THE OTHER WES MOORE

by William H. Benson

July 8, 2010

     A book review in the Denver Post last week caught my attention. It told of a book written by a banker named Wes Moore and was entitled The Other Wes Moore. In it, Moore recounts the details of his life: that he grew up in poverty in the Bronx, that his dad had died when he was quite young, and that his mother had worked at several jobs. Determined to see him succeed, she had extricated him from the street by sending him to a military school, where his native intelligence and leadership skills blossomed.

     He was then fortunate enough to enroll in and graduate from John Hopkins University, and then, in the year 2000, he surprised everyone and won a Rhodes scholarship, becoming “the first black student at John Hopkins ever to win the award.”

     Roughly, at the same time that the news of Wes Moore’s scholarship was being blazoned across the headlines of the Sun, Baltimore’s newspaper, the name of another young black man, coincidentally named Wes Moore, was in the same newspaper, but for an entirely different reason—murder. He had killed “an off-duty police officer named Bruce Prothero, father of five.”

     This second Wes Moore had had a tough start in life too, growing up in a poverty-ravaged and drug-infested neighborhood, but he had distanced himself from that deplorable environment by joining the Job Corps, getting his GED, and learning some marketable job skills. But, he “never found a good job and tumbled back into his old life.” He became the other Wes Moore, now stuck in prison for the rest of his years.

     A German word that the English language has appropriated is “doppelganger,” which refers to “the counterpart of a living person that is often ghost-like.”

     In Washington Irving’s classic story, Rip Van Winkle, the never-do-well Rip falls asleep on a mountain in the Catskills of upstate New York and awakens twenty years later. He walks back into his village, and the people have all changed. In despair, he cries out to the crowd, “Does nobody here know Rip Van Winkle?” Someone points and answers: “Oh, to be sure! that’s Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree.”

     Rip gapes in wonder and exclaims, “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else—that’s me yonder—no—that’s somebody else got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!” He had met his doppelganger.

     Abraham Lincoln, when notified of his election as President in November of 1860, saw himself in the mirror and noticed two faces, one of which was paler and ghost-like. That second face would disappear, and then reappear later. So concerned was Lincoln by the oddity that he confided in Mary Todd, his wife, and eventually he concluded that it meant that he would win the election again in 1864, but that, because of the ghostly pale of the second face, he would not survive a second term. He too had met his doppelganger.

     Mark Twain, in his story The Prince and the Pauper, tells of two boys, who look very much alike, who meet one day near Henry VIII’s palace. One of the boys, Tom Canty is a pauper, a ruffian, shabbily-dressed, but a dreamer. The other, is Edward, a prince, the King’s son. They try on each other’s clothes, and suddenly guards yank Edward, drive out of the palace, and throw him amongst the laughing people who jeer and ridicule him when he protests that he truly is Edward, the prince. In the palace, Tom Canty hesitantly begins acting and talking as a prince, even to the King. Tom and Edward each had met their doppelganger.

     The idea of a doppelganger, and even that of another Wes Moore, prompts me, and I ask, “What about the other Richard Nixon?” Instead of shouting, “I am not a crook!”, he might have been a law-abiding citizen, perhaps an electrician, minus the bristling ego and the paranoid mindset. The other Ronald Reagan may have stayed in Iowa and worked for decades in relative anonymity as a sports announcer, and the other Bill Clinton never won a Rhodes scholarship, never attended Yale law school, but he was faithful to his wife.

     Some of us might want to trade places with our alter ego, a second self, our doppelganger, the “other Wes Moore” of our lives, but, I am convinced, most of us would not. We are where we are in life because of the choices we made early on, and to put our lives into reverse and go backwards to a point where we made a crucial mistake or made a foolish decision and then fast forward is not possible: time only marches forward.

     Would I truly want to live the other Bill Benson’s life, my doppelganger? I wonder. Yes, it might be better, but it might be worse. To me, this life, as I have lived it, has been sufficient for one person.

