A SHORT READING LIST

by William H. Benson

November 13, 2008

     In the June 1, 2008 edition of the New York Times Book Review, nineteen living authors were asked to suggest certain books for the, at that time, three Presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain.

     The authors’ suggested reading list is worth repeating here and now and might be appropriate reading material for all the recently elected officials—including our next President as well as the incoming Senators, and Congressmen and women. They have two months to read and prepare themselves for the extraordinary jobs ahead.

     One author suggested Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “the timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.”

     Another suggested Joe Haldeman’s novel based upon events in the Vietnam War, The Forever War, lest we forget “the young people we’ve damned to this folly we call Iraq.”

     Scott Turow offered Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, saying it is “the fullest rendering I know of the complexity of human motivation and thus a precious warning against seeing the world as full of villains.”

     His second choice would be any book about the Swedish warship Vasa that was “completed in 1628 and envisioned by King Gustavus Adophus as the most formidable military vessel in history. It sank after sailing less than a mile, drowning dozens of crew members. Many were aware that the vessel was unstable, but all were terrified of breaking the news to the king.”

     Another author suggested any volume by Miss Manners, “who reminds a reader that civility matters, even in presidential campaigns.”

     They should read, one author said, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, written by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. “A half-century of research in psychology has shown that we all overtrust our memory, judgment, and rectitude. Nothing could be more important in a president than an awareness of this universal flaw.”

     Garry Wills offered Samuel Johnson’s essays. “To John McCain he suggested Rambler No. 11, on anger in old age; to Obama he suggested Rambler No. 196, on the illusions of young hope; and to Clinton he presented Rambler No. 79, on demonizing one’s opponents.”

     John Irving thought that McCain should read Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, an account of the utter folly of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “With any luck, and stubborn though he is, he might learn that engaging the enemy isn’t always such a swell idea.”

     Francine Prose suggested the Norton Anthology of American Literature and read the words and thoughts of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain, as “a crash course in who—as a nation—we are, and how we got to be this way.”

     Another author thought that she should personally hand out copies of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, examples of great nations who defied their own self-interest and ended up committing egregious mistakes: Great Britain losing its North American colonies, and the United States fighting to a loss in Vietnam.

     To the above list, I would suggest that President-elect Obama reread The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s astonishing idea that an “invisible hand” guides businessmen best. “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

     Finally, I would recommend that he pick up Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography on Abraham Lincoln, especially upon the sixteenth president’s handling of the war against the rebellious states and how he maneuvered his cabinet and his generals and how he controlled his own emotions. Contained within these volumes are timeless lessons upon diplomacy, recognizing others’ feelings, and dedicating oneself to a goal. “[A]s God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”

PRESIDENTIAL INTELLECT

by William H. Benson

October 30, 2008

     At the founding of our nation and the creation of the government, the intellectuals ruled. Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton had each read the political treatises of the European thinkers, men such as John Locke and Jean Jacque Rousseau, as well as the Greek and Roman political philosophers. That the Founding Fathers had done their homework was evident when they wrote first the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. The intellectuals were the elite.

     That did not remain true, especially when Andrew Jackson and his popular form of democracy claimed the Presidency. The night of his inauguration the common people—frontiersmen and rogues alike—stormed into the White House and trashed it. Intellect for a season was checked and replaced with arbitrary decisions and unrestrained power.

     Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught intellect, arguably the best writer and thinker of all our Presidents, and yet, he was first and foremost a politician.

     Lincoln’s general, Ulysses S. Grant, proved himself a brilliant military strategist during the Civil War but an abject failure as a President, who then partially redeemed himself with his Memoirs, an outstanding example of military biography.

     Woodrow Wilson was a historian and a political scientist at Princeton, before becoming Princeton’s president, then the governor of the state of New Jersey, and finally the President of the United States. In spite of his intellect, he was cold, reserved, impersonable, and unbending, such that his Presidency faltered and ended in disgrace.

