LANGUAGES

by William H. Benson

February 19, 2009

     As Lewis and Clark traveled from tribe to tribe west across the North American continent, they remarked repeatedly on the differences among the languages of the Native American peoples. Some that they heard sounded “liquid and melodious,” and others were “harsh and guttural.” Scholars have since identified at least eight distinct language groups, fifty-three separate stocks, and between two and three hundred individual languages. And those are just the languages north of the Rio Grande.

     Grammars varied widely among these languages, and it is the grammar that makes a language so formidable. It is never simply a matter of learning a series of the other language’s words for their English equivalents. For example, a sentence in English—Suddenly, she heard someone give a yell from across the street.—would translate into the Mohawk language this way: Suddenly, by what you could hear, there, it beyond the street, the ear went to who just then made shouted back towards her.

     The best way to learn to think in a grammar as complex as that Mohawk sentence, is to grow up in it, learning it as an infant, toddler, and then as a child.

      Grammar, the underlying construction of a language, need not be so difficult. Consider Mandarin Chinese, a nearly “grammarless” language. Rudolf Flesch, a prominent English writing authority, wrote about Mandarin Chinese: “It has no inflections, no cases, no persons, no genders, no numbers, no degrees, no tenses, no voices, no moods, no infinitives, no participles, no gerunds, no irregular verbs, and no articles.” All words contain only a single syllable, and sentence construction is the usual order: subject, verb, object.

     Scholars now understand that the Chinese language once had the usual “arsenal of unpleasant grammar,” but that over several millennium, the Chinese people eliminated all that into a streamlined language, consisting of “standardized, prefabricated, functionally designed parts.”

     All Native American languages belong to a single language family, and Mandarin Chinese belongs to another, the Sino-Tibetan family. English, of the Indo-European family, originated in the Teutonic forests of Germany and was then transported across the English Channel to the British Isles where it ran headlong into Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as well as the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton languages.

     Approximately two billion people speak one of the Indo-European languages, including Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, English, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Bengali, Punjabi, Pashto, Kurdish, Persian, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

     Of the 6000 spoken languages in the world today, Mandarin Chinese is spoken by some 873 million people. Spanish is the first language of choice for 322 million people, and English, in third place, has at least 309 million who claim it.

     Other languages, such as Garig-Ilgar, Mati Ke, and Gudanji, are three of the Aboriginal languages of northern and central Australia, and each have as few as ten living speakers.

     February 21 is the United Nations International Mother Language Day, a day to help raise awareness among all peoples of the distinct and enduring value of their language. Movements exist to save certain dying languages. There is one for Mohawk, another for Irish Gaelic, and a concerted effort in the United States is now under way to save Yiddish, a Germanic language of central Europe that used Hebrew characters and which was brutally swept aside after the Holocaust.

     “It has been said that once there is a revival movement for a language, the language is already dead.” There may be some truth to that, and yet there is tremendous value in each language that faces an uncertain death. Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar, fled his native Poland in 1939 when the Germans attacked his homeland, and once settled in the U.S., he opened his doors and began to teach Yiddish to American students, who were uninterested. When asked why he did this, he answered, “Because Yiddish has magic, it will outwit history.”    

LINCOLN VS. DARWIN

by William H. Benson

February 5, 2009

     “Neither man gave much evidence of his future greatness until well into middle age.” so wrote Malcolm Jones last July in an article he wrote for Newsweek, in which he compared and contrasted Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Both of these men knew of the other, and both knew that they were born on the same day, in 1809, on February 12, two hundred years ago next week.

     Because “[b]oth were private and guarded,” few who knew them understood the powerful and deep thoughts that coursed through their minds. Darwin’s gardener said of him, “Poor man, he just stands and stares at a yellow flower for minutes at a time. He would be better off with something to do.”

     Mary Todd Lincoln said of her husband, “He is of no account when he is at home. He never does anything except to warm himself and read; he never went to the market in his life. I have to look after all that. He just does nothing. He is the most useless, good-for-nothing man on earth.”

