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.    

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND HALLOWEEN

by William H. Benson

October 29, 2009

     In 1831, then at the age of twenty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided that he would try to make a career as a writer of poetry and short stories. Over the course of the next eighteen years, he proved himself versatile and talented, for “he used his extraordinary mind to work out his literary effects with almost mathematical exactitude.” However, he was never successful financially and was constantly penniless.

     In 1835, Poe wrote one of his less successful stories—The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall—which was published in June in the Southern Literary Messenger, and for which Poe received only the standard fee, a pittance.

     The story is about how Hans Pfaall, a citizen then living in Rotterdam, built a hot air balloon, which he filled with “a constituent of azote,” and with a cat and two pigeons soared into the sky. Nineteen days later he landed on the moon’s surface “in the very heart of a fantastical-looking city and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable.” None had ears.

     The story was quite fantastic, but above all else, remarkable in that it was one of the first stories in what would become a new literary genre: science fiction.

     Two months later, beginning on August 25, the New York Sun published an account written by a Dr. Andrew Grant who was the companion of a well-respected scientist named Sir John Herschel, who had developed a combination telescope / microscope that permitted him to see the lunar surface. Herschel claimed he had seen bison, goats, water birds, unicorns, beavers without tails that walked upright, and a race of bat-like winged humanoids, Verspertilio-homo, who built temples, all on the moon.

     At first, the paper’s readers believed Herschel’s claims as reported by this Dr. Grant. Circulation increased dramatically, and the profits rolled in. But then several weeks later it was determined a hoax, in the vein of P. T. Barnum, or today’s National Enquirer.

     Dr. Andrew Grant did not exist, and Sir John Herschel had not seen those living things on the moon. Although the Sun never printed a retraction, it was believed that the Sun’s editor, Richard A. Locke had staged the hoax as a stunt to boost circulation. It worked.

     Poe was outraged that Locke had stolen his idea from his short story, had then capitalized upon it, and that Poe had not received a cent.

     Nine years later on April 13, 1844, Poe wrote for the New York Sun a detailed and highly plausible account of a famous European balloonist named Monck Mason who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his balloon in 75 hours. Poe was astonished at the enthusiasm this story aroused. “I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper,” he said. Unfortunately, Poe’s article was also a fabrication.

     The French have always revered Poe more than have the Americans. For example, the French author Jules Verne read Poe’s short story and his balloon-hoax story and wrote three works of fiction about balloon travel: Five Weeks in a Balloon, Around the World in 80 Days, and From the Earth to the Moon.

     The story of a hoax involving a balloon continues. Two weeks ago, the Heene family in Fort Collins claimed that their six-year old son was inside a balloon as it floated across the Colorado landscape, but then he was found hiding in a box in their attic. Officials now believe that the Heene’s may have staged the whole thing.

     The biggest hoax of the twentieth century occurred on the night of October 30, 1938. While broadcasting on radio H. G. Wells’s story, The War of the Worlds, the movie director Orson Welles interrupted the production with a news flash that Martians were indeed invading Earth, and thus he created confusion and panic among listeners who, gullible to a fault, had tuned in late and believed his report.   

     Halloween approaches, and Edgar Allan Poe has always seemed to me a Halloween-type of guy, with his weird stories like The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart— tales of murder, of being buried alive, and of utter terror.

     Look at what the man unleashed. When will the hoaxes end—those involving balloons; travel across the Atlantic or eastern Colorado; the Sun, the moon, and Mars; and    of Martian invasions? Quote the Raven, “Nevermore.” Do not believe it.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 15, 2009

     In 1995, James W. Loewen published a book he entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me, in which he released the results of his survey of a dozen different high school American history textbooks that each began with a similar account of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage west across the Atlantic.

     Loewen observed that these twelve texts presented an average of 800 words on Columbus, covered two and a half pages, and featured either a picture or perhaps a map. Loewen then provided a synthesized recap of those 800 words, and then observed that “unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional account is wrong or unverifiable.”

     He had two major problems with what the textbook authors said about Columbus: first, they underplayed previous explorers, such as the Viking Leif Erickson of the tenth century, and second, none of them provided any kind of analysis of the major changes going on in Europe then that prompted the response there after Columbus’s return.

     In other words, Loewen faults the textbook authors for failing to provide adequate explanations for what Columbus unleashed—not just an Age of Exploration but the Age of Conquest in the new World.

     Loewen wrote: “We must pay attention to what the textbooks are telling us and what they are not telling us. The changes in Europe in the fifteen century not only prompted Columbus’s voyages, but also paved the way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years. Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential development in human history.”

     What were these changes in Europe? First, there were the advances in military technology, mounting bigger guns on bigger ships; in other words an arms race. “We live with this arms race still.” The Western nations, including the United States, continue to try to keep non-Western nations disadvantaged in military technology, i.e. Iraq and Iran.

     Second, there were new forms of social technology: the printing press, double-entry bookkeeping, and bureaucratic chains of command that allowed the Spanish to maintain and direct their far-flung empire.

     Third, a shift in the theology in Europe sanctioned the domination of other peoples and the theft of their wealth as a means to win esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. In other words, Europe now had a Christian faith that they could transport, and that faith “rationalized conquest.”

