TRUE GRIT

by William H. Benson

January 6, 2011

     I am not a fan of the Western. One book by Zane Gray, Riders of the Purple Sage, and one by Louis L’Amour, Sitka, are the only two Westerns I have ever finished. I have started others but invariably found something missing: either the plots were juvenile—lacking an ounce of motivation, or the characters were stereotypical—cut from cardboard, or the dialogue was contrived—cowboys talking like cowboys are presumed to talk. 

     Then, over the holidays, I went to the movies and saw True Grit, and came away so impressed that I purchased a copy of the book by the same name by Charles Portis and read it to the end.

     The plot is straightforward: Mattie Ross a fourteen-year-old girl from Dardenelle, Arkansas, Yell County, has arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas to claim the body of her deceased father, Frank Ross. The Ross’s hired man, Tom Chaney, had gone with Frank to Fort Smith to help him bring back some ponies, but Chaney, in a drunken stupor one night, had shot and killed Ross, stole his horse named Judy, as well as $150 in cash and two gold pieces, and lit out for the Indian Territory, Oklahoma.

     Mattie stares down at her departed father and said to herself, “What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!” After reading that, I thought, “there is enough motivation to keep this story going to the last page.”

     At a negotiated price of $100, she hires a one-eyed Marshall, named Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn—described as “a greasy vagabond,” who “loves to pull a cork,”—to find Chaney and bring him back to Fort Smith to hang for the murder of her father. Mattie insists that she go with Rooster.

    The third character in this unlikely posse is LaBoeuf, pronounced “LaBeef,” a solitary Texas Ranger, a dandy filled with a mountain of self-importance, who has been chasing Chaney across several states for a crime committed back in Texas. LaBoeuf suggests to Mattie that he “throw in with Rooster,” which he does, but then, on the morning of their scheduled departure, the two men try to slip away without her. Undeterred, she crosses a creek on her pony, Little Blackie, and catches up with them. The three ride into the Indian Territory in search of Tom Chaney.

     One critic named Donna Tartt said that the two men adjust to Mattie’s presence. “Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tag-along; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last—as she stands among them and proves herself—a relentless force in her own right.”

     Charles Portis, the author, avoided the stereotypical, and instead, carefully drew each of these three characters and then balanced them. At one point Rooster says, “I am getting old. I am undone by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop.” Then, the three of them are set in opposition to a gang of cutthroats, for they discover that Tom Chaney has fallen in with a band of robbers headed by Lucky Ned Pepper. The story gallops along with such vivid and colorful characters.

     But what really impresses the reader is the precision of the language, for this story is a monologue, spoken by Mattie Ross, but written as a recollection later in her life, of that winter she rode in hot pursuit of Tom Chaney held up in the Winding Stair Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma.

     Her first sentence leaps out at the reader. “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.”

     Mattie is sharp-tongued, filled with opinions, but deadpan in her delivery, prim, resourceful, naïve, hard-headed, blasé about hangings and gunfights, without a shred of doubt or hesitation, and her religion is of the Old Testament variety. On occasion, she will quote scriptures to justify her opinion, but normally she just gives it without any support.

     Seeing Rooster’s thirst for alcohol, she says, “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” Seeing his slovenliness, she says, “Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

     Mattie Ross is made of a sterner fabric than was Huckleberry Finn, also fourteen-years-old, and that which drives Mattie—justice, if not revenge—is of a heavier quality than that which drove Dorothy, who only wants to see the Wizard of Oz so that he can return her to Kansas. Instead, Mattie wants to go to Oklahoma, and she would ignore a wizard, for he lacked “sand in his craw” and had little “true grit.”

     Portis published his book in 1968, and the movie came out the following year, and starred John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Kim Darby as Mattie Ross, and Glen Campbell, the Country and Western singer originally from Arkansas, as La Bouef. John Wayne won his first and only best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster. In the 2010 version, Jeff Bridges plays Rooster, Hallie Steinfeld is Mattie, and Matt Damon is LaBouef.

     Which is better, the book or the movie? Take your pick, for both feature Mattie Ross, an original in American fiction.