     Neither man, when younger, got along well with his father. Charles Darwin’s father, Dr. Robert Darwin, a very successful family physician in Shrewsbury, England, north and west of London, told his son in a pointed letter, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” And Lincoln said of his father, “My father taught me to work, but he never taught me to like to work.”

     The world took little note of either man until they each had surpassed their fiftieth birthdays. On November 24, 1859, 150 years ago this year, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species, when Charles was fifty years old, and exactly a year later, Lincoln, at the age of fifty-one, won the Presidential election of 1860. Suddenly, the world was wondering about these two men, and the world still is wondering.

     Their successes—Darwin in science and Lincoln in politics—stemmed immeasurably from their ability to write. Malcolm Jones wrote, “Both men were compulsive scribblers and note takers, and the clarity of their writing enhanced the power of their ideas.” And their ability to write masterful English was derived from their great passion for reading.

     Darwin read the sciences. His father wanted him to become a physician, but because he could not endure the sight of surgery, he decided upon a career as a country parson. Shy, quiet, retiring, bookish, he thought the ministry would fit his life style, but beetle-collecting called him away from theology. Darwin certainly had access to far more books living in England than did Lincoln who grew up on the frontier in Kentucky and Indiana.

     A naturalist and a scientist, Darwin lived all of his life in England, save for the five years, 1831-1836, he lived aboard the Beagle, sailing around the world. While en-route, he shipped back to London fossils of extinct large mammals, such as a giant sloth and a pre-historic horse. In addition, he collected living animals, preserved them, and shipped them home; all told, he shipped back to England 5436 skins, bones, and carcasses.

     In a sense, Darwin read the earth’s record—its fossils and its living life forms—comparing and contrasting them, noting their differences due to mutations as the life forms had changed and evolved, because of a process he called “natural selection.”

     Lincoln was more of a literary man, a deep reader of any book that he could latch his hands onto. He read Blackstone’s Law and Euclid’s propositions and proofs within the Elements of Geometry, but above all else, Lincoln read Shakespeare and the King James Bible, memorizing numerous and lengthy passages. Steeped in Renaissance English, he wrote with a style seldom matched in his day or ever since.

     A consummate politician, Lincoln was more the man of action than was Darwin, who was content to observe and then write a readable science. And, yet, each in their own sphere of knowledge has had far-reaching influence. We, the members of Western Civilization, are still trying to come to terms with the implications contained within “the theory of evolution,” and “The Gettysburg Address.” 

     Where Darwin read earth’s record in its fossils and living life forms, Lincoln read the human written record in its books. Where Darwin extended and revolutionized the natural sciences, Lincoln extended and revolutionized the concepts of human freedom inherent within the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

     Darwin and Lincoln, the two great thinkers of the nineteenth-century.

INAUGURATION

by William H. Benson

January 22, 2009

     A literary scholar once suggested that all story lines fit into one of 36 different plots, but another suggested that actually there are only two basic plots for all great stories: “someone goes on a journey” or “a stranger comes to town.”

     Huckleberry Finn, The Hobbit, and the parable of the Prodigal Son are three examples of “someone who goes on a journey.” Writers of westerns and comics often build their stories around “a stranger who comes to town.” Batman fought off a series of strangers who drifted into Gotham City, as did Superman in Metropolis, and Marshall Matt Dillon did in Dodge City, Kansas. It really depends upon your perspective, for every time that someone goes on a journey, he or she becomes the stranger who comes to town.

     Dr. Samuel Johnson, the British lexicographer, once asked a rhetorical question: “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” Yes, they are three great stories, and all three fit into the “someone goes on a journey” plot line.

     Don Quixote dressed himself in an old suit of iron, like an errant knight of old, and upon horseback charged at a windmill, thinking it a dragon, and ended up breaking his lance. Robinson Crusoe refused to listen to his father’s guidance and fled home to a life on the high seas, but in the midst of a storm, he finds himself washed ashore upon an island where he lived alone for nearly thirty years.

