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.

TOOLS OF RHETORIC

by William H. Benson

December 15, 2011

     Benjamin Franklin explained in his autobiography that at a young age he desired to learn and master the best literary techniques. “But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them.” So, he obtained the best literary magazine of the day, the Spectator, transformed one of its essays into poetry, and then he said, “after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.” “This,” he said, “was to teach me method in the arrangement of my thoughts.”

     These exercises he completed at night after he had finished his day’s work, so, he said, “that I might in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.” We judge he achieved his ambition.

     Last week, I came across a most interesting lecture by an English professor at Purdue University named Dorsey Armstrong, who listed and explained a series of rhetorical strategies.

      A commonplace is that which is widely known and recognized, an obvious and trite observation that is taken for granted, and which an audience would agree as true. People of yesteryear would write down their simplest thoughts into a commonplace book: observations of the weather, of people, the local events, and the arguments. Instead, people of today “journal” their thoughts.

     Armstrong gives examples of a commonplace: “the pursuit of happiness,” and “hiding in plain sight.” She explains that the ancient rhetoric of Aristotle and Cicero is woven into the very fabric of our thought patterns, but even though rhetoric is not taught today, “it is nowhere, and yet it is everywhere.”

     Stasis is related to commonplace in that “both hinge upon the need for agreement.” But stasis is the balance achieved after an argument or a dispute ceases. It is the peace that breaks out after the war has ended, when warring parties sign a peace treaty. Stasis is a process, and normally is ushered in after opposing factions find agreement upon definitions of ideas, and continues when one side yields.

     By invention a writer generates new ideas or enhances and transforms old ones and thus presents fresh thoughts and mind-jiggling considerations to a bored, dull, and weary audience.

     Arrangement is the recognition that a writer must heed conventions, prescribed patterns, and formulas when listing his or her ideas. If the arrangement veers too far from the accepted patterns, the reader will not follow. Good writers use inductive or deductive reasoning, or a combination of the two.

     Correct reasoning requires the skill of distinguishing between fact and opinion, plus a dose of deliberation and judgment, and the art of collecting and sorting evidence. “Assertion is not evidence!”

     Kairos is a Greek word that means time, but it refers to that supreme moment, when conditions are right. Armstrong says that, “It is saying and writing the right thing in the right way in the right time.” Great writers and public speakers are masters of kairos. Ronald Reagan appeared one day in Berlin and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That was a kairos moment.

     Kronos was the other Greek word for time, but it referred to the steady march of time, its quantitative feature. Kairos, instead, contains a qualitative aspect. Timing is everything. Ideas are in flux. They are elusive. Grab them before they flee. The window is closing, so pay attention to the commonplace, “strike when the iron is hot.” Lincoln speaking at Gettysburg was also a kairos moment.

     The New Testament authors wrote in Koine Greek; that is, the common dialect of the Greek-speaking people, and because they recognized kairos, they included the strategy in their texts. So they wrote, “And it came to pass in those days,” “in the fullness of time,” “straightaway,” and “they came with haste.” The Romans renamed kairos “Carpe diem,” which means seize and capture the day.

     Like Benjamin Franklin, we can shape our thoughts and enhance our writing with certain rhetorical tools until they stand out as something meaningful and worthy of an audience’s deepest consideration. Such a writer can take hold of the commonplace and seek agreement and stasis with an overpowering argument and solid incontrovertible evidence. He or she can invent new ideas, arrange them into logical patterns, and do this quickly, at the opportune moment, before the window drops and the door closes.

     One New Testament writer wrote a lengthy letter to a friend in which he began with a sentence that, when translated from Koine Greek into King James I’s English of 1611, captures certain of these rhetorical strategies: the commonplace, stasis, invention, arrangement, and kairos. “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word.” The friend’s name was Theophilus, and the writer was Luke.

     Have for yourself a very merry Christmas.