     Franklin Roosevelt in the early days of his New Deal gathered a privy council, which a reporter dubbed the Brain Trust, to advise him on the intricacies of global and national economics. Indeed, the experts and the intellects “seemed to have free access to the White House while the President kept the politicians at arm’s length.” Not a bad idea.

     The intellectuals then loved Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, when he ran for President in 1952 and 1956, embracing him “with a readiness and a unanimity that seems without parallel in American history,” and yet the common people loved Dwight D. Eisenhower more.

     Kennedy peopled his cabinet with his own Brain Trust, young men, brash and action-oriented, from the big business world and the universities, men such as Douglas Dillon, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk. One day at a meeting of the intellects, Kennedy observed that never before had more intelligent people gathered at one time in the White House, “except when Jefferson dined alone.”

     Carter was knowledgeable about each of the issues, but his Presidency was mired in galloping inflation, a crippled military, a hostage crisis in Iran, and a stagnant economy. Reagan did not possess Carter’s encyclopedic grasp of the facts, but his talent was to perceive the crucial point of each issue and then communicate that to the people.

     Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, a graduate of Georgetown and of Yale Law School, who taught law at Arkansas’s law school before running for governor. His wisdom, training, and breadth of knowledge of the economy and foreign and national policy made for a good government—a balanced budget, low unemployment, slight inflation, and positive economic growth—despite his personal moral lapses.

     When told of the attack upon Iraq in March of 2003, Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of Treasury, said, “Trust me, they haven’t thought this through.” Indeed, they had not, and the dire results of this rash decision were quickly evident and still are.

        And now it is either Obama or McCain. Who has the greater intellect, the more focused mental acuity, and the wisdom to gather advice and build a good government?

     Newsweek‘s Fareed Zakaria reported last week that “Throughout the campaign, McCain has been volatile and impulsive. He moves suddenly and unpredictably. By contrast, Barack Obama has been steady and reasoned. McCain’s campaign has been chaotic and ineffective, while Obama has run a superb operation, and done so with little of the drama and discord that usually plague political machines.”

     On Tuesday, the electorate will vote and decide: either for “volatile and impulsive,” or for “steady and reasoned.” We can only hope that by the election process we, the people of the United States, will in return receive a measure of intelligence and of “good government.”

MOGADISHU AND TRIPOLI

by William H. Benson

October 16, 2008

     The battle began on October 3, 1993, when rebel forces in Mogadishu, Somalia, armed with a rocket-propelled grenade, shot down a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, pinning the American crew at the crash site. Those trapped soldiers spent a tense night, surrounded by armed and angry rebels, but the next morning a combined US task force rescued the trapped soldiers.

     During the two days of the Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and one Malaysian soldier were killed. Those twenty-four hours were later re-enacted in the movie “Blackhawk Down.” American forces, led by the U.S. Army’s Delta Force and Ranger teams, were there in Somalia with orders to capture officials of Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s rebel militia, for the government had collapsed in 1991.

     However, the Battle of Mogadishu undermined American determination to re-establish law, order, and a functioning government in the east African country of Somalia. Once the American forces withdrew late in 1993, rebel forced plunged Somalia into lawlessness.

     In recent weeks, Somalia is again in the news. Pirates along the coastline have been operating with impunity on the high seas, exploiting Somalia’s lawlessness, attacking ships, taking prisoners, and demanding ransom. An estimated 300 hostages are being held today in the city of Eyl, where several hijacked ships are now docked. Twice this year, French commandos have intervened to rescue citizens taken hostage.

     On Thursday, September 25, the pirates captured a Ukrainian ship, the Faina, which had been heading south to Mombasa, Kenya’s port city, and was loaded with 33 Russian built T-72 tanks, grenade launchers, and a crew of 21. The pirates demanded $35 million in ransom before they would consider returning the men or the booty. The Russian and American navies sent destroyers to Somalia with orders to recapture crew and the weapons, but it is a difficult task, given the extensive coastline.