     In John Bunyan’s extended allegory, Christian sets off alone for the Celestial City and passes through the Slough of Despond, endures others’ taunts at Vanity Fair, and meets up with a host of characters, like Obstinate, Pliable, Faithful, Formalist, Hypocrisy, and Evangelist, some more trustworthy than others.

     Senator and President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday is now behind us, and “a stranger has come to town,” specifically to Washington D.C., to the White House, and to the Oval Office. With his hand on Lincoln’s Bible and repeating the oath of the office as directed by Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Roberts, Obama was sworn in to uphold the Constitution. A combination of ambition, intelligence, and daring has landed him in the highest office in the nation’s federal government.

     There is no shortage of advice for the 44^th President, some better than others.

     In last week’s Newsweek, Anna Quindlen suggested that the new President keep talking to the American citizens. “No one,” she wrote, “should underestimate what a succession of inspired secular sermons can mean in a time of civic darkness.” She may be right: FDR’s fireside chats and Reagan’s televised speeches from the Oval Office lifted American spirits as little else could ever do.

     Quindlen also suggested that Obama write his own speeches, a novel idea these days, and thus avoid the White House’s ghostwriters. “The committee,” she wrote, “is the enemy of the eloquent.”

     In order to succeed, Obama might consider the aforementioned literary examples. Avoid Don Quixote’s foolish idealism, tilting lances at windmills, thinking they are dragons. We have just ended eight years of that ideological and polarizing style, and it has led us into a quagmire. Also, Obama might consider championing resourcefulness, another novel idea these days, making a living with less or with what is available, as did Robinson Crusoe.

     Also, Obama will have to learn to trust some, such as Faithful, and not others, such as Formalist and Hypocrisy, and he will quickly learn which is which, as did Christian once he was on the other side of the Slough of Despond.

     Life inside the Oval office can be exceedingly difficult, but “there is one good way,” Quindlan wrote, “to appear willing to break out of The Bubble, and that’s to talk to the American people. . . . Sometimes it’s grandeur, the big ideas, the great thoughts, not as a substitute for action, but as a supplement.”

     Inauguration is the peaceful transfer of power, and a stranger, a new President, has come to town.

CASTRO’S CUBA

by William H. Benson

January 8, 2009

     The Cuban Revolution was amazingly non-violent. On New Year’s Day in 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator, boarded a jet and took his fortune, as have countless other Cubans, with him to Florida. Fidel Castro, dressed in green army fatigues and cap, sporting a beard, and smoking a cigar, assumed control of the Caribbean island.

     On January 21, more than one million people jammed into the plaza around the Presidential Palace to hear Fidel Castro speak. Someone released a flock of white doves, and then as though choreographed, one of them perched on Fidel’s shoulder, an event that held incredible symbolic power for the Cubans, who associate doves with Obatala, a deity in their African-derived Santeria faith.

     In April of 1959, Castro flew to Washington D.C., where he met with President Eisenhower, and assured Ike that he was not a Communist, but then once back in his country, he herded his opponents before firing squads and drew himself close to Moscow. On January 3, 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba.

     In April, the new U.S. President John Kennedy approved a CIA plan to invade the country at the Bay of Pigs, using Cuban refugees, but because he refused to approve any U.S. Naval support, Castro easily crushed the invasion. In October of 1962, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island until Khrushchev removed the Soviet’s missiles, bringing the world close to a nuclear Armageddon.

     The Americans soon discovered that they were dealing with a formidable opponent. “Castro had unquestionable qualities of leadership. Endowed with an extraordinary gift of oratory and an exceptional memory, he would speak extemporaneously for hours.” The lynchpin of his foreign policy was to avoid all U.S. “Yankee” influence; he would be content if he could row his island far out into the Atlantic.

     The severing of political relations and the U.S. embargo has resulted in a deep political chasm between the two countries, with mutually bad feelings on both sides, and has driven the Cuban people into a life of deprivation and shortages. The Cuban people are paid in pesos, which can only buy rationed items, but if they can ever get their hands on U.S. dollars, they can buy cell phones, televisions, and washers and dryers.

