POWER AND POETRY

by William H. Benson

January 21, 2010

     John F. Kennedy and Robert Frost met on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 1961 at the inauguration of the 35^th President of the United States. Kennedy’s associate, Stewart Udall, had first suggested that Jack should invite the nation’s most distinguished poet, Robert Frost, to speak at the inauguration, but Kennedy, at first, had hesitated. “Oh no. You know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of.”

     During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had ended his speeches by quoting Robert Frost’s memorable lines: “But I have promises to keep; And miles to go before I sleep; And miles to go before I sleep.”

     Both Kennedy and Frost were from Massachusetts: Kennedy from Hyannis Port on the coast, and Frost from Amherst, in the center of the state, where he was poet-in-residence at Amherst College, and that was about all they had in common, for in 1961, Frost was 86 years old, and Kennedy half that at 43. Where Frost was a distinguished poet, the grand old man of American belles letters, Kennedy was the wealthy scion of Joseph Kennedy, Catholic, Irish, a Navy man, and an exceedingly ambitious politician.

     And yet there was something within Kennedy that drew him to Frost. Someone said it was Kennedy’s “insatiable curiosity, his support of the arts in America, and his optimism.” Another said that his decision to include Frost at the inauguration “focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture.”

     Alice Roosevelt Longworth said: “The Kennedy’s were a fascinating incredible outfit. I had great fun with them, especially Jack. He loved to tease, and he could be very amusing. He also had a real feeling for learning. Both he and Bobby were eager to supplement their education by learning more. They really wanted to know.”

     The day dawned bright and sunny on the heels of a snowstorm just days before, and then after the swearing in, Kennedy spoke.

     “Let the word go forth . . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. . . . The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. . . . And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!”

     After the applause, Frost approached the podium, but because of the glare from the blinding sun, he discovered he could not read the 77 lines of the poem “Dedication,” that he had written for the occasion. After a few awkward moments, he instead recited the fourteen lines of “The Gift Outright,” a poem he had memorized.

     Frost’s private advice to the new president: “Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” Then in a thank you note back to Frost, Kennedy wrote, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

     During the last two years of Frost’s life, he continued to circle within the President’s orbit, but then on January 29, 1963, at the age of 88, the poet passed away. Of Frost, Kennedy said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

     On Saturday, October 26, 1963, Amherst College conducted a ground-breaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library and invited the president to give the key address, and in it Kennedy explored the distinctions and resemblances of power and poetry.

     “And it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths that serve as the touchstones of our judgment.

     “But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. I look forward to a great future for America—a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America, which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

     Lofty words, but well worth pondering today, and they were virtually President Kennedy’s last intellectual thought, for four weeks later on Friday, November 22, 1963, while riding in a Dallas motorcade, an assassin’s bullet ended his life.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND 2010

by William H. Benson

January 14, 2010

     Robert Downey, Jr. stars in the new Sherlock Holmes movie that Hollywood released this past Christmas season. Because it is an intricately-woven plot with a fair number of turns and twists, movie-goers must listen closely to the characters, an unusual request of most of Hollywood’s productions and made more difficult in this movie because Downey’s words come so fast and soft, almost unintelligible.

     The story includes all of the standard Sherlock Holmes trappings: Holmes himself—peerless and brilliant; Dr. John Watson, who, with Sherlock, lives at 221 A and B Baker Street; Mrs. Hudson, their domestic housekeeper; LaStrade, the inept London police detective; Irene Radler, Holmes’s female counterpart, played by Rachel McAdams; and a mastermind criminal, who, for this story, is named Blackwood. And then there is the gray and dreary nineteenth-century London setting—the Thames River, Big Ben, and horses pulling coaches over cobblestone streets.

     According to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon on Sherlock—four novels and fifty-six short stories—the master detective was born in 1854 on January 6, a day I find most appropriate, at the year’s beginning. January derived its name from the Roman god, Janus, two-faced, seeing into the past, but also peering deep into the future, much like Sherlock. In the present Holmes can step into a crime scene, see from the clues what happened in the past, and using detective reasoning and logic determine what he, Watson, and LaStrade must do to trap the perpetrator in the future.

