THE BERLIN WALL

by William H. Benson

June 23, 2011

     On March 5, 1946, less than a year after the conclusion of World War II, Winston Churchill spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”

     Europe was split between the the East and the West, between the Soviets with their communist governments installed across all of the eastern European states, and the democratic republics in the western European nations. Relations deteriorated. World War III hovered as a possibility.

     Once hostilities in Germany ended in May of 1945, Germany had been divided into four zones: American, British, and French-controlled zones in the west, which became West Germany, and the Soviet-controlled zone in the west, which became East Germany.

      Berlin, Germany’s capital, was also split into the same four zones. The American, British, and French-controlled zones in Berlin’s western districts became West Berlin, and the Soviet-controlled zone in Berlin’s eastern district became known as East Berlin. It was a workable solution, except for one fact: West Berlin, a free city, was stuck one hundred miles within communist East Germany.

     Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s ruthless dictator, saw his opportunity: on June 24, 1948, he blockaded West Berlin, denying all ground transportation. The Americans responded with “Operation Vittles,” the Berlin Airlift, in which U.S. army and navy pilots flew 8,000 tons of supplies every day to the two million people stranded inside West Berlin. After eleven months, on May 12, 1949, Stalin relented and opened the roads and railroads.

     A decade later Stalin was dead, and a new blustering Soviet leader, Nikita Krushchev, stomped about threatening, “We will bury you!” His style was called “diplomacy by tantrum.” In November of 1958, he said that West Berlin was “a bone in my throat,” and he gave the Western powers six months to clear out of the city. The deadline arrived, and nothing happened.

     In January of 1961, a new U.S. President was inaugurated, John F. Kennedy, and in June he met Krushchev at a summit in Vienna. When the Soviet leader ranted about a possible war over Berlin, Kennedy tried to interject his own thoughts. Krushchev came away convinced he could bully Kennedy.

     On August 13, 1961, the East Germans began building a wall, not of iron, but of concrete and barbed wire around West Berlin. When an older East Berlin woman asked a policeman what time was the next train for West Berlin, he told her, “That is all over. You are all sitting in a mousetrap now.”

     Countless numbers of people tried to escape their stultifying lives in communist East Germany by either burrowing their way under the Berlin wall or pole vaulting or flying over it by kite. All those who dared to attempt to escape to freedom were summarily shot. In the cold war between west and east, the Berlin wall was the flashpoint.

     Kennedy’s political opponents condemned him for not ordering the wall knocked down, but he said, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a lot better than a war.”

     Years passed, and a new President visited West Berlin, and there at Brandenburg Gate, very near the wall, on June 12, 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed the new Soviet leader, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

     Two years later, an East Berlin official, quite by mistake, announced that travel to the West would be lifted immediately. So, on that evening of November 9, 1989, a throng of thrilled people gathered at Checkpoint Charlie, expecting to cross into West Berlin, into freedom. The captain at the gate tried repeatedly to call his superiors for confirmation of the request, but there was no answer.

     He put the phone down, pondering. Michael Meyer of Newsweek wrote later of that moment. “Perhaps he came to his own decision. Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!‘ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.” The author Adam Goodheart has called it “the shrug that made history. . . . Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions.”

     It all unraveled. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down. The two Germany’s became one. The eastern European nations denounced communism and formed their own independent democratic republican governments. The Soviet Union’s republics split away from what had been the Soviet Union, and Russia itself renounced the Communist Party. The Iron Curtain dissolved into a pile of rust.

BILL CLINTON’S INDISCRETIONS

by William H. Benson

June 9, 2011

     June is the month for weddings and for celebrating Father’s Day, a season and a day for happily reuniting with family and relatives.

     And yet, for some, the recent news has been less than joy-filled. Steven Richards was hauled into a North Carolina court last week to answer a series of felony charges for secretly spending campaign money, more than $925,000, in 2008 in order to cover up his adultery that resulted in a child. Last month Arnold Schwarznegger, the former Governor of California, admitted to an affair with his housekeeper a dozen years ago that resulted in a child: Maria Shriver, his wife, wants a divorce.

    Jesse Jackson confessed to the same several years ago. Two men—Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy—may have missed their opportunity to run for the Oval Office because of their affairs: Gary Hart with Donna Rice, and Ted Kennedy with Mary Jo Kopeckne.

     Two weeks ago Mitch Daniels, the widely-respected Indiana governor, bowed out of the 2012 Presidential race because his wife had left him years before, married another, and then returned back to him. For her, the scrutiny would have been unbearable “in this sophisticated and transparent age.”

