REVOLUTIONS AND CHINA

by William H. Benson

October 1, 2010

     When in high school, nearly forty years ago, I remember the day when, either late in September or in early October, a fellow student, as he was heading up his math paper, blurted out and asked our instructor for the date, so that he might write it down. The instructor, whose sense of timing when  delivering his one-liners was superb, without pausing responded with a single word, “Soptober.”

     There was only a scattering of laughter, but at the time I remember thinking that coining such a word instantaneously, seemingly without thinking, was quite ingenious of that instructor. It would have required minutes for me to arrive at “Soptober,” rather than the second or two it took our instructor.

     “Soptober”—the final two weeks of September and the first two weeks of October—is, I think, the best four weeks of the year, and not just because it contains my birthday. The weather is pleasant: warm and sunny days, cool evenings, and less wind than usual. Behind us are the broiling days of summer, and the snow and ice and freezing temperatures of winter are some weeks distant. It is what is typically called “Indian summer”—near the first frost but before the first snow.

     Despite the pleasantness of the day’s temperatures, for the reminiscing historian, the approaching days of October remind him or her of one thing: political revolution.

     England’s general, Cornwallis, surrendered to America’s general, George Washington, on October 17, 1781, ending England’s attempt to restrain their American colonies from forging their independence. The Bolshevik’s “Great October Socialist Revolution,” according to the old Russian calendar, began on October 25, 1917 and ushered in a Marxist philosophy directed by Leninist tactics, a truly diabolical mix. And the Chinese celebrate National Day on October 1, the day in 1949, when, after years of civil war and desperate struggle, the Chinese Communist Party, headed by Mao Zedong, founded the People’s Republic of China.

     There have been other important revolutions—France’s in the late eighteenth century, Mexico’s in the early twentieth century, and Iran’s in the late twentieth century—but it was the American, Russian, Chinese Revolutions that have had such astonishing consequences for the people of North America, Europe, and Asia in the modern world.

     And of those latter three, the most pernicious, and yet not readily recognized, was that of the Chinese revolution, a viewpoint shared by the historian and writer, John King Fairbank, who wrote, “The Chinese revolution since 1949 has been the greatest in history, measured either by the number of people involved or by the extent and rapidity of the changes made. To the outside world it has also been the least known event of modern times.”

     Mao Zedong whipped the Chinese people into absolute submission to him, and in the process he converted the nation into something that was utterly unimaginable previously. Armed with his own interpretations of Karl Marx’s political theories, a socialist economic agenda, and a fierce determination to  redirect China’s culture, he transformed the Chinese people, and slaughtered any who opposed him.

     The Chinese people struggled and grappled to accommodate Mao’s profound changes and his demands. Fairbank wrote, “Frenzies of joyful enthusiasm and vengeful hatred, of organized effort and self-sacrifice, depths of terror and exhaustion, prolonged frustration, ardent self-discipline, new hope and pride, have been experienced among a population [a]rising from [between] 600 to 800 millions.” Truly, the Chinese, individually and collectively, experienced the entire gamut of human emotions, all they could bear and way beyond.

     “Mao Zedong’s real claim to immortality lies in his effort to smash the ancient ruling class tradition,” wrote Fairbank. The formerly ruthless and miserly landlords were rounded up in village after village all over China and either were publicly executed, expelled, or forced to publicly confess their errors to those peasants they had once lorded over. Land reform, or collectivization, was accomplished by fanning the lower classes’ hatred into mob violence.

     Mao carefully redirected people’s thinking by what was called “thought reform,” which included: “control of the environment; the stimuli both of idealism and of terror, intermixed; and a grim psychological experience, undergone with guidance through successive phases and intensified by the manipulation of one’s sense of guilt and shame.” We know it better as “brainwashing.” The people, with no alternatives to choose from, submitted their minds and bodies to Mao’s authority and came into  silent and yielding acceptance of his new attitudes and concepts.

