickly escalate into battles and war: that is a fact. Snowballs, oyster shells, and sticks one day, and bullets and cannonballs the next.

COLONEL MUAMMAR al-GADDAFI

by William H. Benson

February 23, 2012

     Machiavelli, the sixteenth century Italian writer and thinker, wrote in his book The Prince the following: “Private citizens who become princes purely by good fortune do so with little exertion on their own part; but subsequently they maintain their position only by considerable exertion. They make the journey as if they had wings; their problems start when they alight.” In other words, for a prince the hard work is not latching on to power, but maintaining his grip upon it thereafter.

     One prince who exercised extreme power over a country was Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.

     South of Italy and across the Mediterranean Sea lies the north African country of Libya. There Gaddafi worked out the cruder and finer points of a dictatorship that lasted in Libya for forty-two years. On September 1, 1969, in a bloodless coup, Gaddafi led a group of military officers that overthrew King Idris I, abolished the monarchy, and pitched aside the old constitution.

     To entrench his power he kicked out the Americans from their air base, drove out the multi-national oil companies, nationalized oil production, provided free education, refused to assume any debt, and most importantly, he crushed any opposition. Voices of dissent were silenced. People disappeared.

     One strange thing he did was change the names of two months. August, a reference to Caesar Augustus, he changed to Hannibal, and July, in honor of Julius Caesar, he changed to Nasser.

     Borrowing from Mao Tse Tung’s revolutionary tactics, Gaddafi wrote out his political manifesto, entitling it, not a Red Book as did Mao, but the Green Book. In it Gaddafi argued for lodging power in committees, rather than in tribes, sects, parties, or classes. Then, fueled by visions of apocalyptic revolution and worldwide destruction, he turned his sights upon international affairs, sponsoring a series of despicable international terrorists strikes.

     The New York Times journalist, Anthony Shadid, visited Libya and came away shocked. “It was one of those places,” he said, “I had no sense of. I had been there once before. It was a surreal experience. It happened back in 1995. It was a country that felt to me beyond traumatized. I mean its civil society had been wiped out. Almost every institution that would have knit the country together Colonel Gaddafi had destroyed.”

     On February 18, 2011, just a year ago, the end for Gaddafi began. On that day protestors followed the lead of those in Tunisia and Egypt, took to the streets, and demanded the overthrow of Gaddafi’s government. It was another scene in the “Arab Spring.”

     Gaddafi’s forces fought back, but the National Transitional Council, the NTC, soon had the support of NATO and American missiles, aircraft, and drones. In the month of August, actually Hannibal, Gaddafi fled Tripoli, but not on elephants, and found refuge in Sirte. In October he was among those who fled Sirte in a motorized convoy, was captured, and killed. Four days later he was buried in an undisclosed grave in the desert.

     Last weekend, the Libyan people celebrated the one year anniversary of the revolt. They have much to cheer about: Gaddafi is gone. Yet, conditions in the country are chaotic. “The NTC is neither trusted nor in control. The country is run by hundreds of militias which refuse to give up their arms or submit to the NTC’s authority. It’s everyone for himself.” What color of book will emerge as the legitimate one? Another green, or red, or perhaps yellow or blue? It is a question where the country will go.

     Beyond the east shores of the Mediterranean Sea is the country of Syria, and there the revolt that started as part of the Arab Spring has turned vicious. Bashar al Assad’s forces killed an estimated 5000 defiant protestors and innocent civilians by the end of 2011, and the past few weeks the killings have accelerated. He knows that should he lose this fight, his fate will be the same as that of Gaddafi’s. Dictators do not normally retire to a country estate.

     This struggle for power reminds me of Shakespeare’s quote from his play Julius Caesar: “O, that a man might know the end of this day’s business. But it sufficeth that the day will end, and then the end will be known.”

     Anthony Shadid, the American journalist I mentioned above, died last Friday, February 17. He was fleeing Syria when he suffered an asthma attack, brought on by an allergic reaction to his guide’s horses. He was forty-three, an American casualty in this Arab Spring that has now lasted a full year.