COMEDY, HISTORY, OR TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

December 23, 2010

     Steve Allen was a fixture upon American television for fifty years, from the day his first show, The Steve Allen Show, premiered, which was on Christmas Day of 1950, the day before he turned twenty-nine, until his passing on October 30, 2000. Although the network canceled that first show after only two years, numerous others followed, including his pioneering work as the first host of the Tonight Show, which was first broadcast on September 27, 1954.

     It was Steve Allen who introduced to television audiences the innovative concept of a television talk show, in which he, the host, would begin with a comic monologue, and then introduce a series of guests and comedians who would perform briefly and then seat themselves on a couch and visit with the host, who sat behind a desk. Audiences loved the format, a guaranteed spot of humor at the end of a long day, and it is still on the air today after fifty-six years.

     The Tonight Show—comedy.

     On January 23, 1968, a U. S. Naval research vessel called the Pueblo and commanded by Lloyd Bucher, was attacked and taken hostage by the North Koreans. For the next eleven months, the crew was starved, beaten, and tortured, and Commander Bucher was put through a mock firing squad. The Johnson administration finally issued a written apology and admitted that the Pueblo was on a spying mission. On December 23, 1968, the American crew, 82 men, carrying one deceased sailor, was then released when they were marched across the Bridge of No Return, which connected the two Koreas.

     The North Korean Communist government, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, still holds the Pueblo yet today, even though it is still a commissioned vessel of the U. S. Navy. It is positioned on the Taedong River, and is now a tourist attraction for the North Koreans.

     The Pueblo—history.

     On December 8, at 5:00 P. M. John Lennon, the one-time Beatle, with his wife Yoko Ono beside him, left his home at the the Dakota apartment building, located at 1 West 72nd Street, across from Central Park. Outside he met a young man, then only twenty-five, named Mark David Chapman, who held up a copy of Lennon’s most recent album, Double Fantasy. Lennon took it, autographed it, and handed it back to Chapman. A photographer happened to take a picture of Lennon standing next to Chapman. Lennon and Yoko Ono then slipped into their limousine and headed to a recording session.

     At 10:50 P. M. the couple returned to the Dakota, walked past Chapman, who was still waiting there, and as they were about to step inside, Chapman fired five shots directly at Lennon’s back. Four struck him. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital and pronounced dead minutes later.

     The assassination of John Lennon—tragedy.

     There we have Shakespeare’s three art forms—comedy, history, and tragedy. Like most human beings, I enjoy wholesome comedy, and I thrive on history, but I shrink away from tragedy.

     There are those individuals, those who are inherently dramatic, who would categorize life’s events into one of those three forms; they are the literary types. Other people see life as little more than a warmup before that final judgment that will determine all people’s eternal fate; they are the religious ones. Others see life as a struggle, a battlefield, a bitter fight to vanquish the enemy and achieve preeminence; these are the workaholics and the power-crazed executives.

     Others are so sated and dulled by entertainment—football, basketball, baseball, movies, and television—that they have given up. They are the proverbial potatoes on the couch. Others are legalistic, paying homage to the statutes, the tax code, or the religious documents and covenants; they are the ones who can quote verbatim from some governmental or sacrosanct document.

     That philosophy of life that runs, like an artery, throughout our minds can, if we let it, determine the outcomes of our lives. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “The years teach us things that the days never knew.” Indeed, the lessons of our lives we learn daily, but together those lessons eventually build into principles, unchanging maxims, such as: “Kindness begets kindness.” “Rudeness begets trouble.” “Arrogance and pride are eventually brought low.” “What goes around comes around.”

     Human nature has not changed for thousands of years. We are, above all else, emotional beings, filled with an astonishing aggressive streak as well as rank passivity, along with anger, greed, and lust, and when you mix life’s lessons, with its core principles, and with those hot human emotions, life  transcends into something unpredictable, a volatile mixture that yields comedy, history, and tragedy.

     The year 2010 is drawing to a close. The Christmas season is upon us, and what will the new year bring? The cynic will say, “More of the same,” meaning more laughter on the Tonight Show, more trouble with the North Koreans, and more tragedy: a series of earthquakes, epidemics, wars and assassinations. Yet, hope springs eternal in the hearts of men, especially the optimistic, and perhaps something magnificent will happen in 2011: a war might end, a cure for all cancers might be discovered, and an epidemic might be conquered. May it be so. “Peace on earth and goodwill toward all men.” Have a great Christmas!