MIDSUMMER DAY FESTIVAL

by William H. Benson

June 24, 2010

     For fun this summer, I read the first of Stieg Larsson’s three mystery novels, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. In it, Larsson, a Swedish author, tells the story of a missing person, Harriet Vanger, who disappeared in 1966 at the age of sixteen. Her uncle, Henrik Vanger, now eighty-two, hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who works at the magazine the Millennium, in early January of the year to devote the next twelve months to investigating the disappearance of Harriet, who Henrik is convinced was murdered.

     In October, Blomkvist teams up with a twenty-something computer hacker and a social misfit, a girl covered in tattoos, named Lisbeth Salander. She is “a startling and strangely appealing character, an oddball and something brand new in crime fiction.” Late in the year, this “improbable pair” solve the case in a most sensational way.

     Larsson’s story is gripping, difficult to put aside, an enticing thriller, and perhaps even addictive, and this is mainly, I think, because of how he writes it. I call his literary style—for want of a better phrase—a bicycle ride. He spins a single wheel by focusing upon Mikael Blomkvist, and then after a few paragraphs, he will cut away and spin a second wheel by dwelling on Lisbeth Salander for a few more paragraphs. He switches back and forth between these two characters, spinning each wheel, building suspense.

     Of course, the reader anticipates that moment when the two wheels, the two stories, and the two characters will come together, and once they do, the reader is suddenly on a bicycle soaring down a paved mountain highway, without pedaling.

     The book is long, 644 pages in paperback, but it is a quick read.

     Larsson’s second book, The Girl Who Plays with Fire, and the third, The Girl Who Kicks the Hornets’ Nest, feature the same two characters, written in the same style, but with different mysteries. Larsson actually wrote all three at once, forming a trilogy, but he submitted the three at once to a publisher.

     The motif of the trilogy though is coffee, something that Larsson may not have intended, but he has his characters repeatedly preparing or drinking coffee. It may be a Swedish thing, for I have heard coffee referred to as “Swedish gasoline.”

     Larsson never knew of his sudden stroke of fame and fortune—27 million copies have sold worldwide so far—with his Millennium trilogy because he died in November of 2004 at the age of fifty, presumably of a heart attack. One columnist suggested that he actually died of too much coffee, or of cigarettes, for both of his characters, Blomkvist and Salander, smoke plenty of them.

     Midway through that year when seeking Harriet Vanger, at the time of the summer solstice, Blomkvist gave a passing nod to the Swedish festival at Midsummer, a holiday celebrated across northern Europe, especially in Finland, Latvia, and Sweden. This week, actually on Monday, people across Scandinavia will celebrate Midsummer, when the day is the longest, with dancing, maypoles, music, and bonfires.

     Also, this Tuesday, June 22, is National Columnist’s Day, a day not nearly as widely observed as the Midsummer festival. In 1992, I submitted my first biweekly column, and except for one short break along the way, I have dutifully submitted the same every two weeks since.

     The genres I have touched upon include history, literature, religion, politics, science, biography, sometimes even sports, and now today, a book review. Fortunately, I have worked with editors, publishers, and newspaper owners willing to print my 700-word column, and have had readers willing to read it: always the hope.

     Unlike the breakaway mystery novelist who has minted a new thriller series, such as Larsson’s trilogy, the lowly columnist rarely, if ever, enjoys any fortune or fame, even though writing a thought-provoking and tasteful column is not simple. One esteemed writer began a lengthy letter with an apology, “Please forgive me that this is so long. I did not have the time to write a short letter.” To cut, revise, and excise the unnecessary words, and still deliver the idea is a columnist’s job. Writing is rewriting.