     In 1989, James Michener, the novelist, toured Cuba, and was struck by two things: all the buildings needed a fresh coat of paint, and the lawns needed mowing, for he soon learned that paint and lawnmowers are not readily available in Cuba.

     Also, Michener noted that the few cars on the streets and highways were are all vintage 1950’s models, for no U.S.-manufactured cars have been sold in the country since the Revolution. Proud of their “cacharros,” the Cuban people continue to repair and then drive them whenever they can afford and find the gasoline.

     Out of fear of imprisonment, torture, and death, the Cuban people have learned to not complain, but the discontented and the ambitious try to escape the island on pitiful rafts.

     Castro’s government did get some things right, such as in education and health care. The Revolution has improved the literacy rate from the 40% during Batista’s reign to close to 98% now, and there are 80,000 doctors for a population of 11.3 million. But this raises crucial questions: “Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, to travel, and to the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life?”

     For the past two years, Fidel’s younger brother, Raul, has headed the Cuban government, but he has done little other than tinker with what Fidel left him. And Fidel has not been seen in public since November of 2006.

     The Revolution is now fifty years old, and Castro has outfoxed ten U.S. Presidents, but even though Barack Obama has promised a different, softer policy with Cuba, changing it will not be easy. One Cuban-American in Little Havana in Miami suggested that Obama should simply: “Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba. If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”

     Others are not optimistic. “Cuba is a disaster,” said Jaime Suchlicki, a Cuban historian, “but it will not fall apart. . . . Every past rapprochement has turned to rancor.”

There is no reason to think that Obama will succeed with Cuba where ten other Presidents have failed.   

1968

by Wiliam H. Benson

December 25, 2008

     On January 20, 1968, the Vietcong attacked five of Vietnam’s six major cities, most of its provincial capitals, and fifty towns. The Tet Offensive caught the American and South Vietnam forces by surprise, but within a week they had taken back all the cities and towns that had been lost. It was not the spectacular defeat that the media suggested it was.

     In the following weeks, Congressmen, Senators, and members of the media, such as Walter Cronkite, began to call for an end to the war. Cronkite suggested that negotiation was “the only rational way out.” Public opinion swayed against the war.

     In early March at the New Hampshire primary, the relatively little known Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won 42% of the vote, nearly defeating President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was running for President with only a single idea: if elected he would end the war in Vietnam immediately.

     On March 16, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he too would run for President, terrifying Johnson, who understood that Bobby’s political draw was greater than even McCarthy’s. Aides to the President told Johnson that he would lose the Wisconsin primary on April 2.

     On Sunday morning, March 31, Martin Luther King gave a moving sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.: “It seems to me I can hear the God of history saying, ’That was not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not . . . “

     That same Sunday, at night, LBJ spoke to the nation on television and announced that he would stop bombing almost all of North Vietnam, and that he was inviting the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. Then, he surprised everyone when he said, “I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Knowing he could not win the election, LBJ chose to step aside.

     On Wednesday, April 3, in Atlanta at the Masonic Temple, Martin Luther King gave another rousing sermon: “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop, . . . And He’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the promised land.”

     The next day, Thursday, April James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, shot and killed Martin Luther King while he was standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel.

     On June 4, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, shot Bobby Kennedy while he was walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just minutes after he had given a speech to his supporters for winning the California primary election.

     Later that summer of 1968, the Democrats convened in Chicago. Anti-war protestors marched in Grant Park until Mayor Richard Daley sent in his henchmen to club and gas these Yippies. The mayor was denounced from the podium of the Democratic convention for “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

     In November the republican candidate, Richard Nixon, won the election, and little did the American public know, but he would greatly expand the war, resume bombing North Vietnam, and even send in troops into Laos and Cambodia.