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

by William H. Benson

December 9, 2010

     In The Element’s of Style, the authors, William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, presented Rule Number 14: “Avoid fancy words. Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able. Anglo Saxon is a livelier tongue than Latin, so use Anglo Saxon words.”

     Ammon Shea, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine, offered similar advice: “Brandishing  unfamiliar words unnecessarily will mark you as a blowhard, not an effective communicator. You should apparently take care to sound smart, but not too smart.”

     The stylists often point to Winston Churchill, who, at the moment of England’s crisis, spoke of “blood, sweat, toil, and tears,” rather than vermeil, sudorification, moiling, and delacrimation.

     However, not every writer dutifully obeys those stylists who legislate the laws of prose. An excellent example is William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of the National Review. He repeatedly broke Rule Number 14, for he was the champion and defender of the unfamiliar English word.

     One critic complained that to read Buckley’s columns, a person was forced to refer repeatedly to a dictionary in order to understand his meaning, and so he called Buckley “a lexicographical snob.”

     The critic wrote, “First he gives us synecdoche, a figure of speech in which the whole is used for the part or the part for the whole. Then, adumbrated, to darken or conceal partly; to overshadow; this was followed by velleity, a mere wish with no effort to obtain it. From there he takes us to maieutic, the Socratic mode of inquiry, bringing out ideas latent in the mind. Then, on to provenance, the location of a beginning such as where a painting was painted or a book written. Finally, he unloads pasquinade on us, a publicly posted lampoon or satire or ridicule.”

     Buckley justified his style. “Have you noticed that the use of an unusual word sometimes irritates the reader to such a point that he will accuse the user of affectation, of which there is no more heinous crime in the American republic? I raise the problem because I am often accused of an inordinate reliance on unusual words. There is a sort of phony democratic bias against the use of unusual words.”

     “I said,” he continued, “that I have a private theory, a theory so simple, so rudimentary, that it almost embarrasses me to trot it out. But think it over. It is that we tend to believe that a word is unfamiliar because it is unfamiliar to us. Concede, of course, that there are words neither you nor I know. Should those words be quarantined?”

     In 1955, when he was just thirty, his father gave him $100,000, with which he started his magazine, the National Review, a politically conservative publication. Between 1962 and 2008 Buckley wrote some 5600 columns, plus he published more than 50 books, and in all those works, he refused to quarantine any word, regardless of its degree of familiarity. He paraded before his readers a string of words located well outside the boundaries of the common vocabulary of the American people.

      Buckley was easily recognizable with his arched eyebrows, an expansive and toothy FDR-like grin, and his wispy blonde hair. He was urbane, cordial, erudite, but above all else he was humorous, with a sparkling wit that manifested itself on his television show, Firing Line, that aired for over thirty years.

     Alistair Cooke once referred to Buckley as the “lover of the last word,” but Buckley admitted that on occasion he would leave the television studio “with much on my mind, en esprit d’escalier, a wonderful French term describing what you wish you had said by way of devastating retort: typically a sunburst that hits you as you reach the bottom of the staircase.” 

     And so Buckley broke another of Strunk and White’s rule’s, Number 20: Avoid foreign languages.

     He was the quintessential sesquipedalian, a user of long words, and he relied upon a pleonastic writing style, using more words than necessary to communicate meaning. It was his style of prose, he was most comfortable with it, it brought him much success, and he ignored Strunk and White’s rules.

     William F. Buckley, Jr. passed away on February 27, 2008 at the age of 82, while seated at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut and when writing yet another column, and not avoiding “the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute.”