STEPHEN KING & JFK

by William H. Benson

December 1, 2011

     Stephen King is not one of my favorite authors, not even close. I have yet to finish anything he has written, mainly because he restricts himself to two genres that fail to satisfy me—horror and science-fiction. And yet I bought his new book, 11/22/1963, after reading a positive review in The New York Times Book Review. It is a work of fiction, but historical, with a pleasant-feeling romance, and a measure of science-fiction mixed in. A promising setup, even exciting.

     The book’s main character, Jake Epping, is divorced and teaching English composition in a small school in Maine, when Al, the proprietor of the local diner, explains privately to Jake that there is a spot in the back of his diner where, if he walks into that spot, he can travel back to a single point in time, “11:58 A.M. On the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip.” Whenever Al returns from this hole into the past, for however long, he has only been gone two minutes.

     Because Al is dying of lung cancer from too many cigarettes, he asks Jake to go back to 1958, stay there for five years, and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy. “You can change history, Jake,” Al tells him. “Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live.”

     Jake agrees, gets himself to Dallas, locates Lee and Marina Oswald, rents the room underneath the Oswald’s room at 214 West Neely Street in Dallas, spies on them, falls in love with a Texas beauty named Sadie Dunhill, and struggles with all his might to stop Oswald. There is the setup.

     In 11/22/1963 Stephen King splices together two shop-worn subjects: time travel and Kennedy’s assassination. Time travel, as a literary topic, began with H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It was advanced, according to King in his “Afterword,” by Jack Finney in his wonderful story Time and Again. For a good story, Hollywood loves time travel, either back or forward. Consider Frank Kapra’s It’s A Wonderful Life or Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait.

     Kennedy’s assassination is a nest of ideas that can be neatly divided into two: those who subscribe to the conspiracy theory and those who point only to Lee Harvey Oswald. A host of books will describe in vivid detail the trajectory of the third bullet, the shooter on the grassy knoll, and that the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Soviet Union, or Fidel Castro were working in conjunction with Oswald.

     One would tend to believe that after considering what Oswald did in his twenty-four years: he joined the Marines, but then defected to Russia; married Marina Prusakova, a Russian girl with whom he had two daughters; returned to  the U.S., but took a bus to Mexico City where he appealed for a visa to Cuba; and handed out pro-Marxist pamphlets on New Orleans’s streets, urging Fair Play for Cuba.  

     Then, there is The Warren Commission Report—all twenty-six volumes of it, William Manchester’s Death of a President, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, and Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale, and each concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. They consider it coincidental that on October 20, 1963 he found the job at Dallas’ Texas Book Depository, which just happened to be on the route of Kennedy’s motorcade, and that he had purchased the previous March by mail-order a Carcano rifle.

     Norman Mailer began his book convinced that there was a conspiracy, but after thoroughly examining the evidence, he wisely concluded that Oswald acted alone. Mailer said, “It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security.” Yet he did, and Stephen King agrees.

     “It is very, very difficult,” he wrote, “for a reasonable person to believe otherwise. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” The assassination is “the same simple American story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the right place to get lucky.”

     Simple it may be, but complexity is what the human mind craves and automatically resorts to it when seeking better explanations. Oswald’s last words were, “I’m a patsy,” words that have sent countless people on a frenzied pursuit to name those who they believe pulled Oswald’s strings.

     The wound our nation suffered that Friday, November 22, 1963, on a street in Dallas, Texas has not ever completely healed. I still remember the day. I was ten years old. I was in the fourth grade. Our teacher told us the sad news after our lunch break that our young President was most certainly dead, that someone had shot him while he was riding in a car. A mean thing to do, I thought then and still do.

     On a note of horror, Stephen King’s supreme area of expertise, he ends his book, and so he gives the reader his opinion on gun control, on the necessity of keeping guns out of the zealots’ hands, and on the danger of holding too tight to crazed opinions: “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head explodes.”