     This fascination with opening up and then gaping at prominent people’s private lives is a new phenomenon in American society. As recently as fifty years ago, the press cast a blind eye to the egregious actions of powerful and rich people: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy would never have withstood an investigation.

     This all changed with William Jefferson Clinton.

     Recently, I came across an interesting interpretation of the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton. In a lecture given by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard legal professor stated that Bill Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, should never have permitted Clinton to testify before the grand jury. However, Bennett never informed Clinton that he did not have to do so, and this, Dershowitz said, was very bad legal advice. In fact, he considers it the number one legal blunder of the twentieth century.

     Paula Jones was suing Bill Clinton, the President, in a civil case for harassment, that occurred when he was Governor of Arkansas. She was asking for $750,000 in damages, which sounds like a lot of money, but was far less than what he ended up spending on legal fees. If Bill Clinton had submitted, that is paid that amount to the court, the case would have closed.

     Dershowitz said Clinton should have made a speech. “You have elected me President twice. I cannot serve as your President if I have to spend an enormous amount of time preparing for a deposition and a trial. I will pay the amount they are requesting, and this is the last time I will speak on this matter.” If he had paid and said that, he may have endured a day or two of bad press, and it would have ended.

     Instead, he testified, and these depositions are far-reaching, bringing in extraneous matters wholly unrelated to the case. Where it ceased being a civil case and became a criminal one, was when he perjured himself when testifying about his foolish relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, in the cloak room of the Oval Office.

     Clinton—ashamed, tired, upset, and infuriated—obfuscated and parsed his words when grilled: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he answered one question.

     Members of the House of Representatives voted by a simple majority to impeach him, but in the trial in the Senate, the two-thirds majority failed. In his book My Life, Clinton wrote, “The vote on the perjury count failed by 22 votes, 45-55, and the vote on the obstruction of justice count failed by 17 votes, 50-50.” Clinton was allowed to serve out the remainder of his term. He won.

     Dershowitz believes that Clinton’s case broke the impeachment mechanism, that it was never the intent of the writers of the Constitution to permit private indiscretions to serve as the basis for an impeachment. That was reserved solely for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” outrageous dereliction of duties, and treasonous behavior.

     This case, Dershowitz argued, set a dangerous precedent. We are a country of common law. We look to past cases for guidance into the future. Was Bill Clinton’s conduct justification for removal? Will Congress and the Court dare to impeach a future President? He was an extraordinarily divisive President: Some loved him; others hated him. Much of this division fell along political lines.

     Despite his personal faults, in 1997, he signed the Balanced Budget Act, which Congress presented to him, and two years later the government projected a surplus of about $100 billion. Amazing.

MAJOR GENERAL BENJAMIN F. BUTLER

by William H. Benson

May 26, 2011

     On Wednesday, May 22, 1861, Major General Benjamin F. Butler arrived at his new command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, a fortress under Union control and located at the mouth of the James River in the Chesapeake Bay. A lawyer from Lowell, Massachusetts, but not an abolitionist, Butler was known as one who could find his way around a legal problem.

     The next day three young men—actually slaves named Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend—rowed a boat north across the James River in the hope of finding freedom at Fort Monroe. Their owner, a Confederate colonel named Charles Mallory, had pulled them from field work and forced them to assist in building an artillery post that was aimed directly at Fort Monroe.

     On Friday, the three men were escorted into Butler’s office for questioning, and they understood that their fate, their future, and their very lives depended upon what Butler decided that day, May 24, 1861. If returned to their master, they would receive a beating, most likely be sold, and then shipped south.

     The war, North versus South, had begun just weeks before, on April 12, with the firing on Fort Sumter. Slavery had bitterly divided the Republic for decades, and with the election of Abraham Lincoln the previous November and the rapid secession from the Union of several Southern states in the weeks afterwords, the two regions had accelerated rapidly toward war. It was now upon everyone.

     As Butler quizzed the three slaves’, his legal mind was racing through the implications of each alternative decision. Return them, or keep them? Either decision would make him enemies. The Constitution, and also the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 emphatically stated that the slaves must be returned. But, he reasoned, they were helping to build a battery with guns aimed at his own fort.

     Still, the new President, Abraham Lincoln, had said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

     While Butler was deciding, a Major in the Confederate States army, John Baytop Cary, was knocking at Fort Monroe’s front gate, carrying a flag of truce, and he wanted the three slaves back.

     Adam Goodheart, a historian, has recently published a new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, in which he describes the poignant scene of Butler and Cary, each seated on a horse, meandering away from the fort into rebel territory, and each stating their respective legal positions.

     “I intend to hold them,” Butler said to Cary.