THE PERILS OF THE CELEBRITY

by William H. Benson

February 9, 2012

     On February 9, 1864, George Armstrong Custer married Elizabeth Bacon, a girl from his hometown of Monroe, Michigan. Libby’s father did not approve of the match, because Custer was the son of the village blacksmith, but she loved this dashing general, the youngest in the U.S. Army.

     After the Civil War ended, Custer proved himself an adept media personality, carefully polishing both his boots and his image. He wore a sharp Army Uniform and a slouch hat, his wavy blond hair dangling out in ringlets. So that newspapers would publish reports of his adventures fighting Indians on the Great Plains, he invited journalists along on his daring military campaigns.

     Brash, impulsive, a showboat, “a vain dandy,” he eventually flamed out. Thinking himself invincible, he flirted with disaster, assumed too much risk, put himself in harm’s way, and his enemies cut him down. His widowed wife then wrote three books of his adventures, slanting them all towards promoting his memory and his image as a gallant hero. One can safely call him America’s first star.

     Over 2400 stars are etched into the sidewalk on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, along Hollywood and Vine. It is rumored that the first person to receive a star was Joanne Woodward, on February 9, 1960, for her portrayal of a woman with multiple personalities in the movie The Three Faces of Eve. Actually, she was just one in that first group of 1500 to receive stars, but she was the first to arrive on Hollywood Boulevard with a cameraman. All kinds of stars have subsequently been honored, such as Billy Graham, Woody Woodpecker, Lassie, and Joanne Woodward’s husband, Paul Newman.

     On January 29, 1958, Newman married Woodward, and two years later they fled Hollywood and settled in Westport, Connecticut where they raised their children. In 2006, a reporter asked Paul Newman how he and Woodward had stayed married for so long, and he answered, “I have steak at home. Why go out for hamburger?” He also said that, “It’s absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and the career. . . . It’s been a privilege to be here.”

     Along the way he learned to check his risk-taking impulses, settled down, enjoyed his family and his home, worked at his film career, and steered clear of the Hollywood party scene. The couple celebrated their fiftieth anniversary on January 29, 2008, and eight months later on September 26, Paul Newman passed away at the age of 83, due to lung cancer.

     Achieving stardom comes with a monumental cost, the loss of anonymity. Lindsay Lohan at the age of eleven was adorably cute in the remake of The Parent Trap, but ever since, she has tried repeatedly but failed to handle her celebrity status. In May of 2010 a judge gave her a new script to memorize: weekly alcohol education classes, an alcohol-monitoring bracelet, and random drug tests.

     Daniel Radcliffe was also eleven years old when he was cast as Harry Potter and was propelled into fame, and he too started drinking nights after filming days. Now at twenty-two, he admits that when filming some of the scenes in the Harry Potter movies, he showed up mornings at the set drunk. “I can point to many scenes where I’m just gone. Dead behind the eyes.”

     Achieving fame, as difficult as it is, is really the easy part. The hard part is when it happens, knowing how to handle it properly, maintaining respectability, and exercising self-management. Someone once said of Elvis Presley, “On a scale of one to ten that measures a person’s ability to handle fame and stardom, Elvis was at most a two.”

     Mary Moody Emerson told her nephew Ralph Waldo to “Turn up your nose at glory and honor,” but years later, Ralph advised his readers to “Hitch your wagon to a star.” Elizabeth Bacon did just that, and George Armstrong Custer’s star fizzled.

     Like cars and trucks, human bodies break down with high-mileage living. The fast Hollywood celebrity life-style cuts years off the back end of a person’s life, and people have known this for centuries. To paraphrase St. Augustine, who wrote in a different context, some aspiring actor might write, “Lord, give me fame, but do not give it yet.”

     If my research is correct, as of this moment, I do not see Lindsay Lohan’s name on that list of stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but then neither is John Denver, Julia Roberts, Clint Eastwood, or George Clooney. Either they did not crave the publicity or they were too cheap to pay the fee. Most certainly, George Armstrong Custer’s name is not there either, for he, a natural-born showman, was born a century too soon to ever achieve his own star.