THANKSGIVING

by William H. Benson

November 25, 2010

     Robert Kosi Tette is an African immigrant now living in Detroit. His relatives, in his home country of Ghana, in 1998 pooled their capital and paid his fare to America, and he arrived with the equivalent of a high school diploma and a load of determination. He now holds a graduate degree and has “a  relatively successful professional career.” After ten years, in March of 2008, he wrote for Newsweek:

     “Every inch of progress has been achieved through exhausting battles.” He worked at  “multiple minimum-wage jobs,” to finance his education, and finally accepted a professional job, but then, in order to avoid being walked all over at work, he learned to, at least, pretend assertiveness. He signed up for graduate school to give himself an edge over his fellow employees, and all the while, he was struggling with enormous legal blockades to obtain the coveted permanent residency. in the U.S.

     “It was as though,” he wrote, “I had run ten consecutive marathons, one for each year in America, and my body screamed for rest. . . . Most of us leaving home never considered how much we would change, or the scarring challenges ahead of us.”

     Robert’s joys and survival skills are not unlike any other immigrant’s over the past four centuries, for to achieve in America one must grab for an education, for a job, for more education, and so jump ahead of the lazy, the unfocused, and the unambitious. How difficult it can be for a solitary immigrant to arrive in America and achieve even a shred of professional success.

     “The American Dream” is all relative. Christopher Caldwell, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote that “a 75-minute bus commute to a job at a [big-box discount store], which looks like wage-slavery to the son of a unionized industrial worker, might be a dream come true for an immigrant from a poor country,” but “to the average native-born American with no other frame of reference but his life’s span in this country, however, it is not a dream. It is simply the social contract.”

     Other immigrants, such as the Pilgrims or the Puritans, arrived in North America, not as individuals but as families, and in an atmosphere of mutual trust, each family worked their fields together.

     Asians, especially the Chinese steeped in Confucian thought, stare in astonishment at America’s highly individualistic society, for, according to the Japanese-American scholar and thinker, Francis Fukuyama, “Americans assume that ‘rugged individualism’ is one of the most distinctive and appealing aspects of their civilization.” That is not the case in Confucian China, where the family is preeminent.

     And yet Americans, Fukuyama argued, have also demonstrated a powerful tendency to form associations: social ones—in churches, clubs, and organizations; political ones—in fire, school, and irrigation districts; and economic ones—in partnerships and corporations. Fukuyama writes that the social capital, the currency that underlies these associations, is “trust,” for without trust, they falter and fail. And whom do you trust? In your government, your church, your company, or perhaps only in yourself, or possibly, to extend it a little further, in your family?

     Our country’s holidays are observed for various reasons: for religious—Christmas and Good Friday; for historical events or people—Presidents Day, Fourth of July, Columbus’s discovery, and Martin Luther King’s birthday; for those who have passed on; for laborers; for veterans; for mother’s; and for father’s. But what is being observed on Thanksgiving Day? Is it a historical or religious holiday? Yes, we grant an obligatory nod to the Pilgrims, and we pause to thank God for His blessings.

     However, I think that Thanksgiving is more: it is also an observance that honors the immigrant. To “immigrate,” according to Webster’s means “to come into a country of which one is not a native for permanent residence.” America is a nation founded upon immigration.

     The columnist, Jose Expedito M. Garcia, wrote, “Whether we like it or not, when we celebrate Thanksgiving, we are paying homage to the story of a group of immigrants who celebrated their bountiful harvests and good graces on their New-found-land. Thanksgiving is, indeed a living testament to America’s unique character as a land of immigrants.”

     When we, as fellow Americans, seat ourselves at the table on Thursday, surrounded by family and friends, whom we mostly trust, we should think of that family member who prepared the meal, and we should also think about the immigrant laborers, most often from Mexico, who worked tirelessly for low pay often under inhumane conditions in the fields to grow those potatoes, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and raise those turkeys. And we should think about the corporations that owns the means of production and the distribution channels to deliver it all so conveniently to our local stores. And we should think about our forefathers who risked everything, packed up, left their homeland, and came to America. Africans, English Pilgrims and Puritans, other Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican—all of us are Americans, and so we learn to be thankful on a single day in November.

     Have a great Thanksgiving!

WORLD WAR II

by William H. Benson

November 11, 2010

     For an American soldier or sailor who served during World War II, the words “called to serve for the duration” meant until “death, serious wounds, or captured” rendered that fighting man or woman ineffective, useless, or incapable. Of course, none of those three options were desirable, but the American people, between the years 1941 and 1945, were fiercely committed and utterly determined to fight the Axis powers—the German Nazis in Europe and the Japanese Imperialists in the Pacific—until they surrendered without condition to the Allied powers.