     The new year, 2010, yawns before us, inviting us to live it, and we wonder what it will hold. George Will in Newsweek considered 2009 “A Clunker of a Year.” And, Jon  Meacham, Newsweek’s editor, called for “The Case for an Optimistic Stoicism,” and then quoted from Meditations, written by the second-century A.D. Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”

     Our ears long for a healthy dose of optimism, perhaps even a Marcus Aurelius stoic variety. A headline by Daniel Gross, another Newsweek columnist, shouted, “Snap Out of It! The dangers of economic pessimism.”

     Thirty years ago, America was adrift, suffering from galloping inflation, an Iran hostage crisis, a sluggish economy, and a cerebral but ineffective Democratic President, Jimmy Carter. Suddenly, from the wings, we heard a new voice, the California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who startled everyone with his words, “There are those who think that America’s best days are gone, that we are now a has-been, a finished republic, but I say to you that America’s best days are in the future. We are the city on the hill, a guiding light for all the world to see and admire.” He was right.

     That kind of language uplifted and motivated a downtrodden American people then in 1980 and would do so again in 2010. But instead we read headlines: “How Great Powers Fall: Steep Debt, Slow Growth, and High Spending Kill Empires—and America Could Be Next,” and “An Empire at Risk.” Few words could be more debilitating.

     There are those who argue that the Republican Party must pull itself together, capture the independents and moderates, focus upon fiscal restraint, hold taxes down, finish and be done with these excessively foolish wars in third world countries that squander our people and resources, and then discard unaffordable federal government programs.

     Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor in Minnesota said, “You can’t say you are going to be fiscally disciplined and then go to Washington and spend like crazy. You can’t say, ‘We are against corruption and bad behavior,’ and then engage in corruption and bad behavior. I mean, people aren’t stupid.” Pawlenty further believes that “we should pass an amendment to require a balanced budget.”

     Haley Barbour, Mississippi’s Republican governor, believes that the Republican Party, instead of struggling for a grand political theory, should take back the moderates. “People are crazy if they think we win by getting more pure. We win by getting big.”

     “Elementary, my dear Watson,” supposedly said Sherlock Holmes, once he had explained how he had solved a crime, but according to Doyle’s canon, Holmes never did say that phrase, for Doyle understood that seeing into the future is not ever elementary.

     And yet the clues are all there for what we face in 2010, and we try to focus upon it and see it, but pessimism and a helpless feeling have obscured and colored the picture gray, like a dreary day in Sherlock Holmes’s London. Let the sun shine on America.  

JIM BAKKER’S CHRISTMAS

by William H. Benson

December 24, 2009

     Jim Bakker’s Christmas at Heritage USA was a spectacular production, a

seasonal extravaganza, and a destination point for sightseers from near and far. Called the Christmas City of Lights, the spectacle attracted thousands of people to the Heritage Village just south of Charlotte, North Carolina, each Christmas season throughout the early 1980s. Jim insisted that Christmas at PTL be an over-the-top lavish display.

     Heritage USA was listed as a top Christmas destination point in America. Over 1,250,000 colored Christmas light bulbs were splayed across the dozens of buildings and hundreds of trees that dotted the 2500-acre property. The Christmas tree inside the lobby of the Grand Hotel stood nearly three stories tall, and workers decorated the tallest tree on the Village’s Main Street with recognizable moving Christmas characters.

     There was “Angel Boulevard,” a startling display of angels lit up in lights, and a “Living Nativity” that featured Mary, Joseph, a baby, three wise men, sheep, goats, horses, and even three camels.

     In the 1986, and final, edition of the annual Christmas parade, “Uncle” Henry and “Aunt” Susan Harrison, Jim Bakker’s friends, dressed up as Santa and Mrs. Santa and rode in a float fashioned into a sleigh pulled by reindeer. All the floats in the parade sparkled with hundreds of lights powered by portable generators. The security department at Heritage USA recorded over one million visitors during that 1986 Christmas season.

     And then it all came crashing to an end with the “revelations.” In March of 1987, Jim admitted to his wife Tammy Faye and to the public that he had had a one-time affair with Jessica Hahn, a New York church secretary, in December of 1980. In humiliation and disgrace, he resigned as pastor of Heritage Village Church and passed his pulpit over to Jerry Falwell, a Baptist televangelist from Lynchburg, Virginia. By October of that year, Falwell, who lacked Jim Bakker’s talent for raising money, placed PTL in bankruptcy.