VIRTUES VS. VICES

by William H. Benson

January 26, 2012

     During the Middle Ages, it was decided that human beings suffer from at least seven venial sins or vices, and they include: pride, envy, greed, lust, anger, gluttony, slothfulness. Standing in opposition to each of those sins is a contrasting virtue: humility, kindness, charity, chastity, patience, temperance and diligence. One is considered either proud or humble, envious or kind, greedy or charitable, lustful or chaste, angry or patient, gluttonous or temperate, and slothful or diligent.

     It is a neat system, dividing human behavior into seven categories that is further divided into two halves, one good and one evil, yet I wonder about this scheme, this dualism, this “either / or” division into two irreducible components. I wonder if it is the final answer when judging human behavior.

     I would agree that those people who demonstrate a preponderance of anger or lust or pride live misery-filled lives, and that those whose lives radiate patience and diligence and kindness evoke joy and contentment to those about them, but I question limiting it to seven, as if they are all-inclusive.

     Others would add to that list of seven vices “cruelty, dishonesty, fear, superstition, and deceit.”

George Bernard Shaw argued strongly for the virtue “responsibility.” The critic E. R. Bentley said, “The cardinal virtue in the Shavian scale . . . is responsibility; every creed he has attacked Shaw has attacked on the grounds of irresponsibility.”

     Then, there are the four cardinal virtues of “prudence, justice, restraint, and courage,” and the three theological virtues of “faith, hope, and love.” I would suggest that human behavior is a shade more complex than just seven vices and seven virtues, but that it is multifaceted.

     Also, instead of flashing only green or red, or residing at the north or south pole, I would argue in favor of a continuum of gradually-changing colors and of geographical points along the way between those poles. For example, consider pride and humility. Somewhere in that gaping distance between the two lies a strong sense of self-esteem, and lodged between greed and charity is ambition.

     Benjamin Franklin did not consider human failings so much as sins but as “errata,” human failings that needed correcting. One learns as one lives what is proper behavior and what is not. He thought that people come equipped in this life with an eraser, and that they should learn to erase their mistakes. In Franklin’s autobiography, he listed thirteen virtues: “temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.”

     He then worked hard to incorporate those thirteen into his daily living, but on occasion, as all human beings will do, he failed. “Yet,” he wrote, “I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”

     I suggest concentrating on ideals, such as “prudence, discernment, and deliberation.” Prudence, according to the dictionary, is that “ability to govern and discipline oneself by use of reason.” Discernment is that “ability to grasp and comprehend what is obscure,” and encompasses other ideals: discrimination, perception, a penetrating mind, insight, acumen, and shrewd soundness of judgment.

     Deliberation is key. With deliberation, time slows down, as one ponders the issues, considers, sorts, balances, and turn over the consequences. All ideas, like pancakes, need flipped occasionally to see what is on the other side, and like a package, deliberation arrives at our door only after a series of brutal experiences. We learn what works and how to behave, and so we gain an inkling of judgment.

     I recently ran across a passage about Cotton Mather, the colonial New England Puritan. Of him, a biographer wrote, “He went through this world in a state of emotional exaltation, of passion and reaction, which left him in all the sixty years of his conscious life hardly an hour of that cool thoughtfulness without which any deliberation is impossible.” Deliberation is key.

     Our nation is now in the grip of the Republican primaries, and so a “fog of rhetoric” has settled down about us. Peering through that fog, we seek to process, evaluate, and judge each of the candidates’ virtues, vices, ideals, character, tactics, strategies, and political conclusions, and we want to know if they line up or agree even remotely with our own. If they do, we vote “yes.” Otherwise, “no.”

     Everyone carries within their minds a filter or a firewall that prevents viruses and foreign ideas from invading, and that filter is composed of our attitudes, habits, past experiences, what we have been told to believe, and what we believe now. My filter tells me that I am looking for a candidate with none of the seven vices, all of the seven virtues, plus countless other virtues, such as responsibility, plus healthy doses of prudence and discernment, and especially a talent for deliberation. Slow down and deliberate.