     “Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?” Cary asked.

     “I mean to take Virginia at her word,” Butler said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

     “But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot detain the Negroes.”

     “But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

     Union forces would use the word “contraband” throughout the war as a practical solution to the problem of what status to give to the runaways. Like a fire, word swept among the slaves that Major General Butler would not return them. On Sunday eight more showed up, on Monday another forty-seven, and by Wednesday, they were arriving hourly: men, women, children, the young, and the old.

     What most shocked everyone was the former slaves’ reaction to life once living beyond the iron grip of slavery: there was no bloodbath, no wild-eyed vindictiveness, which for centuries the whites in the South had predicted would happen if the slaves were suddenly freed. Instead, these fugitives worked, they cooked, they built, and completed those jobs expected of people living in a fort.

     A soldier watched and said, “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free.” 

     One Northern visitor to the fort observed them. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day. Somehow there was to my eye a solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

     This trickle of slaves became a flood as tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands sought sanctuary among the Union’s forts.

     Goodheart noted that Fort Monroe, Virginia, “this spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the same spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia colony.”

     Last month, April 12, marked the 150^th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and once it concluded, exactly four years later, slavery was gone from the American Republic.

OSAMA BIN LADEN VS. ROGER WILLIAMS

by William H. Benson

May 12, 2011

     Michael Reagan, the former President’s son, submitted his opinion of Osama bin Laden’s demise. “They got him. Put a couple of slugs in his face. Then they dumped his body in the sea—something for the fish which don’t much care what they eat to feed on.”

     Reagan pointed out the ideological discrepancy that falls along geographical boundaries, of that between the West and the East. “All of this comes out of a divergence of world views. Here in the West we try to live and let live. Believe what you must; we’ll defend your right to your beliefs as long as they threaten no one.”

     But speaking of the zealots of the world, Reagan observed, “That’s heresy to the fanatics who worship at the altar of violence, who insist that their warped view of the world, and the role that one’s religion plays in it, demands violence against its non-believers. . . . Do it their way or die.”

     Reagan’s comments cause me to wonder, how is it that one part of the world clings to the idea of allowing everyone to believe and worship as he or she wants, and in another part its citizens wish to persecute those who refuse to believe as they believe? A difficult question, but it juxtaposes the modern with the medieval, and the West, it must be remembered, was not always a beacon of religious liberty. 

     The best answer is that the West produced forceful individuals, stubborn men from centuries ago who dared to assert what they believed to be true, regardless of the consequences, and they convinced a few others, and gradually their ideas took root, grew, and blossomed into freedom of the conscience.

     One such individual was Roger Williams, the founder of the New England colony at Rhode Island. In 1644, when visiting London, he published his major work, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience. Although it is a tedious work, its ideas overwhelm the careful reader.

     At its beginning, he lists twelve ideas. The first: “That the blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the Wars of present and former Ages, for their respective Consciences, is not required nor accepted by the Prince of Peace.”

     The fifth: “All Civil States with their Officers of justice in their respective constitutions and administrations are proved essentially Civil, and therefore not Judges, Governors, or Defenders of the Spiritual or Christian state and worship.” Roger insisted that the government should not interfere in a state’s religion, an idea that his contemporaries in Massachusetts thought crazed, outlandish.

     But if anyone misunderstood him, he spelled out in his sixth what he insisted upon: “It is the will and command of God, that . . . a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Anti-Christian consciences be granted to all men in all Nations and Countries.”

     This was too much for the Bay colony clergymen and magistrates, who believed in a theocracy, the joining together of the government with the one church, for they reasoned it would be foolish to allow all brands of religion to flourish in their colony. It would invite trouble.

     Those officials justified their position by pointing to the Old Testament, to ancient Israel, and Roger offered an answer to that argument in his seventh: “The state of the Land of Israel, the Kings and people thereof in Peace & War, is proved figurative and ceremonial, and no pattern nor precedent for any Kingdom or civil state in the world to follow.”

     The eighth: “God requireth not an uniformity of Religion to be inacted and inforced in any civill state.” If a government does require a uniform religion, the result, Roger argued, “is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience,” because it “confounds the civil and the religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility.”

      In the eleventh, he predicts the benefits that would result from a multiplicity of religions: “The permission of other consciences and worship only can procure a firm and lasting peace.”

     The Bay colony magistrates rejected each of Roger’s twelve ideas, and to advance their own narrow brand of religion, they relied upon the tools of persecution: banishment, fines, the whipping post, badges and emblems of disgrace worn on their clothing, the dunking tank, stocks, branding, disfigurement, severing limbs, and ultimately the gallows and the hangman’s noose.

