ROBERT CARO VS. EDWARD CONARD

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2012

     Two new books are being published this season.

     The first is Robert Caro’s fourth biography on Lyndon Baines Johnson, and is entitled The Passage of Power. In it Caro covers Johnson’s life between 1958 and 1964, primarily the years when LBJ was   Vice-President during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. For LBJ, those were his most difficult years, drifting along in the shadow of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, doing little and saying even less. Caro ends the book with Kennedy’s assassination and when Johnson is taking the oath of office.

     Former President Bill Clinton wrote the book’s review that appeared in the May 6^th issue of The New York Times Book Review. Clinton said, “Caro paints a vivid picture of LBJ’s misery. We can feel Johnson’s ambition ebb, and believe with him that his political life was over, as he was shut out of meetings, unwelcome on Air Force One, mistrusted and despised by Robert Kennedy.”

     Caro has devoted the past four decades to writing what will ultimately be five volumes in the series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first installment came out in 1982, the second in 1990, the third in 2002, and now the fourth in 2012. Caro is 76 years old and running out of time. Hopefully, he can complete the series’ fifth and final volume, in which he will focus upon Johnson’s Presidency.

     Caro’s wife completes much of his research. With pen and white notepad, he writes the first draft, and the second draft he types on a Smith Corona Electra typewriter. He refuses to use a computer. He wears a suit and tie to his office on the 22^nd floor of an office building in New York City, near 58^th and Broadway, close to Central Park’s south and west corner. The New York Times says that “Robert Caro is a Dinosaur.” A reporter at the Times asked Caro’s publisher, “Are the books profitable?” He hesitated and then answered, “They will be, because there is nothing like them.”

     Edward Conard wrote the second book being published this season. He entitled it Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong. Conard is a businessmen, a Harvard Business School graduate, one of the 1%, super rich, and in his book he makes a strong argument for a ferocious form of capitalism, for taking enormous risks, and for adequately rewarding those who do take those risks and succeed. He is brash, arrogant, and outspoken.

     Conard finds fault with the accountants and lawyers, those he says “who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential.” But he especially disparages those whom he calls “the art-history majors.” At a diner close to his office in New York City, at 57^th and Madison Avenue, near Central Park’s south and east corner, Conard points out “three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair” and asks a reporter, “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30? I’m sure those guys are college-educated.”

     Conard says that “the only way to persuade these ‘art-history majors’ to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements, but a shortage of people willing to take those risks.”

     Because Conard is all about calculating risk, the reporter states the obvious. “The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art and romance and the nonrenumerative satisfactions of a simpler life are invisible.”

     Two books: the first is a biography written by a political historian, and the second is a book on economics. It would not take too long, no more than twenty minutes, to walk the distance from Robert Caro’s office to Edward Conard’s and yet they are as far apart intellectually as the North and South Poles. If they met, the two men would barely communicate, such disparate worlds do they inhabit.

     Graduation season is nearing. Some high school graduates will want to invest in themselves and go on to college. The university is a risk. It is competitive; grades count. It may involve assuming a load of debt. It is a struggle trying to balance housing, food, friends, classes, textbooks, and study time. One is expected to develop work habits like those of Robert Caro and yet survive in an environment in which no more than a handful in every class get the A’s, much like Edward Conard’s harsh world.

     Frank Bruni, a New York Times reporter, stated the situation. “Because of levitating costs, college these days is a luxury item, one with newly uncertain returns.” He cautions students to select those majors with job potential—computer science, business, nursing, and teaching—and steer wide of those without—philosophy, anthropology, zoology, art history, and the humanities. The world of jobs and employers can be very cruel to those who choose unwisely their major when first they enroll.

     Yet, I say take the risk. Go to college. Let no one stop you. There you will find your own way to survive and even thrive. The Passage of Power and Unintended Consequences. You will find both at the college you choose and the subject you study.

LITERATURE VS. RELIGION

by William H. Benson

May 3, 2012

     In January of 1604 the English King, James I, instructed a committee of 54 men, “That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek.” Seven years later, on May 2, 1611, 401 years ago yesterday, that committee published the authorized English version, the King James Bible, and it remained preeminent until the latter half of the twentieth century.

     Most religions, such as Christianity, are based upon texts or Scriptures, usually writings that originated in the distant past, much like the King James Bible. People then will extract from those texts certain principles, doctrines, creeds, covenants, interpretations, and supplemental works, which they then expect other people to believe. This is the case for literate people of all ages.

     For example, in ancient Greece, people read, studied, and believed Homer’s Iliad with as much intensity and devotion as Christians read and study the Old and New Testaments today.

     The subject of literature is equally textual-based. People of the past wrote down words, and their words have been read and studied by generations of people who wish to understand that writer’s mind. There were the Greeks—Plato and Aristotle; the Christian writer—St. Augustine; the English writers—Chaucer and Shakespeare; the French writers—Montaigne and Balzac; the Russians—Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky; and the Americans—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Twain.

     So we have religion with its Scriptures, and we have literature with a secular scripture, the Western Canon. The first is reserved for the church, synagogue, meeting-house, and temple, and the latter is restricted to the library, college, and the university. The two rarely meet or communicate.