     It would also be nice if he or she displayed a sense of humor. William Falk wrote last week in The Week, “Humor humanizes. Make people laugh, and you’re halfway home to getting their votes.”

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE

by William H. Benson

January 12, 2012

     Alexander Hamilton was born 257 years ago yesterday, on January 11, 1755. He was a bright and articulate young man, who had served in George Washington’s cabinet as the new government’s first Secretary of Treasury. But at the age of forty-nine, he agreed to a duel with Thomas Jefferson’s vice-president, Aaron Burr. Honor bade Hamilton meet Burr’s challenge. At the duel Burr shot Alexander Hamilton, and the next day he died, a tragic loss to our country. He would have made a great President.

     Steve Pinker, a Harvard professor of psychology, published last fall a most interesting book, The Better Angels of our Nature, in which he examines the reasons that underlay the steep decline in levels of violence over the millennium that humanity has ruled our planet. In his book, Pinker describes Hamilton’s decision. “Yet in 1804 this brilliant man did something that by today’s standards was astonishingly stupid.”

     Dueling was by then on the way out. Because New York state had recently outlawed dueling, Burr and Hamilton rowed across the Hudson River to New Jersey to conduct their business. As a means of dispensing with quarrels, dueling was by then considered an act of violence, and so the government had stepped in and made it illegal.

     The state’s assumption of power was one of the reasons that Pinker identified to explain the decline in humankind’s level of violence, and he calls this exchange of power—that from individuals to a governing body—“Leviathan,” a word he borrowed from the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Before there was government, human beings lived in a state of anarchy in which people lashed out at each other constantly. Angry words were said, and murder, rape, pillage, arson, and theft resulted.

     “Human history,” according to Pinker, “is a cavalcade of bloodshed.” Life in the natural state was according to Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

     Pinker writes: “The Leviathan [is] a monarchy or other government authority that embodies the will of the people and has a monopoly on the use of force.” Acts of violence by individuals are now illegal.

     The Roman writer Tacitus noted this renouncement of violence when he wrote, “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.”

     As all psychologists are wont to do, Pinker quantifies violence. He produces convincing graphs that show that the murder rate in the twenty-first century stands now at 1 per 100,000 people. That is below the 45 in Detroit in 1980, and far below the 250 among the Aztecs prior to Cortes’ arrival. It is also a significant distance below the 500 to 600 average across 27 societies at various times in the past.

     According to Pinker, we live in one of the safest times in human history. “This discovery confounds every stereotype about the idyllic past and the degenerate present.”

     Was this “Pacification Process” caused by religion. No way, Pinker argues. The sacred books of religion of ages past contain chapters filled to the brim with revenge, warfare, murder, and exploitation. Just read a few pages of the Old Testament, or especially Homer’s Illiad, and you will be repulsed.

     In Pinker’s third chapter, he looks at the work of the twentieth century writer Norbert Elias, whom Pinker calls “the most important thinker you have never heard of.” In 1969 Elias published a book he entitled The Civilizing Process. Elias was most curious to know why and how people civilized themselves. Because he did not have access to the statistics that Pinker has, he read materials that people of past generations wrote, specifically books on manners and etiquette.

     Elias concluded that people living in the Middle Ages must have been vulgar, uncouth, even gross, because the etiquette books that they wrote insisted that people should display better manners: “Control your appetites; Delay gratification; Consider the sensibilities of others; Don’t act like a peasant; Distance yourself from your animal nature. And the penalty for these infractions was assumed to be internal: a sense of shame.”

     Because government has assumed the right to use judiciously deeds of violence and people have developed that sense of shame due to poor manners, humankind has civilized itself. According to Elias it was always within our nature to act this way, but that the people of the Middle Ages had “underused” it. “There is no zero point,” he insisted.

     Pinker concludes that lurking within each of us are those “inner demons” that goad us on to commit murder and mayhem, and at the same time there exist those wiser thoughts, “the better angels of our nature,” that caution and guide us towards peacefulness, self-control, restraint, and cooperativeness.

     I find Pinker’s arguments most persuasive, and for a Harvard professor, he writes well.