     On December 21, 1968, three men—James Lovell, William Anders, Frank Borman—atop Apollo 8 blasted off a Florida launching pad, bound for the moon, 240,000 and three days away. They would orbit the moon in a rehearsal for a lunar landing next summer.

     “All of a sudden,” Lovell said, “just sixty-nine miles below, the ancient craters of the far side of the moon were slowly slipping by. We forgot the flight plan. We were like three kids in a candy store window.”

     On Christmas Eve these three astronauts, the first men to be in a lunar orbit, took turns reading to an estimated billion people who were listening back on Earth the first ten verses of the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . And God saw that it was good.”

     The year 1968 had been a horrible year—a divisive unpopular war, political maneuvering, student unrest, and two horrific assassinations—and yet the year ended on a hopeful and positive note, like a band that has missed all the notes in the song except the last one.

     Have a very Merry Christmas, and may your 2009 be a very happy one.        

SMALLPOX

by William H. Benson

December 11, 2008

     The World Health Organization certified on December 9, 1979 that small pox had been eradicated. Two years before, WHO officials had vaccinated a hospital cook stricken with the disease in Merka, Somalia, and even though the same officials continued treating all other suspected rashes, they never found another case. A disease that had caused great horror among human beings for centuries was gone.

     Caused by the variola virus, it is spread from person to person through the air by inhaling droplets expelled by someone infected Two weeks later, the person aches, runs a fever, and develops a rash that turns into thousands of pustules. Blindness, disfigurement, and death can occur, but fortunately once infected, a person cannot get the disease again.

     Repeatedly, epidemics devastated Europe, Asia, and Africa over the centuries, and when introduced into North and South America, it decimated entire villages. Cotton Mather, the minister at the Old North Church in Boston during the eighteenth century, observed that beginning in 1630 a smallpox epidemic had appeared in New England every twelve years, with one exception—the year 1714. By 1721, he knew it was due.

     It struck Boston with vengeance in April of that year, when an infected sailor from the ship Seahorse, supposedly quarantined on a nearby island, was seen walking about Boston’s streets. Within weeks, cases began appearing, and people began dying. 

     Cotton Mather struck back. He had heard about a method to prevent the disease from his African servant, Onesimus, who showed Cotton the scar on his arm from when he was inoculated when in his youth and living in Africa among his tribe, the Guramantese.

      “People take Juice of Small-pox; cutty skin, and putt in a Drop; then by’nd by a little sicky, sicky; then very few little things like Small-pox; and no body die of it; and no body have Small-pox any more.”

     Mather wrote about this remedy in a pamphlet he entitled Wonderful Practice and that he dated June 6, 1721. He convinced only a single Boston physician, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to try it, and by December, Boylston had inoculated some 300 people. Only one of them had died, a Mrs. Dixwell, but due to other health issues.

     By December of 1721, the epidemic had infected 5889 people in all of New England, and of those 844 had died.

     In the late eighteenth century, inoculation gave way to vaccination when Edward Jenner, an English scientist, began using the discharge from the pox on cows who had cowpox, for he had observed that dairymaids who had had cowpox did not get small pox.

     By the middle of the twentieth century, “mass vaccination” had rid Europe and North America of the waves of a small pox epidemic, but in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Africa, and Indonesia it was difficult to get 100% of the population vaccinated.

     An outbreak in Nigeria in 1966 began the evolution of a new strategy called “surveillance and containment.” Once notified that a village had a case of small pox, officials would swiftly rush in and vaccinate those immediately close to the infected person and then those that surrounded them and so on in ever widening concentric circles. They discovered that this strategy could break the transmission chain of smallpox, even when less than half the population was vaccinated.

     What eventually eliminated smallpox was a combined approach of using mass vaccination to reduce the disease’s incidence so that surveillance and containment could eliminate the few remaining pockets of outbreaks.

     “The global eradication of smallpox in 1977 ranks as one of the greatest triumphs in modern medicine, science, and public health.” Although two cases of smallpox occurred in England in 1978 as a result of a laboratory accident, it was gone as a naturally transmitted disease.