     Larsson filled his three novels with pages of immorality, messed-up lives, drunkenness, murder, savage viciousness, and spectacularly corrupt Swedish businessmen, and politicians, sufficient to sicken and revile even the most jaded, and yet, readers seem eager to soak it all up. They are like the people who arrive after the hurricane or tornado has torn through a town or a farm, eager to stare, photograph, and point at the wreckage.

     Where the columnist cuts words, the novelist stacks them atop each other, to the ceiling. Who dares argue with the flimsily-built success of a novelist like Larsson? Not the columnist. “Never get into a fight with people who buy ink by the barrelful.”

A STATISTICAL ANOMALY

by William H. Benson

June 10, 2010

     Vikas Swarup of India published his debut novel, Q & A, in 2005. Told in first person, the story is that of Ram Mohammad Thomas, an eighteen-year-old waiter who survived a multitude of misfortunes—abandonment, child abuse, destitution, and the witness to several murders—while growing up alone on the streets of Mumbai and Delhi in India.

      Suddenly, he is selected to appear on the television game show Who Will Win a Billion. The show’s host, Prem Kumar, chose Ram because he assumed that an uneducated street lad would answer only a few questions. He astonishes everyone by answering all twelve questions correctly, and winning the billion rupees. But, Kumar calls the police, who proceed to torture Ram, wanting to know how he had cheated.

     It is, they assume, statistically impossible for Ram to know the answers to twelve random questions. But to his attorney Smita Shah, Ram explains, “Well, wasn’t I lucky that they only asked those questions to which I knew the answers?”

     Ram then tells about his life, how he had lived it, and how at various points, he had learned the answers to each of the dozen questions, and he had an incredible story behind each question. Ram argued that the questions only tested his memory, not his knowledge.

     The book Q & A was then made into the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and although names and details were radically changed, the movie won a host of Oscars two years ago.

     Aside from the trifling nature of Ram’s dozen questions, the more significant issue that Q & A brings up is the question of probability: that it is statistically unlikely for anyone in Ram’s station in life—uneducated, a waiter, without home or family, a street urchin—to answer correctly 12 random questions in a row, in a streak.

     Stephen Jay Gould, the writer and Harvard professor, wrote in his article “The Streak of Streaks,” that, “the rules of probability govern our universe,” especially winning streaks. Game shows, the state lotteries, as well as the Las Vegas gambling casinos operate their businesses upon those rules of probability, and when someone actually wins, such as Ram on a quiz show, or a lottery or a casino winner, we are all astounded.

     Gould argued, and I think quite correctly, that there was one statistical anomaly in the history of sports, once considered unachievable, and that is that “Joe DiMaggio got at least one hit in each of 56 consecutive games in the 1941 season.” It is one of the most cherished of all baseball’s records. His streak began on May 15 and ended on July17 when a third baseman for the Indians caught two of DiMaggio’s hits.

     In 1978, Pete Rose hit at least once in 44 successive games in the 1978 season, good enough for third place in the record books, and Ty Cobb hit in 40 games in 1911, earning him the sixth place. No one else in professional baseball has come close to DiMaggio. 

     In a toss of 100 coins, chances are more than 75% that you will see a streak of 6 or more heads (or tails), and almost a 10% chance that you will produce a streak of 10 or more. But a streak of 56 is far beyond 10 or even 15 heads (or tails) in a row.

      Gould wrote, “a streak of this nature must be absolutely exceptionless; you are not allowed a single day of subpar play, or even bad luck. You bat only four or five times in an average game. Sometimes two or three of these efforts yield walks, and you get only one or two shots at a hit. . . . DiMaggio’s streak is the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports.”

     Ed Purcell, a winner of a Nobel in physics and a baseball fan, agreed and said that, “Nothing ever happened in baseball above and beyond the frequency predicted by coin-tossing models. The longest runs of wins or losses are as they should be.” His one major exception was DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, the “one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should never have occurred at all.”