     They banished Roger Williams from Boston, executed a Quaker lady named Mary Dyer, fined a Baptist named John Clarke, and tied another Baptist named Obadiah Holmes to the whipping post where he received thirty stripes across his bare back. Holmes’ crime: he had visited a fellow Baptist in Lynn, Massachusetts and preached a sermon there on the need for adult immersion in baptism.

     Roger Williams’ ideas won the battle though. A century and a half later, freedom of religion and liberty of conscience were incorporated into the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights: “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

     But that is in the United States, and does not apply to the world’s other nations. Michael Reagan wrote that bin-Laden and his Al-Qaida party, “have not understood that they cannot enforce their beliefs by killing those who reject them.” The bloody tenent of persecution: May it be buried in the sea.

EDWIN HUBBLE

by William H. Benson

April 28, 2011

     Edwin Hubble was born in a small town in Missouri but grew up in Wheaton, Illinois. Even though he excelled at athletics after the turn of the century, and was exceedingly intelligent, he frequently embellished his astonishing list of  accomplishments, adding more glory than was actually there. Bill Bryson, the author of A Short History of Nearly Everything said that “Hubble was an inveterate liar.”

     He claimed a series of deeds that never happened: “rescuing drowning swimmers, leading frightened men to safety across the battlefields of France, and embarrassing world-champion boxers with knockdown punches in exhibitions bouts.” He also claimed he had practiced law for a decade, when he had actually taught school and coached basketball at that time, and then for only a year.

     What is interesting is that Hubble had no reason to lie in order to enhance his extraordinary achievements. In high school at a single track meet in 1906, “he won the pole vault, shot put, discus, hammer throw, standing high jump, and running high jump, and was on the winning mile-relay team; seven first places in one meet, and then he placed third in the broad jump.” And this was all true.

     Eventually, he won a doctorate in physics, found a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory close to Los Angeles, and on January 1, 1925 announced a spectacular discovery. What appeared to be a distant cloud of gasses was actually another galaxy, a cluster of stars, and that it was located an enormous distance from our own galaxy. At that time it was believed that the Milky Way Galaxy, of which Earth and the solar system belongs, was all there was.

     Suddenly the universe, the entire cosmos was bigger, far bigger than initially believed. Bryson said that “Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.”

     Hubble further discovered that these galaxies, or “island universes,” are accelerating outward, away from a central point, proving the theory that the universe is expanding, rather than contracting or even static. He further demonstrated that those further away are moving faster than those that are closer.

     Another astronomer named Georges Lemaitre considered Hubble’s observations and concluded that if that was all true, then “the universe began as a geometrical point, a ‘primeval atom,’ which burst into glory and had been moving apart ever since.” In a word, the Big Bang Theory.

     On April 12, 1990, the space shuttle, the Discovery, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and days later, on April 25, astronauts placed into a low orbit the Hubble Telescope, twenty-five years ago this week, named for Edwin Hubble.

     The Hubble is cylindrical-shaped, 7 feet and 10 inches in diameter, and 189 feet long. It was believed that the resolution would be 7 to 10 times greater because it would not be hampered by the distortion from Earth’s atmosphere and the absence of background light.

     However, it was discovered that the lenses had been grounded incorrectly. Three and a half years later though, in late 1993, astronauts replaced the faulty lenses, and since then, the Hubble Telescope has taken more than a half-million images of our universe.

     In 1994 the Hubble recorded a series of comets striking the planet Jupiter, “which produced Earth-sized plumes of vaporized debris in the giant planet’s atmosphere.” Astronomers have trained the telescope towards regions where stars are being born and then towards other regions where the stars are dying. In the year 1054 A.D. Earth’s inhabitants witnessed the explosion of a supernova. The Hubble has now peered deep into that supernova’s remains, into what is called the Crab Nebula.

     One of the most astonishing things requested of the Hubble was the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. Between September 24, 2003 and January 16, 2004, for a total of 268 hours, the telescope was aimed toward what seemed a blank spot in the sky and recorded thousands of images. What those images  revealed was an abundance of distant galaxies, perhaps ten thousand, located in the deepest optical view ever made of the early universe.

     Unfortunately, Edwin Hubble missed all these eye-popping views of our solar system, of supernovas, and of newly-discovered galaxies in Hubble Ultra Deep Field, for he suffered a cerebral thrombosis on September 28, 1953, and passed away at the age of sixty-three. What is most unusual is that his wife refused to identify what she did with his remains and where, or even if, she buried him.