     “This piracy is starting to draw international attention,” said Abdisaid Muse Ali, a security expert and former Somalia official. “This latest attack was a real shock.” Indeed, these pirate attacks are pushing Somalia’s problems onto the global stage. Ransom payments are expected to top $50 million this year. “Many of these companies have chosen to just pay the ransom versus taking upfront measures to improve security.”

     Somalia lies on the horn of Africa that juts into the Indian Ocean. Above the country is the Gulf of Aden that leads into the Red Sea, then into the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean Sea, and ultimately into the Atlantic Ocean. This pathway is crucial, for shippers transport much of the petroleum that the oil companies drill in Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait and that is bound for Europe and America, via this waterway.

     Piracy along the African coastline is not a new phenomenon. From the time of the crusades until the early nineteenth century, a span of nearly three centuries, the Barbary pirates in Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli operated along the Mediterranean coast of northern Africa. They commandeered western European ships in the Mediterranean and even conducted raids upon Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian coastal towns in order to capture Christians to sell at the slave markets in Algeria.

     The impact was devastating. Thousands of ships were lost. Over a million Europeans were enslaved. Coastal cities were abandoned. Trade was impaired, and millions were paid for protection and ransom. The Americans shouted, “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” Thomas Jefferson, the American President, was a pacifist, but he too was so incensed at the idea of paying blackmail to these pirates that he refused.

     In 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli declared war upon the United States, and Jefferson responded by ordering to the Mediterranean the infant U.S. Navy and the Marines. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Jefferson refused to yield, and after four years of hair-raising battles, the Marines forced the Pasha to sign a peace treaty, agreeing to release all prisoners and ships in exchange for an American payment of only $60,000.

     About the situation today in Somalia, U.S. Naval Commander Jane Campbell said that “The long-term solution is going to take international cooperation.” Perhaps, but two centuries ago, Jefferson, acted alone when he sent in the Navy and the Marines.

KING, PRIEST, JESTER, SCRIBE

by William H. Benson

October 2, 2008

     I recently read Alan Alda’s newest book, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, in which, after a lifetime of acting on stage and on the screen, he addressed a group of young actors and offered them his personal wisdom.

     “And when you’re acting, remember that it’s play. Enjoy it deeply, richly. Use your intellect as well as your emotions. Try to find out what connects the Apollonian and the Dionysian; the serious and the antic. One without the other is not as satisfying.

     “There are at least a couple of ways of looking at the actor. One is as a priest performing rituals of reconciliation, enlightenment, and dedication, or as a clown performing acts of rudeness, and appetite. Find ways of serving as both.”

     A priest and a clown are two very dissimilar roles, and yet Alda suggests that the emerging actor or actress learn to tie them together. The Apollonian priest is the serious one: he links people one with another and with the Divine. He is Billy Graham standing at his pulpit, inviting people to come forward and find peace for their weary souls.

     The Dionysian jester engenders smiles. He is Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger who said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” He is Huckleberry Finn, saying, “it warn’t good judgment,” when Pap “fetched the tub a rattling kick, . . . because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it.”

     But beyond the actor we can identify other social roles; first, there is the scribe, the guy or gal in the community who deals in barrels of printer’s ink, writing the news, as well as essays, columns, and scholarly journal articles. He or she can sway public opinion one way or back to the other. One says Obama, and the other says McCain.

     That brings us to the king, the elected, appointed, or designated leader. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” wrote Shakespeare, for the sword of Damocles is always hanging over his head. Within the King—the President, the Congressmen, the Senators, or the Justices—resides final political power.

      The priest can bless, or perhaps withdraw his blessing, from a King’s decision, the jester can ridicule the King’s foolish choices and thus draw smiles from others, and the scribe can list on paper all the wrongs that the King has made. But each of them lack the power to do anything other than that, for the decision-making power resides strictly with the king, and not with the priest, jester, or scribe. They can only circle him and advise.