     Gould said, “Detractors can argue forever about the general tenor of your life and work, but they can never erase a great event.” For Joe DiMaggio, his singular great event was 56 games and a hit in each one in 1941, and for Ram Mohammed Thomas, albeit a fictional character, it was answering twelve trivia questions correctly, in a row.

     On the Bell curve of streaks, they were the outliers, solitary and alone.

MEMORIES

by William H. Benson

May 27, 2010

     “Precious Memories, how they linger,” sings the Gospel singer.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson, born on May 25, in 1803, hinted at those “lingering” memories, seemingly jointly held: “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”

     On May 26, in 1940, fishing boats and recreational boats rescued the Allied troops pinned down at Dunkirk and facing a sheer annihilation by the Nazi troops. On the same day, but in 1994, the United States and Vietnam resumed relations after nineteen years of an uneasy truce. James Arness, aka Marshall Matt Dillon of “Gunsmoke,” turns 87 today, and turning 62 is Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, who was constantly telling us to “Go Your Own Way,” or “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” because it’ll soon be here.

     Both Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s Vice-President, and Vincent Price, the man with the haunting macabre voice, were born on the same day, May 27, 1911, and both are now deceased. Henry Kissinger too was born on the 27^th, but a dozen years after Humphrey and Price, and he, like James Arness, will celebrate his 87^th birthday.

     James Bond’s creator, the writer Ian Fleming, would have turned 102, on May 28, if he had not died at the premature age of 56.

     On May 29, 1865, in the grandest display of a redemptive act in our nation’s history, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that granted a general amnesty to all those Confederates who had participated in the rebellion. On the same day, but in 1917, John F. Kennedy was born, which means he would have turned 93 this day, except that an assassin ended his life at 46 ½: too young, much too young. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest on the same day, May 29^th, but in 1953, and Bob Hope, who saw his 100^th birthday on this day in 2003, and then died two months later, would be 107.

     On May 30, in 1943, the Battle of the Aleutian Islands ended after three weeks of fighting that was marked by savage and bitter fighting: 552 Americans were killed, and 2352 Japanese soldiers, plus some 500 others who preferred suicide to surrender. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on this day in 1922, and in 2002, at Ground Zero at the World Trade Center, in a solemn and silent ceremony, the recovery and cleanup ended. Gale Sayers, the Chicago Bears running back, turns 67 this day.

     Some 2300 people drowned on May 31, 1889, after a dam on a river broke, causing a flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Clint Eastwood, aka Rowdy Yates and Dirty Harry, who coined the moniker, “Go ahead, make my day,” turns 80 this day. “Broadway” Joe Namuth also turns 67, and Brooke Shields turns 45. Walt Whitman would be 191 years old this day, and in his Leaves of Grass, he pondered about human life.

     “As the time draws night glooming a cloud, a dread beyond of I know not what darkens me. I shall go forth, I shall traverse the States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long. Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease. O book, O chants! Must all then amount to but this? Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?—and yet it is enough, O soul: O soul, we have positively appear’d—that is enough.”

     Elvis Presley sang of remembrances of things past: “Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind. Memories, sweetened through the ages, just like wine.”

     Memories can be precious and sweet, tasting perhaps of wine, like those of an outstanding achievement—ascending a mountain or marking a number of birthdays, but not necessarily all of them. Some memories are of arguments and bitter disagreements and are of fighting, wars, killing, and of lives tragically cut short. Those ugly memories we remember better than the pleasant ones, but, instead of sweet, they taste sour, and are better left unspoken, but they cannot be unremembered.

     And so it is every year on Memorial Day, a day we reflect upon our memories of loved ones passed on, of people we know and have known, and of events that continue to astound us still. Forgetting the bad and relishing the good, you, my dear reader, can enjoy each hour of your precious Memorial Day.