     Two years later in October of 1989, a jury convicted Jim Bakker on twenty-four counts of wire and mail fraud, and Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Potter sentenced Jim to an astonishing forty-five years in prison. Late that year, Bakker woke up to find himself housed in a cramped cell with three cellmates, who smoked and swore nonstop, on the second floor of Building 2 at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota.

     “I must be in hell,” he thought.                                                                                                                

     Jim’s job was to clean the toilets, sinks, and shower stalls every morning after the other inmates on his floor had headed to their day jobs.

     One afternoon in mid-December of 1989, a guard handed Jim a box and told him to assemble a Christmas tree for the sitting area. He stared in amazement at “a few colored lights, one short straggly garland, and some beat-up ornaments, that were worse than ragtag—they were the ragtag ends of nothing.” “The tree was truly pitiful,” Jim said.

     Other inmates saw what he was doing and cursed him. “What are you doin’, Bakker, puttin’ that tree up like that?” Several told him where to shove the tree.

     Christmas Day in prison was especially painful: Tammy Faye arrived with their two children—Jamie Charles and Tammy Sue. They each cried and hugged Jim as long as the guards would permit. Then, because they were the last family to receive their Christmas dinner in the chow line—not until three o’clock—the guards told them to “Wrap it up!” before they had eaten a bite. The Bakker’s had to throw their plates into a garbage can.

     Then, as Tammy Faye, Jamie, and Tammy Sue headed outside into the falling snow—an unappreciated white Christmas—a sobbing Jim endured the indignation of yet another strip search and a hurried march back to his cell to make the daily four o’clock count. Envious eyes stared up at him from the other cells as he walked past them.

     Someone explained to Jim that first year that inmates in prison count their time served, not by calendar months or years, but by the number of Christmases that they have missed away from home. Fifteen years in prison meant “Fifteen Christmases.”

     No man living in the twentieth century fell further than did Jim Bakker. The contrast between his Ghost of a Christmas Past and his Nightmare of a Christmas Present was immense, absurd, and most ironic.

     How much is enough of anything? How much of Christmas is enough? How much of prison is enough? A week incarcerated has to be horrible, a year ghastly and inhumane. The poet William Blake wrote that, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Jim knew all about “more than enough,” in at least two ways.

     After a judge reduced his sentence twice and with time reduced for good behavior, he was released from prison on July 1, 1994, after enduring “five Christmases.”               

     Wherever you may reside, treat yourself well, and make it a Merry Christmas.

KING EDWARD VIII ABDICATES

by William H. Benson

December 10, 2009

     Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David was born in 1894, into the House of Windsor, the son of George V, King of the British Empire, and Queen Mary. Being the eldest son, David, as he was called, soon learned that he too was destined to become King, upon his father’s passing.

     His family and the people of England were anxious that he meet and marry someone appropriate, a girl with good breeding, royal blood, educated, and equipped to handle the demands of serving as Queen. At the age of 37, when at a party in London, and when still a bachelor, the Prince of Wales met Wallis Simpson, an American girl from Baltimore, and the prince fell in love.

     Wallis at that time was married to Ernest Simpson, a member of the Coldstream Guards, the Prince’s own regiment, and this was her second marriage. Her first marriage to Lt. E. Winfield Spencer, a flight instructor at Pensacola, Florida, had ended in divorce.

     From 1931 until 1936, Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales were often seen together, cruising on the royal yacht, or dining and entertaining at house parties in the south of France or at the Prince’s own home in London, Belvedere Lodge. Indeed, Mrs. Wallis Simpson was considered then the most distinguished host in all of London, and the Prince frequently attended her dinner parties.

     Mrs. Simpson was neat, tidy, charming, witty, did not take herself too seriously, had blue eyes, and laugh lines about those eyes, and of course David was love struck.

     George V died on January 20, 1936, and David gained the throne, becoming King Edward VIII. Because of censorship, few British commoners knew of the king’s love for this married American woman, Mrs. Simpson, but when the news broke, the British public was more accepting of the match than either the church, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the government, headed by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin.

     A constitutional crisis broke out when King Edward VIII indicated his intention to make Mrs. Wallis Simpson his Queen. In October of that year, Wallis divorced Ernest Simpson, but because the Church of England did not recognize divorce, no representative of the church would marry her and the King. If they married elsewhere, the Church would not recognize the marriage.