     A quotation from Chairman Mao: “Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery. . . . A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

     Soptober, halcyon days of peace and prosperity forty years ago in North America, in the United States of America, but at the same time in a land half a world away, the Chinese people wordlessly groaned under the deadweight of their oppression. What a person experiences, the information that he or she receives through the senses, and the range of emotions that color and stain those experiences can never be fully contained in print. Those outside that revolution will never know nor realize the full extent what the Chinese people endured underneath Mao Zedong’s Revolution.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER VS. AGATHA CHRISTIE

by William H. Benson

September 15, 2010

     Born on this day, September 15, in 1789 was the American author James Fenimore Cooper. Because he inherited his father’s vast landholdings—surrounding the city of Cooperstown, New York—at a young age, and then he married well, to Susan DeLancey, the daughter of a landowning family, he never had to work the rest of his life. With little else to do, he bet his wife that he could write as well as any of the books then coming out of England, and so he proceeded to write, over the course of his life, three dozen novels. They sold well: he is considered the first ever best-selling American novelist.

     The best known are the five Leatherstocking tales: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans,  The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. The main character in all five is Natty Bumpo, also called Hawkeye, who is a very practical-minded frontiersmen, more comfortable in the woods than indoors. With his gun nicknamed “Kildeer,” he can shoot anything with deadly aim.

     The rhythm of Cooper’s tales is the repetitive “danger and escape,” scenes that appear before Natty Bumpo with frequent regularity.

     The critics have derided Cooper’s stories ever since, mainly for his stilted use of language that seems obsolete to the modern reader, and also for Cooper’s egregious literary errors. Chief among that host of critics was Mark Twain, who lambasted Cooper with a lengthy essay by writing, “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in . . . two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”

     Twain especially did not appreciate Cooper’s standard trick, in which he would heighten the danger and the suspense by repeatedly laying in front of Natty Bumpo or Chingachgook a dry twig which they would invariably then step on. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, “ Twain wrote, “and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.”

     One can conclude that Cooper’s reputation as a literary artist has plummeted since the days he first wrote his “Leatherstocking Tales,” more so after Mark Twain so hotly disabused him.

     Also born on this same day, in 1890, was the British author Agatha Christie, who wrote her first murder mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, introducing to the world of crime fiction Hercule Poirot. In 1926 she came out with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in 1934 Murder on the Orient Express, and in 1939 probably her best known mystery And Then There Were None or as it is sometimes titled Ten Little Indians. All together she wrote eighty mysteries over fifty-six years.

     Virtually all her books are a formula: a murder, a stack of exotic and diverse characters each with a motive to kill, a scenic location, a winding and circuitous plot, and a final scene in which Hercule Poirot draws all the clues together and confronts he or she who had done the deed.

     Agatha Christie was writing her successful stream of mysteries up until her passing in 1976. Along the way she introduced her favorite investigator, Miss Jane Marple, who was most skillful at slipping quietly into a crime scene, and without fanfare, solving it. It was Miss Marple, an elderly spinster, who explained her success. “After all, no one pays attention to an old woman.”

     Like Cooper, Christie too had her detractors, her critics. On January 20, 1945, Edmund Wilson, the book critic at the New Yorker, published an essay that he entitled, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”, in which he dismissed the entire mystery genre and most vociferously Agatha Christie. Wilson wrote that, “her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters because they never can be allowed an existence.”

     David Lehman, another literary critic, countered with a different opinion. “Wilson regarded the genre as terminally sub-literary, either an addiction or a harmless vice on a par with crossword puzzles. But the truth is that for every Edmund Wilson who resists the genre, there are dozens of intellectuals who have embraced it wholeheartedly.”

     I agree. A well-written mystery has always held my attention, ever since my days of soaking up one Hardy Boys mystery after another followed by my discovery of Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason. The same I cannot say for Cooper and the western writers.  