JANE FRANKLIN MECOM

by William H. Benson

May 13, 2010

     Benjamin Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, was married four times, and by two of those wives, he produced seventeen children: Elizabeth, Samuel, Hannah, Josiah, Anne, Joseph I, and Joseph II, all by the first wife; and  John, Peter, Mary, James, Sarah, Ebenezer, Thomas, Benjamin, Lydia, and Jane, all by the second wife. Aside from the fact that most of those names were plucked from both the Old and New Testaments, one can deduce that Benjamin was the youngest son, and Jane the youngest daughter.

     Three weeks ago, I was invited to attend the History Club’s annual awards banquet at my alma mater, University of Northern Colorado, and the guest speaker that evening was Dr. Jill Lapore, a young professor of History at Harvard. Within twenty minutes, she had us all there that evening entranced with her simple story of the tender relationship between Benjamin Franklin and “his favorite younger sister,” Jane Franklin Mecom.

     Benjamin was born in January of 1706, and six years later, in March of 1712, Jane was born. In their native Boston, Josiah, their father, fashioned candles out of tallow and had a soap-boiling business, and he was active in his church. Benjamin hated the grimy candle / soap business as much as he detested New England’s Puritan theology. So miserable was he that when he was seventeen, he ran away to Philadelphia. There, for Benjamin the world unfolded itself.

     A life-time later Jane explained to Benjamin’s grandson her reaction to the loss of her older brother. “When Benjamin ran off to Philadelphia at seventeen, he never sent word back home to tell us he was safe. He used to call me his favorite little sister—Jenny. I was eleven when he fled—but did he ever think of my anguish when we were left without news for almost six months? I cried in bed every night.”

     Dr. Lapore explained that by the act of running away, Benjamin had escaped the poverty of the candle shop, the obscurity of colonial Boston, the crushing burden that Calvinism loaded upon Puritan believers, and the ignorance of the world that lay beyond Boston’s borders. Jane’s lot in life was that which he had escaped: poverty, obscurity, ignorance, and a doctrinally heavy religion.

     Benjamin built a successful printing business, published for decades Poor Richard’s Almanack, flew a kite and discovered electricity, constructed bifocals, lived sumptuously in London and then Paris, participated in the Revolutionary War, and then assisted in the creation of legal documents that ensured a new government. Soon, he was one of the most talked about men in the world, deeply esteemed by all.

     None of this was available to Jane, who, at the age of fifteen, married the young man next door, Edward Mecom, a maker of saddles. For Edward, she bore twelve children, eleven of whom she buried. Into her journal, that which she called her Book of Ages, she recorded the dates of their births and then one by one the dates of their deaths, until, overcome with sorrow, she tossed aside the entire project.

     Then, when her parents began failing due to poor health, she had to move back in with them and care for them until the day they too died and she buried them. She was the youngest daughter, she lived next door, and so the duty of parental care fell upon her.

     The only bright thing in her dismal life was that series of letters that she received from her brother Benjamin, for they corresponded until Benjamin died in 1790. “Dearest Jenny,” he wrote. “Genius without education is silver in the mine,” and “Remember, that modesty makes woman more lovely than an angel.”

     Late in her life, Jane, in one of her letters to Benjamin, requested a pair of spectacles because she could no longer read the printed words at a church service. He dispatched to her a pair plus different lenses to try, and said, “Look at the spectacles, Jenny, and see!”

     Where Benjamin had escaped, Jane had not. She had a single window into the larger universe and that was through her older brother, Benjamin. Dr. Lapore commented that the difference between the two siblings was due to more than just gender; it was that between the new and the old. Where Benjamin had moved into modernity, into a new and more expansive universe called the modern age, Jane had stayed behind in the old world, in colonial Boston, carrying for children and parents.

     To Benjamin’s grandson, Jane told of her family when she was a young girl growing up, and the young lad noted the bitterness in his Aunt Jane’s voice. “The girls were all kept busy,” she said, “helping mother or preparing their hope chest in view of marriage some day. No schooling for them beyond reading or writing. Once married, they had a crowd of children and hardly any time for themselves.”

