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.

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.