     We, the voting citizens of the United States of America, are now just a month away from deciding who will live in the White House, work in the Oval Office in the West Wing, and possess that decision-making power to impact our lives for the better or for the worse for the next four years. Who we vote for is important, more so than in other years.

     Anna Quindlen, last week in Newsweek wrote, “Do not be distracted by the gossip, nonsense, or lies. The time to really focus on the facts is now. . . . What I need is someone to clean up the mess George W. Bush has made of the country I love.”

     She wrote that, in our country, “The Presidency was once aspirational. Voters wanted someone smarter, better informed, stronger than they were.” In other words, we wanted a Wizard, someone superhuman, who was witty, wise, in touch with the Divine, who could put things right. A Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a John F. Kennedy, or a Ronald Reagan, for a Wizard is part jester, priest, scribe, King, and magician all rolled into one.

     But, in the last elections, because we have not had a Wizard to cast our vote towards, we have had to look to within ourselves for patience. “The trouble, my dear Brutus,” said Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “lies not in the stars but within ourselves.” And it is from within ourselves that we may find our own solutions.

     Good government is a precious commodity, a rarity that includes a mixture of wisdom, good luck, salesmanship, experience, farsightedness, an expansive mind, and a studious attitude. At points in the past, the American citizen has enjoyed good and wise government, but, sadly, that has not been the situation lately. We feel we have stubbed our toes on a tub, for our toes were leaking out of our boots, and Huckleberry Finn would say of us, “It warn’t good judgment.”     

NUMBERS—ZERO, ONE, TWO, THREE

by William H. Benson

September 18, 2008

      For millennium humankind struggled with mathematics before arriving at the concept of a zero, moving from the idea of empty to nothing to finally the modern zero. For the ancients, a pebble removed from a sand table left an indentation or a dimple in the sand, which reflects the “0” that we see today.

     In the early 1970’s Three Dog Night sang the song One. “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. Two can be as bad as one. It’s the loneliest number since the number one.” One is undiluted power: King John before he signed the Magna Carta and Louis XIV seated upon the French throne. One is without equal, solitary, and autocratic.

     As far as numbers go, zero and one placed together do not appear overly promising, but programmers build computers that operate with a binary number system—just zero and one. One is a closed electrical switch, and zero is open.

     When we introduce two words, it is human nature to align them with their polar opposite: hot/cold, good/bad, right/left, in/out, dry/wet, long/short, salt/pepper, fat/skinny, pretty/ugly, men/women, fast/slow, Heaven/Hell, smart/dumb, past/present, sweet/sour, Democrat/Republican, yes/no, and tall/short.

     And not just words, but also clauses or even sentences can be balanced with two parallel parts. Charles Dickens wrote: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” And John Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” A balanced sentence hinges in the middle, usually by a semicolon, with the second half paralleling the first half, but changing one or two key words or altering the word order.

     Balanced sentences call attention to themselves, and they stick in the reader’s or listener’s mind, for a certain tension is set up between the sounds of the repetition mixed with a lesser degree of variation.

     The problem with polar words and balanced sentences is that they force everything into either agreement or opposition. It is different with the number three. If balance is the rhythm of two’s, then series is the rhythm of three’s.

     The English essayist, Francis Bacon, favored building his sentences with three clauses, rather than just two. In his essay “On Studies” he wrote: “Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them.” “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

     Once two polar words admit a third, possibilities suddenly arise: hot/cold and lukewarm, good guy/bad guy and ordinary, Heaven/Hell and Earth, long/short and medium, Democratic/Republican and Independent, up/down and sideways, friend/enemy and acquaintance, past/present and future, mind/body and soul, and yes/no and maybe.

     The world at times seems to group itself into series of three’s: the calendar into days/months/years, water into solid/liquid/gas, the atom into electron/neutron/proton, and amino acids into carbohydrates/proteins/fats.