     Two authors. An American man. An English woman. Their birthdays separated by exactly one hundred and one years. James Fenimore Cooper wrote romantic fiction, of the early frontier, of adventure stories, was a  forerunner to the western writers Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Agatha Christie wrote murder mysteries, and was a forerunner to Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert B. Parker, and Sue Grafton, who all owe a debt back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and also, to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin.

     A writer dares to write, a brave thing to do, for the ever-present critic is there to read and then point out the author’s mistakes, and the writer feels bruised. However, in spite of the critic, it is the reading public who ultimately judges whether a work succeeds in the market place. Few critics would have dared to believe, after reading Cooper’s and Christie’s first book, that they would sell so well, and yet they did, for the reading public is fickle: they read what they like, not what the critics like.

THE CRUSADES

by William H. Benson

September 2, 2010

     Soldiers from western Europe invaded Palestine, that narrow strip of land along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea with the intention of establishing a Western colony there. These warriors called themselves Franks, for they were Frenchmen, and they were led by zealous leaders, such as Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Godfrey of Bouillon, men fiercely determined to undo certain of the Muslims’ territorial gains.

     Their invasion was religiously-motivated: these Christians wished to supposedly “free” the Holy Land, the place of Jesus’ birth and ministry and death, from the the Muslims’ domination. The year was 1096, and it marked the beginning of a two-century clash between West and East called the crusades.

     The local inhabitants, the Muslims, were at first perplexed and then devastated when they understood that these blonde-haired and blue-eyed foreigners, whom they called franj, intended on  assaulting their towns and cities, and that they had no intention on leaving. Quickly, the local inhabitants realized that there was no army in all of Syria capable of stopping the franj’s advances. 

     March they did. After toppling the city of Antioch, the franj committed unspeakable atrocities at Ma’arra, and then stomped south along the coast, disposing easily of a succession of cities—Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Acre, Haifa, and Jaffa—until, on June 7, 1099, they faced the gates of Jerusalem. “Knights and soldiers fell on their knees, uttering cries of joy, and burst into floods of tears.” But they had not arrived to only cry, pray, and worship; they were there to fight, to seize the city.

     After a siege of forty days, the franj sacked the city of Jerusalem on the night of July 15, killing thousands of both the Muslims and Jews. Survivors carried the grim news to Damascus, and to Baghdad, but there was so little that the Arab world could do to overpower the franj.

     Quickly, the franj established a network of fortresses to secure their colony, instituted a political system not unlike their own in Europe, and began to govern “by principles that were not easily transgressed.” In Jerusalem, the franj’s rulers would succeed one another peacefully. The Muslims were startled by these Occidentals’ allegiance to a mutual political system, for nothing like this existed among the Muslims, where the death of one monarch meant civil war until another regained power.

     Eventually, two centuries later, the Westerners were driven permanently out of their colony along the Mediterranean and, led by Saladin, Jerusalem was recaptured, but the Muslims never forgot. The effect upon them was traumatic, deeply wounding, and rightfully so, for their land had been invaded.

     The Arabs and other Muslims refused to open their own society to ideas from the West, and “this, in all likelihood, was the most disastrous effect of the aggression of which they were the victims.” They would not learn the franj’s language, and so the Muslim world turned in on itself, becoming over-sensitive, defensive, intolerant, and deeply suspicious of Western ideas. One author, Amin Maalouf said it best, “Modernism became alien.” And it has remained so there for a millennium.

     Two weeks ago, the last of the U.S. combat troops departed Iraq, after 2,711 days of occupation, although some 50,000 troops will remain until the end of 2011, at which time the State Department, through paid contractors, will train the Iraqi police. However, America’s combat role in Iraq ends this week, on August 31, 2010. A day for rejoicing.

     Peter Baker, a writer from the New York Times, in his August 22^nd column, asked a most profound question, “But after seven years of a war started by President George W. Bush on the basis of false intelligence, . . . after hundreds of billions of dollars, more than 4,400 American military deaths and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths and perhaps many more, was it worth it?”