     In November, Mrs. Simpson fled to the south of France, and from Lyons, she telephoned Edward and told him, “Don’t abdicate! You fool!” He did it anyways. To the Prime Minister, Edward said, “I am determined to marry Mrs. Simpson, and I am ready to go.” Stanley Baldwin replied, “Sir. That is most grievous news.” On December 11, 1936, after 327 days on the throne, King Edward VIII abdicated, forfeiting his annual salary, estimated between nine and ten million in U.S. dollars at that time.

     Has any man ever given up more for the girl he loved? Perhaps two better rhetorical questions would be King Richard III’s: “Was ever woman in his humor woo’d? Was ever woman in this humor won?”

     Edward’s younger brother, now George VI, succeeded to the throne, and on June 3, 1937, David and Wallis married, and were quite happy together, until his passing in 1972.

      George VI died in his sleep on February 6, 1952 at the age of 56, and his eldest daughter became Queen Elizabeth II. Her son, Charles, the current Prince of Wales, had his own set of marital problems. He had married and then divorced Lady Diana, but then on April 8, 2005, in a civil service at Windsor castle, the Prince of Wales married his long-time love, Camilla Parker Bowles, who had divorced her husband.  

     Why do some men act so foolishly when in love? And why, for that matter, do some women act so foolishly when in love? I am reminded of Shakespeare’s sonnet, “Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight. Past reason hunted, and no sooner had; Past reason hated as a swallowed bait.” –Perhaps Tiger Woods’s thoughts these past few days.

     Thomas Jefferson fell in love with a married woman, Maria Cosway, when in France and upon their breakup, he wrote a dialogue between his heart and head. His head said to his heart, “Well, friend, you seem to be in a pretty trim.” And his heart replied, “I am indeed the most wretched of all earthly beings. Overwhelmed with grief.”

     The head said, “These are the eternal consequences of your warmth and precipitation. This is one of the scrapes into which you are ever leading us.” And the heart cried out, “O my friend! This is no moment to upbraid my foibles.”

     Indeed, for some, when love walks through the door, reason flies out the window.

THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

by William H. Benson

November 26, 2009

     In last week’s New York Times Book Review, I caught the following comment: “Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, ‘no,’ because it is actually an ‘oblate spheroid.’ Such people suffer from ‘the curse of knowledge’: the inability to imagine what it’s like not to know something that they now know.” Those phrases, “the curse of knowledge,” and “the inability to imagine not knowing,” struck me.

     I then read a quote from the October 26 issue of Newsweek. The cover story bandied about the idea of colleges reducing their programs from four years to three. Diane Ravitch, professor at New York University, argued, that “it was a bad idea.”

     “Most of the students,” she said, “who are going to enter college in the next few years are ill-prepared for course-work. I should not say most, but anywhere from a third to a half require remediation of basic skills. They are very poorly prepared in mathematics. They know little of history or literature or science or the arts or geography. They have not studied a foreign language, and to reduce their higher education from four years to three years means that they’ll have 25% less education.”

     Professor Ravitch is right: freshmen students entering college are green, they lack sophistication and an extensive background, but that is why they are going to college in the first place—to remedy that defect. Some arrive on campus wanting an education, the accompanying credentials, and the chance to earn respectability and a career. They probably cannot even hope to suffer someday from the “curse of knowledge.”

     Learning is hard work, often a struggle to tame the emotions. Constant study grinds down the best of students. Impending tests terrify. Bad grades on papers disappoint the strongest, for human beings are not only thinking beings but emotional ones too. It is like two vortexes are set spinning inside every student, one clockwise and the other counter-clockwise, and once the two bump into each other, sparks fly. Reason slams into pride. Facts meet up face to face with envy, and cold calculation crashes into animosity.   

     And yet, once an individual learns a subject, he or she seems to observe the world and others through the prism of only that subject—the curse for knowing something. For example, the psychology majors like to categorize people into either passive or aggressive personalities. The English majors focus in on people’s spoken grammar, their written paragraph construction, or their underlying literary themes.

     The law students are swept up in passionate discussions of the legality or illegality of an act, and the theology students are so quick to point out the fallacies in others’ religious beliefs and practices. The math and science students hold tight to their equations and formulas, and the business students can talk only in terms of dollars.

     Will Rogers once said, “If I can get a person off the subject that he or she was educated in, I usually find an ordinary person, someone interesting who I can talk to.”