     Julius Caesar understood the power of three clauses when he wrote, “Veni, vidi, vici,” meaning “I came, I saw, and I conquered.” The founding fathers divided their new government into three parts: executive, legislative, and judicial.

     Where the two-part balanced sentence has the connotation of authority and expertise, the three-part series seems reasonable, believable, and logical.

     How we see the world may be through the rhythms of our own rhetoric. Zero is without friends, thoughts, or possessions, drifting in a state of nothingness. One is a King, a Queen, a prince, or a princess, absorbed on him or herself, unaffected by others, and quite lonely. Two lives life as a battle, a constant confrontation of that which, by its very nature, it opposes. Three admits to differing ideas and forms, to other systems of thought.

     Human consciousness constructs its language through words but specifically through the numbers of words and clauses that it chooses. How we think our thoughts, how we then choose our words and clauses, and how we create our sentences can determine where we are, what we are, and what we can become.  

PATRICK BUCHANAN

by William H. Benson

September 4, 2008

     Recently, I read Patrick Buchanan’s book, Day of Reckoning, a shrill attack upon George Bush’s noble vision of America’s grand role in the world. Buchanan, a pugnacious, opinionated, and argumentative journalist and television commentator, who ran unsuccessfully for President in 1992, 1996, and again in 2000, minces few words.

     The final chapter of his book, despite its attack upon the current state of things, does set forth solid ideas that he believes will produce a good government for the American people. Buchanan’s ideas seem, at least on the surface, workable and practical, although they are probably not politically feasible.

     At the heart of the book is a chapter entitled “The Gospel of George Bush,” in which Buchanan lifts the President’s words from his speeches.

     “[E}very time people are given a choice they choose freedom.” “Freedom is the design of our Maker and the longing of every soul. Freedom is the dream of every person in every nation in every age.” “Expanding freedom is the only realistic way to protect our people in the long run.”

     “We are led, by events and commons sense, to one conclusion : the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” “Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth.” “What every terrorist fears most is human freedom—societies where men and women make their own choices.” “Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologues.”

     Buchanan writes, “One wonders: Who writes this, and does the president read it before delivery?” He calls Bush’s vision the “divinization of democracy,” attributing to the representative republican form of government a faith unwarranted, and to each of Bush’s points, Buchanan offers a counter-thought. People do not always crave freedom, Buchanan argues; history has shown that on occasion, they will vote dictators into high office and that they will join, without much thought, vicious political gangs.

     Buchanan then lists a series of quotes from wiser former leaders and thinkers.

     John Adams warned that, “the people have waged everlasting war against the rights of men. . . . The numbers of men in all ages have preferred ease, slumber, and good cheer to liberty. . . . The multitude must be kept in check.” And the historian Daniel Boorstin said it succinctly: “The Constitution of the U. S. is not for export.”

     Less than a year into his presidency, John F. Kennedy recognized the limits of American power: “We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient—that we are only six percent of the world’s population—that we cannot impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of mankind—that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity—and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

     The English philosopher Edmund Burke wrote: “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. . . . Their passions forge their fetters. . . . Believe me, it is a great truth, that there never was, for any long time . . . a mean, sluggish, careless people that ever had a good government of any kind.”

     Gerald Ford opposed the attack upon Iraq, saying, I just don’t think we should go . . . around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”

     Buchanan adds to these men’s ideas his own sobering prediction: “If we dethrone their tyrants, dismantle their states, and disband their armies, when we depart, the character of the people will recreate the institutions we have torn down.”

     As for the Gospel of George Bush, Buchanan says, “This is Manichaean. This is messianic. This is utopian. Investing the blood of our sons and treasure of our nation in pursuit of this vision will bleed, bankrupt, and break this republic in endless crusades and interminable wars. Unless this ideology is purged from power, it will bring an end to the republic. No nation, no matter how great, powerful, or rich, can sustain so apocalyptic and global a struggle.”