     He apparently did not think so, and I do not think it was. In March of 2003, in the days before the war began, in this biweekly column, I questioned the idea of the U.S. military seeking to topple a dictator of a third-world country. Once the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction proved itself a fabrication, the purpose for the war then transformed itself: it was to bring to life and then nurse a fledgling democracy there. But, did no one in the Bush White House point out to him the history of the crusades, and the effect that that invasion had upon the Muslim people?

     In the days after 9-11, George W. Bush described his anti-terrorism campaign as a “crusade,” but an adviser cautioned him against saying that word, pointing out to him that it is a strident word to the people of the Middle East because of the historical events to which it referred. Both Muslims and Jews regard it as highly offensive, mainly for the sacking of Jerusalem in the summer of 1099.

     The world division remains: Christian vs. Muslim. Western vs. Eastern. Crusade vs. jihad—the words and their meanings, the religions, the people, the unforgettable memories, and the sobering histories. After a millennium, the split is still a significant part of our political landscape today and may remain so for the foreseeable future.

COMPETENCY VS. CREATIVITY

by William H. Benson

August 19, 2010

     This past weekend I read in The New York Times Magazine of an online board game called “Bring It,” in which players draw from a deck of cards a series of math questions. Although it appears that the program deals from the deck randomly, the game is rigged. How a player answers the first series of questions determines the level of difficulty of the latter cards he or she will receive. It advances or contracts in terms of difficulty according to the skill level of the player.

     “If a player answers the math questions correctly, the deck changes so he will draw more-challenging cards and stay interested. A player who misses questions does not draw the hard cards, so he will not become frustrated. With the deck rigged in this charitable way, the players generally cross the finish line almost together.”

     In other words, everyone wins: the more intelligent will not quit out of boredom, and the less intelligent will enjoy the thrill of winning.

     In a similar way, I recently have noticed how the Web accommodates itself to my personal tastes. For example, if I order a certain book from an online bookstore, it will then suggest other books in that same category. “As a populous commercial precinct, the Web now changes in response to our individual histories with it. . . . Digital “things”—apps carefully dressed as objects—change as we use them, too. And it’s weird enough when those things are being solicitous and cooperative.”

     School begins this week, and even though school does its best to gear itself to the skill and intelligence level of the students, similar to the game “Bring It,” school is still a meritocracy, where those with intelligence, ambition, and the ability to acquire a skill quickly, win the grades. Those without those same talents will struggle and falter.

     By its very nature, school must be competitive—in grades, as well as in athletics, and in the social arena—for the community expects the teachers to set the education standards sufficiently high enough to force all students to stretch to achieve them. Unlike that rigged deck of cards in “Bring It,” the teachers must deal from a random deck.

     School’s competitive nature is a winnowing process designed to produce competent workers for the community. Students begin by mastering a sizeable amount of information laid out in textbooks. Next, the teachers present the students with opportunities for hands-on training, during which the students attain the skills. The third factor is the experience that the students gain once they find themselves in the work force and are required to deal with real-life situations. The result is a competent professional.

     Albert Einstein once said, “The most important method of education always has consisted of that in which the pupil was urged to actual performance.”

     This process—competing in order to achieve competency—produces excellent doctors, surgeons, accountants, attorneys, and educators. Much of this educational process though today is focused squarely upon “standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing.”

     Some observers have noticed that what is missing from this process is the nurturing of creativity. Newsweek, in its July 19^th edition, pointed out in its featured article “The Creativity Crisis,” that “all around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions.” Creativity is considered an innate skill, like intelligence or personality, and certain students may have it and not even know it. The deeply creative individuals would consider playing the online game “Bring It” a pointless waste of their time, although they would be the ones to create it.

     Ingenuity or the ability to creatively solve problems is not normally taught or even fostered in America’s standards-obsessed schools today, but it can be tested and has been for fifty years. The Torrance test, devised by E. Paul Torrance of Minneapolis in the 1950’s, consists of “a 90-minute series of discrete tasks . . . and has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages.” The result is for each student a CQ score, analogous to an IQ score, and the tragedy is that U.S. CQ scores have been declining.