     The literary critic seeks to find, according to the Yale scholar Harold Bloom, that “irreducibly aesthetic dimension in plays, poems, and narratives,” or in other words that which is beautiful, close to the ideal. The religious critic “must seek for the irreducibly spiritual dimension in religious matters.”

     Another difference is that literature does not ask anyone to believe in a life after death with punishments or rewards to follow, or in the existence of divine beings. Literary critics can only go so far. They can point out the flaws in a writer’s work, can identify the plot’s winding intricacies and the skillfully-drawn characters, and they can either approve or disapprove of a writer’s attempts to tell a story or write a poem or present a history, but those are the limits of their authority.

     In the horse race between literature and religion, religion wins every time. People are far more attracted to religion than to literature, mainly, I think, because religion offers hope, a life beyond the grave, a point that the great works of eminent writers lay no claim to. It is with that conclusion that we can then say that “literature . . . can seem oddly irrelevant. It is religion that matters.”

     Thomas Carlyle said, “A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.” Seneca said, “Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.” And George Bernard Shaw said, “Reading made Don Quixote a gentlemen, but believing what he read made him mad.”

     Literature is meant to be read, not believed. A man, woman, boy, or girl, seated in a library’s corner alone with the text, reads in order to know that author’s mind. Sometimes literature, such as a play or a poem, is performed on stage, and those in the audience may experience that which the ancient Greeks called a catharsis, a release of that tension which the characters by their voices produce.

     Americans watch a dozen or more movies and programs every week for what? To see a mystery solved, a killer identified, a guy and a girl driven apart by circumstances but then magically reunited, and other dire human problems all sorted out in the show’s final three minutes.

     But that form of quasi-catharsis is a far cry from that which worshipers experience at a church service, when, according to William James, “they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

     Some things are better off left unwritten. So said Plato. “He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful . . . will not write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words, which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually.” Now that is profound.

     Overshadowing both literature and religion though is politics, because it is now, immediate, right in your face. The politicians can transform our lives, take away our jobs and security, upset our comfort levels, and sequester our bodies into a place we would rather not go, simply by imposing higher taxes, dragging us into a war, or carting us off to prison. Politics trumps all texts.

     Albert Einstein said, “One must divide one’s time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.” Literature and religion, like Einstein’s mathematical equations, are also for eternity, or at least for as long as the human species survives.

TOM PAINE & THE TITANIC

by William H. Benson

April 12, 2012

     In the spring of 1774, Tom Paine’s life hit a low point. On April 8 his supervisor fired him from his job in Lewes, England as an excise-man, working for the British government collecting customs and excises on imports. When his creditors heard that Tom was suddenly unemployed, they demanded that he pay all that he owed them and do so now. With little choice he liquidated his personal belongings at an auction on April 14, a “public sign of bankruptcy.”

     Then, on June 4, he and his wife Elizabeth agreed to separate, and neither of them would ever explain what had gone awry in their marriage. Tom said, “It is nobody’s business but my own; I had cause for it, but I will name it to no one.” He was thirty-seven, but she was only in her twenties. Never again would they see or speak to each other.

     Divorce was out of the question. The English laws then did not permit speedy divorces, in that it required an Act of Parliament, a virtual impossibility. Without a divorce decree, neither could remarry.

     Historians agree that they were badly mismatched. After three years of marriage, their “mutual illusions were destroyed.” He was finally catching a vision of what he wanted to do with his life—write political pamphlets and social commentaries. Because politics so excited him and the greater world beyond the borders of Lewes beckoned him, “he had little time for domesticity.”   

     Tom and Elizabeth had quarreled for obvious reasons. He was gone to London for months at a time. When he was at home, he devoted his nights to arguing politics with his friends over drinks at the White Hart pub. He barely made enough money to feed and clothe himself with nothing left over for his wife. In marrying Tom, Elizabeth “had expected to gain his strength, status, affection, and earning power,” and he had failed her on all counts, leaving her utterly disappointed.

     A day or two after the separation, Tom fled Lewes, landed in London where he met Benjamin Franklin, who told him he must go to Philadelphia and find his opportunity there. On November 30, a ship sailed into Philadelphia’s port carrying Tom Paine, who arrived penniless, in poor health, without family, friends, or job. No one would expect much of Tom Paine, and in that they were wrong.

     Thirteen months later, on January 10, 1776, Tom published Common Sense, a runaway best-seller in the colonies, and suddenly people on both sides of the Atlantic were asking, “Who is Tom Paine?” In that book he insisted that the thirteen colonies should come together, declare their independence, and forge a new country and a new government, one absent a monarch. A year and a half later, the Continental Congress did exactly as Tom Paine suggested.

     Elizabeth also fled Lewes, mainly out of humiliation, and she found refuge in her brother’s house in a nearby town where she made dresses. Without husband, children, or economic status, she could not have experienced any sense of fulfillment. Life and social customs can be very cruel to those who fail early in life, both then and today, and in losing her husband, she felt society’s worst form of exclusion.