     Last Sunday was Mother’s Day. Jane Franklin Mecom, the quiet Franklin, or Poor Richard’s Poor Jane.

EVIDENCE

by William H. Benson

April 29, 2010

     An English word that has drifted out of common usage is the word “pseudodox,” meaning a false idea or untrue opinion, but perhaps it is time to bring the word back.

     Today, April 29, 2010, marks the anniversary of the passing of Dionysius Lardner, an English scholar who died on this date in 1859. Known for editing the massive 132-volume encyclopedia named the Cabinet Library, Lardner was dismissed later in his life as one who was less than fully committed to facts. Charles Dickens labeled him as “that prince of humbugs,” and another denounced him as “an ignorant and impudent empiric.”

     Despite his lofty knowledge of scientific and technical matters at the time, Lardner had a difficulty: he would issue blanket declarations that others, through experimentation, later disproved. In other words, he proclaimed pseudodox.

      For example, he cautioned that trains must not be allowed to travel more than thirty miles per hour because they would asphyxiate passengers. Then, in 1835, he calculated and “proved that a steamship could never cross the Atlantic because it would need more coal than it could possibly carry without sinking.” There were others: all pseudodox.

     The question for today is “how do we know what to believe?” Or, “what is true?” Or, “how do we separate the true opinion from the false?” The historian would say that it all is derived from facts, those provable pieces of information supported by evidence.      

     This past week it was announced that two clerks in the Bisbee, Arizona courthouse were reorganizing files in a storage room when they stumbled upon a manila envelope marked “keep” that contained the original transcripts of the eyewitness accounts of the gunfight at the OK Corral.

     At 3:00 p.m. on October 26, 1881, at least five cowboys had ridden into the town of Tombstone and met up with the lawmen: the brothers Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp and also Doc Holliday. Three of the cowboys ended up dead that afternoon, and in the inquest conducted that same day, eyewitnesses gave their testimonies, which were transcribed onto pages of paper, the same pages found this week.

     The envelope’s contents were turned over to Arizona’s archivists, who had the duty of restoring the documents, which, after 119 years, are faded and “as brittle as potato chips.” They will remain on a shelf in the state’s archives, henceforth.

     Occasionally, biographies magically appear, such as Clifford Irving’s of Howard Hughes, which Hughes himself in 1971 declared via a teleconference on “60 Minutes” was a forgery. Then, in 1983, the German news magazine Stern paid $6 million in U.S. dollars to the journalist Gerd Heidemann for Adolf Hitler’s supposed autobiography, conveniently found in an East German barn. A scholar later proved that it too was a hoax: the ink, only recently applied to the paper, was not manufactured before 1950.

     How do we—those who are privileged enough to be alive today—know that there was once a gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone; that there once lived a reclusive billionaire named Howard Hughes; and that there was once, which is more than enough, a tyrant, a murdering madman named Adolf Hitler?

     Again, the answer is historical evidence: written documents, such as texts, chronicles, genealogies, diaries, and memoirs; oral interviews; works of art, such as paintings, coins portraits, and films; human remains; business, military, and government records; language; and artifacts, such as tools and pottery shards.

     Supported by the physical evidence, facts become stubborn things, for they repeatedly puncture holes in our opinions, in our prejudices, and in our cherished and most recently adopted political / religious / cultural package of beliefs.

     Robert J. Shafer, a historian, said it best: “Many statesmen have testified that the study of history prepared them for what to expect: from human greed, cruelty, and folly, and from nobility and courage and wisdom. It is clear that men who are ignorant of history are apt to make superficial judgments. . . .

     “[In our open society] we must expect unreasonable charges founded on ignorance, emotionalism, idiocy, vague fears, lust for attention, and hope of pecuniary and political profit.” In other words, we can and must anticipate a steady stream of pseudodox, and the best way to block it is by holding fast to the facts, all supported by genuine evidence.