     Television and videogames siphon away a student’s interest in brainstorming, asking questions, and solving problems, and the teachers are overly preoccupied with prepping their students for that standardized test, such that the highly creative students are ignored.

     The American society truly wants and needs more of both the competent professionals as well as the gifted and creative individuals who can identify and solve a multitude of problems. Much of the challenge for the students is to find that program that fits them and then to work extremely hard at it. School is still a meritocracy, and the winners are those who achieve inside of a classroom that is not rigged.       

HUGO CHAVEZ VS. SIMON BOLIVAR

by William H. Benson

August 5, 2010

     Across my desk last week came an interesting quote: “The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it, because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles, wood rots, people—well, they die—but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.”

     Nowhere in the world today is that more the situation than in the South American country of Venezuela. There, the current-day ruler Hugo Chavez has become obsessed over the memory of Simon Bolivar, the revolutionary leader who threw the Spanish rulers out of their New World empire in South America two centuries ago.

     Truly, Bolivar was a most remarkable human being, and is still deeply admired and respected across most of South America as the “El Libertador,” and “El Emancipator.” Called the “Second George Washington,” Bolivar liberated Venezuela—as well as Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia—from Spanish rule and declared their independence.

     His words are still widely quoted: “El arte de vencer se aprende en las derotas,” which means “the art of conquering one learns in his or her failures.” Also, Bolivar said, “The first duty of a government is to give education to the people.” Because Bolivar hated slavery, he said, “Henceforth, there shall be but one class of men in Venezuela. All shall be citizens.”

     And yet, Chavez has paid excessive homage to the former revolutionary. When Chavez reads his televised speeches, he seats himself in front of one of several large paintings of Bolivar, which serves as a backdrop. He frequently brandishes Bolivar’s sword, “a solid-gold saber encrusted with more than 1,000 diamonds, rubies, and other precious stones,” and then he gives out replicas of the sword to other national leaders.

     Chavez leaves an empty chair at meetings or when dining, ostensibly, so he claims, for Simon Bolivar’s spirit to join him, and he celebrates Bolivar’s birthday every year, as he did on July 24, the 227^th anniversary of Bolivar’s birth.

     However, the most bizarre display of veneration happened shortly after midnight on July 16 of this year, when Hugo Chavez presided over the exhumation (or some say, desecration) of Bolivar’s remains from his grave. Chavez was reported to have then prayed for a resurrection, similar to the miracle that Christ had performed upon Lazarus.

     “I had some doubts,” Chavez said, “but after seeing his remains, my heart said, ‘Yes, it is me.’ Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: ‘It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.’”

     In January of 2008, Chavez set up a commission to investigate his firm belief that Bolivar was actually murdered, perhaps by arsenic poisoning, which contradicts the reports of those who witnessed his death, and said that at the age of forty-seven in 1830, he died of tuberculosis.

     Why this obeisance before the memory and bones of Simon Bolivar? Some believe that Chavez is evoking the memory of Bolivar by using a left-wing view of the revolutionary’s writings and supposed ambitions as a basis for his own socialist government and his defiance of the United States. And yet, Bolivar was the very antithesis of what Chavez now believes and does. In fact, Bolivar was more attuned with the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Rousseau than with Marx or Engels.

     Others say that Chavez’s superficial act of homage is simply a distraction, trying to turn the citizens of Venezuela away from facing the sobering reality of what his mismanagement has wreaked upon their country, for he faces elections this September. Chavez is rattling swords with Colombia, his hostile neighbor to the east. The country’s economy currently groans under a 31 percent inflation rate, the world’s highest, and there are shortages of basic supplies in the nation’s markets. The voices of opposition have all been silenced or fled the country.

     Over and above that though, one author wrote that, “The desecration of Bolivar’s tomb is as shocking as anything Chavez has ever done.”