     Much has been written the past few weeks about the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, about how the ship could not turn itself quickly enough to avoid the ice hidden under the sea’s surface, about how the band members continued playing waltzes until they too went down with the ship, and about how men deferred seats on the lifeboats to the women and children. Passengers were either martyrs or survivors in all of two hours, forty minutes.

     Ships, marriages, businesses, careers—each face icebergs that appear suddenly and unexpectedly, ready to rip and tear holes in our foundations, sinking our best inventions. Whenever a disaster approaches, we have options: we can push others aside to secure a spot for ourselves on a lifeboat, or we can do a noble thing, defer our spot to others, and stay on board until the ship sinks.

     Some will say, “This boat is sinking, and I am out of here!” Other will stick with it. Some will swim to safety and survive such a catastrophe, but many will not. For them it means bankruptcy, foreclosure, a public auction, separation or divorce.

     Maritime custom dictates that on a sinking ship women and children are preserved first, but in a failed marriage, it is often the women and the children who feel most afflicted because their means for providing food and clothing and shelter, their breadwinner, has departed. Life can be hard for the countless Elizabeth Paine’s of the world, for to survive they must struggle alone. Elizabeth never remarried, and neither did Tom.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

by William H. Benson

March 22, 2012

     “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” With that famous first line, Charles Dickens’ began his novel A Tale of Two Cities. The “two cities” were London and Paris, the “age” were those years between 1775 and 1794, the “foolishness” was the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, and the “wisdom” was that London did not succumb to a similar bloody revolution.                                                                                                                                

     One commentator said that Dickens’ “implication throughout the novel is that the great European capitals are twins sisters at the core and that the excesses of the French Revolution are not impossible to imagine happening on British soil.”

     London and Paris. Two cities, sisters and twins, juxtaposed, one ensconced on the continent and the other positioned on the British Isle, were for centuries tied together, struggling at times toward cooperative diplomatic relations and at other times locked in mortal combat, suspicious and wary of each other, jealous and anxious to vanquish the other. Most of Europe’s wars in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were fought between between London and Paris.

     Cities often appear in pairs. To read ancient history one reads either of Jerusalem or of Athens. One reads either the Old Testament or the works of Plato and Aristotle, pays homage to either Moses or Socrates, and subscribes to either the Law or Philosophy.

     One can argue that people’s mindsets naturally fall into one of two categories: they are either citizens of Jerusalem—believers in a monotheistic religion and worshipers who follow prescribed forms of ritual; or they are Athenians—believers in the humanities, in art, music, literature, and philosophy and who read Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.

     Eventually, Rome conquered both Athens and Jerusalem. Rome’s military, its power, and its wealth swept aside Socrates and his Philosophy and Moses and his Law and instead insisted upon obedience to Roman law. “There went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” The New Testament is a tale of two cities, that of Jerusalem and of Rome.

     World War I was fought primarily between Paris and Berlin with trenches and a “no-man’s-land” marking the division point between the two warring cities. At the beginning of World War II, it was London vs. Berlin, with Churchill and Hitler glaring at each other, and Churchill refusing to surrender.

     The Cold War was another tale of two cities, that of Washington D.C. and of Moscow. In the world of global finance, it is New York City and London. In baseball and football, it is the World Series and the Super Bowl, perennial tales of two cities battling it out on the baseball diamond and the gridiron.

      Like a magnet, cities attract the world’s people. Each year the newest crop of high school graduates in the small towns spread across the countries of the world see the city’s bright lights, its opportunities, education, jobs, homes, and entertainment. They want to go, and who would dare stop them?

     This throng of people converging into a small geographical area gives rise to immense challenges that perpetually demand fresh solutions. There is traffic that clogs the streets and freeways and gives rise to multiple accidents. There are fire hazards, crime, medical needs, and a need for sufficient utilities, for water and electricity “with dramatically fewer resources and pollution.” “By 2050, roughly 75 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities.”

     In the March 4 edition of The New York Times, the columnist Thomas L. Friedman reported that fifteen years ago in Moscow there were 300,000 vehicles, but today there are now nearly 4,000,000, a multiple of thirteen times. He also reported that the biggest traffic jam ever occurred near Beijing in August of 2010. He wrote that it “stretched 60 miles, moved at a speed of 2 miles per day, took ten days to unsnarl and spawned its own local economy of noodle sellers.”

     In an attempt to alleviate one city’s challenges, an American company recently built and installed the first ever city-wide integrated operations center for Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro, combining “data from some 30 agencies, all under a single roof.” It is “a bold experiment that could shape the future of cities.”

     This summer the Olympics will reconvene. Once again, people across the globe will focus upon the nations’ athletes who will compete on the field, in the gym, and in the pool, participating in that Greek invention, that gift to humanity for which the world is still indebted. Athens today owes much, but those ancient Greeks gave much. Four years ago the Olympics were held in Beijing, eight years ago they were in Athens, and in 2016 they will be in Rio de Janeiro. This year it is London’s turn.

     This year it will be a time for a cup of tea, and in four years it will be a Carnaval.

      The Olympics are not so much a tale of two cities, but a tale of a succession of cities. With sufficient traffic and crowd control, the Olympics in London very well may be “the best of times.”

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.