     The American soldier and sailor was then an expendable fighting unit, but the American people understood that they were fighting a just and a moral war, that the Nazis and the Japanese Imperialists were vicious thugs who were holding tight to an abhorrent set of bankrupt ideas that needed crushed.

     The times were desperate. Save for southern Africa, and Central and South America, the entire world was at war. The Allies were desperately trying to conquer the Axis powers at the same time that the Axis powers were desperately trying to defend themselves from absolute destruction. It was a world-wide fight-to-the-death series of ferocious battles in the middle of Europe as well as in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The reality of such an all-out war is unimaginable in 2010, just as it was unimaginable in the dark days of 1942.

     The historian, Kenneth W. Rendell, wrote that, “In recent wars there has always been a step the United States didn’t take. In Korea we could have used atomic bombs against the Chinese; in Vietnam we could have obliterated Hanoi. Political and humanitarian considerations stopped us. But in World War II there were no such considerations. It was all-out war. Hitler would have dropped atomic bombs if he’d had them first. . . . It was total war.”

     The numbers of casualties in World War II are truly staggering. “Sixty million people were killed. Twenty million soldiers and forty million civilians.” And those numbers may be low because the records in China and the Soviet Union were not always accurate. It was the Soviet Union that took the brunt of those deaths: over twenty million people, mostly civilians, were killed inside the Soviet Union when Hitler’s military machine swept across Eastern Europe and attacked Russia.

     As all good things eventually come to an end, so do all bad things, and this world war found its ending in 1945. In Europe, in the spring of 1945, when surrounded by the Allied forces and virtually all alone, Adolf Hitler, with his mistress Evan Braun, took his own life, and so without their leader to instruct them to keep fighting, the Germans surrendered.

     The Japanese people required a different kind, a far heavier and punishing form, of persuasion. Think of this: “When you consider all of the industrial might of the United States—in a total war, involving every person and every industry—after three and a half years not being able to defeat  Japan—it brings a startling sense of reality to the war.” The Japanese military leaders refused to consider surrendering.

     Indeed, the Japanese government on June 6, 1945 wrote and agreed to the Ketsu-Go Plan, the “Fundamental Policy to Be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War,” an all-out plan to defend the Japanese Islands from the anticipated American attack. Of this Japanese defensive strategy, according to the historian Paul Johnson, “2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees, and a civilian militia of 28 million.”

     It was anticipated that this Japanese civilian militia would then be armed with “muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears, and bows and arrows,” not a pleasant thought for those U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines expected to be dropped onto Japan’s beaches, perhaps as soon as later that summer.

     Rendell wrote that, “One of the top-ranking military leaders stated that the loss of 20 million Japanese civilians (from a population of about 70 million) in an American invasion was acceptable.” Also, American military strategists believed that “a minimum of 250,000 Americans would be killed in an invasion, and another 750,000 hospitalized from wounds.”

     The President, Harry Truman, did not hesitate. He ordered that the newest American invention, the atomic bomb, be dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; it killed 75,000 people. Three days later a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki; it killed 39,000. Still, the Japanese dawdled. Without hearing any hints of a surrender, Truman, at noon on August 14 ordered that the third and final atomic bomb then available be dropped on Tokyo. That same day, at 4:05 P.M., Truman received word that the Japanese would surrender, and World War II ended.

     The news of the dropping of the two atomic bombs thrilled those American soldiers who were in line to invade the Japanese islands, for “They knew then that they had a chance to survive the war.” It is a myth to argue that the atomic bomb was unnecessary: Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved.

     In August of 1945, Douglas MacArthur wrote: “I thank a merciful God that this mighty struggle is about to end. The magnificent men and women who have fought so nobly to victory can now return to their homes in due course and resume their civil pursuits. They have been good soldiers in war. May they be equally good citizens in peace.” November 11^th this year is Veterans Day, a day to pause and reflect what those men and women did sixty-five years ago.