     Centuries before Shakespeare left instructions that upon his tombstone would be inscribed the following: “Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.”

DON KNOTTS

by William H. Benson

July 22, 2010

     Jesse Don Knotts was born on July 21, 1924 in Morgantown, West Virginia into a truly dysfunctional family. The last of four sons, Don slept in the kitchen so that his mother could rent out his room to boarders in order for the family to survive the Depression, and his father, who suffered from anxiety and blindness, rarely left his bed. Two of his older brothers drank constantly, and quarreled. One brother, “Shadow,” died from an asthma attack when Don was still a teenager.

     Don looked to escape: he practiced magic tricks and ventriloquism on the lodgers. He graduated from Morgantown’s high school, and if my memory is correct, his classmates voted him “the most likely to succeed.” At seventeen, he headed to New York City, where he hoped to find work as a ventriloquist, but he lasted only a few weeks. Back at home, he enrolled at the University of West Virginia.

     His education was interrupted in late 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He enlisted, and spent the war years entertaining the troops with a dummy he had named Danny. But, one day on board a ship, he tossed Danny overboard: from then on, he would perform only straight comedy. After the war’s end, he returned to Morgantown and graduated in 1948 with a degree in theatre.

     After marrying, he headed a second time to New York City, and this time he worked the contacts he had made in the army. From 1953 until 1955, he had a small part in the television soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and then in 1956, he became Mr. Morrison, a nervous uptight guy who shook constantly, on the skit “Man in the Street,” a feature of Steve Allen’s television show. If asked if he was nervous, Mr. Morrison would answer with a terse, anxiety-wracked, “Nope!”

     He then teamed up with Andy Griffith, who had the lead in the hit Broadway show, No Time for Sergeants, in which Don played the part of an extreme by-the-book drill instructor with a whistle. Then, in 1958, Andy and Don made the film version of the show. The next year, Steve Allen, like most of the other television performers then, packed up and moved west to Hollywood, and Don Knotts followed.

     Then, in 1960, he heard that Andy Griffith was getting his own television show, in which he would play the part of a small town Sheriff in Mayberry, North Carolina. Don called Andy and asked if he might need a deputy on the show, and Andy agreed.

     For five seasons, until 1965, Don Knotts played the part of Barney Fife, Sheriff Taylor’s utterly incompetent deputy. His single bullet for his revolver was kept safely tucked in his shirt pocket, as he shouted, “Nip it in the bud!”, or blew his whistle. The show’s writers had intended that Andy would play the comic, and Barney the straight guy, but, Andy later said, “By the second episode, I knew that Don should be funny, and I should play straight.”

     The old black and white Andy Griffith Show’s, I have always thought are truly funny, and others agreed: for those five seasons, Don Knotts earned five Emmy Awards for Best Supporting Actor in a television comedy.

     Believing the show would end after the five seasons, Don signed a contract with Universal Studios to perform in a series of movies, but then Andy, bowing to the network’s pressure, decided to continue the show. Don deeply regretted that he left the show when he did, and so did his television audience. It was filmed in color thereafter and without Barney Fife, it was never as funny, barely fifth-rate entertainment.

     Unlike Woody Allen’s movies with their sophisticated adult humor, Don’s never achieved much. The Incredible Mr. Limpert, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, and The Shakiest Gun in the West, were more suitable for children.

     Don finally had his own show, The Don Knotts Show, but it lasted for only a single season in 1970-1971. Then, in 1979, he began playing the part of Ralph Furley, the landlord in Three’s Company, alongside John Ritter and Suzanne Sommers, and stayed until 1984. Again, Don’s comic skills and his sense of timing had everyone laughing.

     Macular degeneration late in his life took away his eyesight, much like his father before him, but a lifetime of smoking gave him lung cancer, and he died on February 24, 2006, the same day as Dennis Weaver and at the same age, eighty-one. Two deputies, one on a western, Gunsmoke, and the other on a comedy, bowed out together.