     The next time someone treats you shabbily, my dear reader, pick up a ten-dollar bill, stare at Alexander Hamilton’s picture, and count to ten. Self-restraint will always be well rewarded.

STEVE JOBS

by William H. Benson

December 29, 2011

     “Steve Jobs was a genius at connecting art to technology, of making leaps based on intuition and imagination. He knew how to make emotional connections with those around him and with his customers.” Walter Isaacson recently wrote and published a biography on Steve Jobs after approximately forty interviews with him, shortly before his untimely passing on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.

     On “60 Minutes” and in articles appearing in The New York Times, Isaacson explained that Steve Jobs was “admired for his consummate skill at persuasion and salesmanship,” and that “he wanted to position each of his businesses and products at the forefront of the information technology for forseeing and setting trends.” He succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams, earning for himself and those who stuck with him incredible wealth and the adulation of millions.

     However, Isaacson admits that there was a dark side to Steve Jobs. He was “considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs.” “His employees described him as an erratic and temperamental manager.” He would scream at them. He would size them up, play good guy versus bad guy with them, and then the next day reverse their roles.

     Quickly they understood that Steve Jobs was explosive, prickly, brittle, emotional, brash, arrogant, and aggressive, and that they were on his emotional roller coaster. Callous, cantankerous, and ungenerous, he rebelled at most forms of authority: he refused to drive a car with a license plate.

     Isaacson once asked him why he acted that way, and he replied, “I am a demanding perfectionist.”

     So many of his employees could not take the verbal punches he threw at them, the bruises and wounds they would feel, that he inflicted, and so they would quit, but those who remained, those who withstood the emotional whipsaw, were his team, the best. He insisted that he would only surround himself with the strongest of personalities, and so he urged managers “not to be too nice.”

     All those who dared to stick with him later admitted that “without Steve Jobs demanding, and pushing, and challenging them to discover their best, they would never have achieved all that they did.” One employee stated it well, “The highs were unbelievable. . . . But the lows were unimaginable.”

     The prime question emerging from the book is, “Could Steve Jobs have achieved what he did without the histrionics, the raw rage, the paroxysms of anger that resulted from his own personal fear of failure?” Possible answers are, “of course he could have,” or “probably not,” and there are arguments for each, but I prefer a third answer “who knows?” We cannot know. Steve Jobs was what he was.

     Niceness, some would argue, is not always the most appropriate tactic when trying to motivate others to perform at their highest level. Have you ever heard of a tender-hearted army general? In certain arenas of live, people should expect to be emotionally punched, and told off. Policemen, judges, coaches, surgeons, teachers, and parents, each, on occasion, must be tough if they are to do their jobs.

      One could argue that Steve Jobs’ gadgets, his tools, were vastly superior to what he was as a person, as a human being. The color and sharpness of the icons, the touch screen, and the seamless integration of numerous functions, invariably produces a couple of descriptive words: “Cool!” and “Neat!” Where he was mean and bullying, his machines were life-enhancing, eye-popping, and rewarding. Isaacson said that “Steve Jobs was a bundle of contradictions.”

     How is it that the designs were greater than the designer? That is a question to ponder. Exceptional larger-than-life people, since the earliest days of the human species, have created imaginative tools. Consider the Clovis spear point. A fair number of millennium ago it was the thing of artistry, carefully crafted, beautiful in its own way, but it offered to those who possessed it a technological advantage, a better tool for procuring food, and for defending oneself from predators and enemies. It too stood midway between art and technology.

     Human beings are, have been, and always will be emotional beings, capable of wounding and of being wounded. We constantly grab spears to make our point—literally sometimes and not so literally other times. The Steve Jobs of the world are very good at delivering messages of what they want. Others are not so keen to receive them. Emotions cloud the transmission. “He knew how to make emotional connections with those around him,” Isaacson wrote. True, but those connections were not the usual pleasantries.

     Christmas is over, and we know now who was naughty and who was nice. The new year 2012 beckons us, and we can resolve this year to be mean or kind, rude or considerate, aggressive or passive. Our choice depends upon what type of relationships we want.