     Finally, the Europeans had diseases, especially smallpox, that would decimate the native tribes, rendering them vanquished, before mustering a fight.

     Loewen addressed then the issue of Eurocentrism, by asking the question—why was it that the nations of Europe rose to dominate the world? “It is rarely presented as a question,” Loewen wrote. “It seems natural, a given, not something that needs to be explained.” Furthermore, why must one group, race, culture, tribe, or state dominate another, for, Loewen argued, domination is not a natural phenomenon but cultural.

     Columbus dominated; of that, we are sure. As soon as he was off the boat, he claimed ownership of all he saw for the King and Queen of Spain. His style was world class “shock and awe.” His purpose was not exploration, writing better maps, sightseeing, or even establishing trade, but conquest and exploitation of the people and their land. 

     Michael de Cuneo accompanied Columbus on an expedition into the interior of Haiti in 1494, and said this of him: “It seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.” Once he had found Haiti’s gold, he enslaved the natives to dig it for him until they dropped dead of starvation and overwork.

     Exploiting the Americas transformed Europe: Spain, with its enormous horde of gold and silver, became the envy of the world. Islamic power to the east was undermined, and Africa became the source for laborers in the New World.

     Lowen wrote that the Columbus account as presented in the textbooks “allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than as a historical product that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”

CHARLES SCHULZ

by William H. Benson

October 1, 2009

     On October 2, 1950, Charles Schulz first published his Peanuts comic strip, featuring Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and the others: Lucy, Linus, Sally, Schroeder, and Peppermint Patty. Schulz exaggerated all of his characters’ heads and then dwarfed their bodies, using what cartoonists call a “minimalist style,” primitive and simple, or as Schulz said, “Less is more.”

     The humor was soft, centering about Charlie Brown’s disappointments, his resentments, his inability to understand as quickly as did Lucy, and his feelings of humiliation. Schulz’s comic strip caught on and eclipsed all others. Over the course of the next 49 ½ years, he drew17,896 strips, almost up to the day he died, February 13, 2000.

     Along the way, he added books, television programs, and even music, until Schulz’s business was indeed very big, and yet strangely, he belittled all these accomplishments.

     To an interviewer, Schulz commented once: “What a waste of time. Well, you know: what have you done? Drawn a comic strip. Who cares? Now, I’m seventy-five years old.” The interviewer suggested that Schulz had built a “lasting legacy because of his achievement.” Schulz responded, “I think I’ve done the best with what ability I have. I haven’t wasted my ability. I haven’t destroyed it. I haven’t misused it in any way.”

     Known as a guy with a melancholy disposition, perhaps even a depressive, who harbored lifelong grudges originating from his childhood, Schulz had dared to admit what he, and others like him, have discovered: that in America, becoming a celebrity does not convert a commonplace, ordinary individual into a hero or even into greatness.

     The historian Daniel Boorstin explored this thought in his 1961 book The Image, in which he wrote the following: “We seem to have discovered the processes by which fame is manufactured. In the U.S., a man’s name can become a household word overnight. The Graphic Revolution suddenly gave us the means of fabricating well-knowness.”

     “Discovering that we—the television watchers, the movie goers, radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers—and our servants—the television, movie, and radio producers, newspaper and magazine editors, and ad writers—can so quickly and so effectively give a man ‘fame,’ we have willingly been misled into believing that fame is still a hallmark of greatness.”

     In other words, a woman or a man writes a book, the book becomes a screenplay, the screenplay becomes the movie, the movie includes music, the music is heard on the radio, and the magazine and newspaper writers submit the news of it to their readers. The forms of the media circle back upon themselves, and celebrities, who are long on luck or ambition but short on talent, are created, this way it seems everyday in America.

     But, Boorstin argued, it is all a hall of mirrors propped up only to reflect upon each other, without substance or reality at its center.

     “Movies and books mirror each other,” wrote Boorstin. “Both give us the fantastic, unreal image that which we wish to believe of ourselves. Music becomes a mirror of moods. Experience becomes little more than interior decoration.”

     What Charles Schulz did with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Walt Disney did with Mickey Mouse, and what Jim Henson did with Miss Piggy and the other Muppets.

     And that is just the entertainment industry. Might we extend Boorstin’s arguments into other arenas: into politics, into religion, into business, or into government? Whom, among all those diverse viewpoints, do we trust? The Democrats or the Republicans; Catholic, Protestant, or Fundamentalist; business leaders; or government leaders? The mirrors that each holds up reflects back upon the other, and substance seems strangely missing. We believe some. We disbelieve others. We hope. We lose hope.

     On October 2, 1959, The Twilight Zone first premiered on television, and Rod Serling, the show’s host, began with these words: “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

     We live today in a kind of Twilight Zone, where, on one side promises are trumpeted and fears are discounted, and on the other side, calamity and despair are shouted from the rooftop, and we lurch back and forth between them. Whom do we trust?

      At the end of the day, inside this hall of mirrors, this fifth dimension of imagination, we can applaud Charles Schulz’s created fictional world by shouting, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown!”