     The American people believe in education and training, and as a result, our universities, both private and state, are the envy of the world. Former President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, recently completed a year of study in the U.S. at the Library of Congress and was asked what in the U.S. impressed him most. “The American university,” he replied. “The greatness and the autonomy of the American university. There is nothing in the world quite like it.”

     Ben Franklin said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance for a season.”

     Adam and Eve were instructed to eat from only the Tree of Life but not the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, for if they did, they were told, they would surely die. It is astonishing that this earliest of the world’s thinkers, the writer of Genesis, seemed to sense that there was indeed a curse hidden inside knowledge.

     Indeed, doctors and surgeons are expected to perform miracles and cure people who have abused their bodies over a lifetime. Other people hope that their lawyer can extricate them out of the precarious jams that they, often enough, have created themselves. Marriage counselors are asked to untangle the strangest of family dynamics, and judges are expected to set matters straight—often an impossible thing.

     The curse of knowledge: once we know, we are expected to use that which we know, and if not too proud, we might try to imagine not knowing what we now know.

     Know this one thing: Thursday is Thanksgiving. Have a great holiday!

DIVISIONS

by William H. Benson

November 12, 2009

     Charles Darwin decided at the age of 29 he should marry, and he arrived at that decision in his methodical manner—by listing the pros and cons on a piece of paper. Listed among the advantages, he wrote, are “Children (if it please God)—constant companion (& friend in old age)—charms of music & female chit-chat.” Among the disadvantages, he wrote, are “Terrible loss of time, if many children, forced to gain one’s bread, fighting about [with] no society.”

     He then ended his jottings with the words “Marry, marry, marry. QED.” Quod erat demonstrandum: meaning, thus it is proved. He had decided.

     He did marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but not before he had had a discussion with her about his commitment to scientific inquiry over that of religious belief. But Emma, Charles learned, was open-minded: “she would not insist on word-for-word biblical belief, she told Charles, just an openness to the love of God.” And to that Charles agreed. Theirs was a happy marriage into which ten children were born.

     In November of 1959, 150 years ago this month, Charles Darwin published his major work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and Darwin was catapulted into international fame.

     A new book by Deborah Heiligman entitled Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith was published in May of this year, and in it Heiligman pointed out that the religious difference between them did not distract from their marriage. “In today’s climate of division between religion and science, it’s instructive to read about a marriage in which the two cultures improved each for exposure to the other.”

    “Had Charles spent more time with free-thinking, liberal intellectuals and less time sitting on the sofa with Emma, perhaps then he would not have been quite so conciliatory and conservative in his writing of the book.” The division between science and religion ran lengthwise, down the center of the Darwin’s kitchen table every morning.

     Armistice Day is also this week. At 11:00a.m., on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, fighting in Europe’s Great War ceased, after tens of millions had been slaughtered and wounded, most often in No Man’s land between the trenches. The division between the Allied and the Central Powers ran roughly along the national border that separated France from Germany.

     On Thursday evening, November 9, 1989, Gunther Schabowski, a Communist Party leader in East Germany, announced that a simple visa procedure would allow East Germans to visit West Germany, immediately. Alison Smale, an American reporter for the Associated Press, happened to be in East Berlin that evening, and she and an East Berlin citizen, Angelika Wachs, both 34 years old, crossed Checkpoint Charlie together, two of the first to do so.

     The next day, the two walls, separated by a No Man’s land of mines and barbed wire, came crashing down to shouts of jubilation. “Unglaublich,”—unbelieveable, Wachs had shouted as the Communist guards had looked the other way. The division between communism and capitalism, between East and the West, had divided the city of Berlin.

     Science vs. religion; the Allies vs. the Central Powers; communism vs. capitalism; East vs. West; the Soviet Union vs. the United States; liberal vs. conservative; Democrat vs. Republican; and on go the deep divisions that disrupt human thought and potential.

     Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, died two weeks ago, nearly 101 years old. “As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and then try to resolve the resulting tension through mythmaking.”

     In other words, people congregate around a political, religious, or cultural belief system, and then they look for reasons to justify their position, at the same time that they are scornful of others with a differing opinion—mythmaking. Divisions and fractures appear. Wars break out; walls go up, but people can stop the wars and tear down walls.

     In a leap of faith, Charles had married Emma, and with tolerance and a respect for the other, they had overcome the divisive issue of science and religion that his book had initiated. The Allies and the Central Powers agreed to cease their fighting, and the Berlin Wall was torn down.