     Despite his penchant for elaborating his achievements, Edwin Hubble is considered the greatest astronomer of the twentieth century, and for that reason astronomers attached his name to the orbiting telescope that hovers miles above our heads.

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

by William H. Benson

April 14, 2011

     Recently, I re-read the story of how Heinrich Schliemann dug up the ancient city of Troy.

     When a child in Germany, Schliemann loved to read Homer’s stories of the Trojan war in the Illiad, and of Odysseus’ wanderings after the war in the Odyssey, or so he claimed he did. He entered into a career in business, and with his intelligence and application, he acquired global business interests: seizing reserves of gold dust in California, and cornering the indigo dye trade across Europe. Believing himself wealthy enough, he retired and headed to northwest Turkey to find the lost city of Troy.

    “In the midst of the bustle of business,” he said, “I had never forgotten Troy, or the agreement I had made with my father to excavate it.”

     The first thing he did on the shores of the Mediterranean was to marry a new wife, a sixteen-year-old Greek girl, whom he had advertized for, and together, beginning in 1871 until 1879, the couple, plus eighty hired laborers, dug into a hill at Hissarlik, some three miles from the Aegean Sea.

     It was said that he arrived with a shovel in one hand and a copy of the Illiad in the other. “He was a man mad about Homer.”

     He dug a trench right through the center of the hill and after about a year, a worker brought to him an artifact that shone like gold. He dismissed the workers that afternoon, claiming it was his birthday, jumped into the trench and carried the precious artifacts away. All together as the digging continued, the trench “revealed an astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in gold and silver.” And each artifact he associated with a passage from the Illiad. He claimed he had found Homer’s Troy.

     Few, if any, believed his wild and unsubstantiated claims.

     Actually, his digging produced nine Troy’s, successive cities, each one built atop the other. The bottom he labeled Troy I and the top Troy IX. Schliemann was convinced that the Troy of the Trojan War was Troy II, but scholars pointed out to him that it was a much older city than Homer’s, all the way back to 2500 BCE. Homer had written his epics in about 700 BCE, of a war that had occurred five hundred years before his time, in about 1200 BCE.

     “Scholars agree that the Trojan War is based on a historical core of a Greek expedition against the city of Troy, but few would argue that the poems faithfully represent the actual events of the war.”

     Archaeologists today focus their attentions upon Troy VI or VII as the more likely candidates for the actual Homeric Troy due to the matching up of details within the poems to the artifacts uncovered, but no conclusive proof exists.        

     Heinrich Schliemann’s story begins with war, of Homer’s recount of the Trojan War, of frightening images, of the weapons of war that mutilate human bodies, and of the god Zeus laughing as warriors mutilate their enemies. It makes for gruesome reading. War is all about greed, power, glory, territory, ambition, and yes, even love. Helen’s was supposedly “the face that launched a thousand ships.”

     But Schliemann’s story continues with at least two other themes: first, the power of mythology and the hesitant steps toward professionalism.

     Schliemann was a man caught in the vise-grip of mythology. He allowed his wife to baptize their two children, but at the ceremony he laid a copy of the Illiad upon their heads and “read a hundred hexameters aloud” over them. Homer’s gods and goddess—Zeus and Athena—became the Greek’s religion and then also that of the Romans, believed to be true by generations, for centuries, until the day when Christianity overwhelmed them. No one should ever underestimate the power that the myth can hold over people: it is a rhythm buried deep within humanity’s psyche, so entrenched it is.

     Schliemann’s search for artifacts—stones, walls, gates, copper kettles, vases of pottery, shards, arrowheads, swords, crowns, gold necklaces, and skeletons—was his feeble attempt to reconstruct history, to determine what truly happened at Troy and when, and then to equate it to a literary document. Yes, he behaved like a bull stampeding in a china closet, and his statements were less than factual or reliable, but his attempt at Hissarlik was one of the first archaeological digs, ever.

     History is all about paying attention to detail, recording written documents, preserving artifacts, reflecting upon the whole body of knowledge, formulating hypotheses, and either proving them true or discrediting them. It demands a strict commitment to hard evidence.

     Literature is another field of human endeavor with its characters, plots, settings, themes, emotions, voices, and to match a literary work to points in history is to invite difficulties. Homer may have telescoped a series of wars between the Greeks and the Trojans into a single one. What was his intent? How much of what he wrote was historically accurate? The questions continue.

     So again, we start with war and end up with professionalism. It takes a certain kind to make a war, but afterwords, in order to make sense of that senseless act, of those unrestrained passions that kill and maim, we have to invite in the poets, the writers, the historians, and yes, the archaeologists: a man, his wife, a shovel, a book, a dream.