PRE-COLUMBIAN VS. POST-COLUMBIAN AMERICA

by William H. Benson

October 14, 2010

     Published in 1950, Nomads of the Longbow was an anthropological study of the Siriono, one of the tribes of eastern Bolivia, in the upper reaches of the Amazon River. A doctoral student named Allan R. Holmberg had lived with the Siriono between 1940 and 1942 and came away believing, and arguing in his book, that they were, “among the most culturally backward peoples of the world.”

     “No clothes, no domestic animals, no musical instruments, no art or design, and almost no religion,” he wrote. The Siriono were, Holmberg announced, representative of the most primitive of human beings, living unchanged for millennium, without technical or cultural skills.

     Even though Holmberg was correct that the Bolivian tribe was exceedingly primitive, he was mistaken that they had always lived that way. In the first ten pages of Charles C. Mann’s  recently-published book, 1491, he pointed out Holmberg’s error. “The Siriono were among the most culturally impoverished people on earth,” Mann wrote. “But this was not because they were unchanged holdovers from humankind’s ancient past but because smallpox and influenza laid waste to their villages in the 1920s.”

     The people that Holmberg lived with were the “survivors of a recently shattered culture,” due to an epidemic, and he was wrong to assume that they had always been “barefoot and starving.” They had not. Mann points to evidence that suggests that the tribes of eastern Bolivia had once built ingenious devices, weirs for raising and harvesting fish, as well as sophisticated mounds and causeways upon  their frequently flooded homeland.

     The story across the Americas for five centuries has been the same. Epidemics of disease have jabbed, like daggers, deep into the Native American communities of North and South America, often before the arrival of white Europeans into their homelands. When the whites finally did arrive, they were startled and then dismissive at what they observed—the pitiful and shocked remnants of the tribe.

     The Pilgrims arrived on the shores of New England in November of 1620 and established their village of Plymouth atop a former Wampanoag village called Patuxet. The sole member of Patuxet, Tisquantum, explained to the English that he had been captured and taken to Europe, and that when he returned five years later, Patuxet had evaporated. Mann wrote, “Scattered among the houses and fields were skeletons bleached by the sun.” The best diagnosis is that the Indians in Patuxet had suffered and died from viral hepatitis A, spread by contaminated food. 

     Christopher Columbus was the watershed. For all of that man’s achievements, his arrival on the shores of the New World in mid-October of 1492 spelled the beginning of a disaster, a calamity of immense proportions for the Native American tribes in the Western Hemisphere. “Holocaust” and

“genocide” are loaded words, and Mann cautions against using them, because Columbus and his followers did not intend to more than decimate the Indians with biological weapons. But it did happen.

     Scholars may disagree as to how and when the first Indians arrived in North America, but those same scholars are in full agreement that the newcomers from Siberia “must have been small” in terms of numbers. Hence, their gene pool was limited, creating remarkable homogeneity, little diversity throughout the Americas. For example, virtually all South American Indians have Type O blood and 90% of North American Indians, but among Europeans it is more variable: A, B, AB, and O.

     Charles Mann underscores the idea that homogeneity does not necessarily indicate inferiority. Columbus and his fellow “Spaniards simply represented a wider genetic array. Asserting their superiority is like saying that the motley mob at a football game is somehow intrinsically superior to the closely related attendees of a family reunion.”

     Homogeneity though can be a good thing though. Prior to Columbus, the Native Americans knew nothing of “cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea, newborn anemia, schizophrenia, asthma, and (possibly) juvenile diabetes,” diseases passed down from one generation to another.

     The trauma of such a high death-rate percentage must have traumatized those Native American tribes. Mann wrote, “Living in the era of antibiotics, we find it difficult to imagine the simultaneous deaths of siblings, parents, relatives, and friends.” Family bonds were severed, governing structures loosened, and survivors were suddenly quite alone.

     “Cultures are like books,” wrote the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. “Each a volume in the great library of humankind.” In the sixteenth century,” Charles Mann wrote, after Columbus’s arrival, “more books were burned than ever before or since.” Again and again and again, for five centuries now a disease would reduce, diminish, or virtually obliterate a tribe to a primitive, culturally-backwards stature. It was and is a monumental human loss.