THANKSGIVING DAY ’S RANDOM THOUGHTS

by William H. Benson

August 27, 2008

     Coincidences, moments of serendipity, and successful turnarounds surprise us. Our intuition expects one thing, but suddenly when we perceive the reality of what is transpiring, we are surprised. Our journeys through life seem a long stream of random events, and so coincidences among those seemingly unrelated happenings can easily befuddle our intuition.

     In a room of forty-five people, there is a 95% chance that at least two of those people will have the same birthday—same day and month. In a room of only twenty-three, the odds are an even fifty-fifty. If Mark Twain and Winston Churchill had walked into that hypothetical room, they would have proven that statistic, for both were born on November 30.

1. S. Lewis, the noted Oxford professor and writer, and President John F. Kennedy both died on November 22, 1963, the former of natural causes, and the latter by an assassin’s bullet.

     Much has been made of the coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy. Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846 and Kennedy in 1946. Lincoln won the Presidency in 1860 and Kennedy in 1960. One of Lincoln’s secretaries was named Kennedy, and one of Kennedy’s was named Lincoln. Lincoln’s Vice-President, a Johnson named Andrew, was born in 1808, and Kennedy’s Vice-President, also a Johnson, but named Lyndon, was born in 1908. Lincoln’s assassin—John Wilkes Booth—went by three names, as did Kennedy’s assassin—Lee Harvey Oswald. Booth was born in 1839 and Oswald in 1939.

     These coincidences surprise us, but in a long list of data that present people’s life events—especially those of two Presidents, one would be more surprised if there were not a number of coincidences.

     Boethius, a sixth-century philosopher, said, “Chance, too, which seems to rush along with slack reins is bridled and governed by law.”

     The underlying theme of Michael Crichton’s fictional novel Jurassic Park, is that life finds ways of jumping over the boundaries that we humans think we have solidly constructed. Crichton’s character Ian Malcolm, a mathematician with a specialty in chaos theory, predicts at the beginning of the novel that a park for dinosaurs, holding a Tyrannosaurus Rex and velociraptors, will self-destruct, probably due to human error, and he is correct. Those life forms will not be contained.

     Scientists estimate that life on our planet began 3.5 billion years ago with the development of single-celled microorganisms, and about a half billion years ago multi-celled organisms—plants and animals—began to interact to create fertile ecosystems. As surprising as those revolutions were, the most startling was the origin of human consciousness, when life became aware of itself.

     Richard Leakey, the paleontologist, said, “The sense of self-awareness we each experience is so brilliant it illuminates everything we think and do.”

     Thanksgiving is upon us. That those Puritan Separatists could celebrate a feast in 1621 in New Plymouth was mainly due to the kindly assistance of Tisquantum, called Squanto, a Patuxet Indian. Captured and sold into slavery by English traders a decade before, he crossed the Atlantic six times before returning to his village to discover that his family and friends were all dead. Those single-celled organisms that carry smallpox had done what they were supposed to do—sustain and replicate themselves, and in the process, Squanto’s tribe was wiped out.

     One historian has surmised that Squanto probably spoke better English than did any other Native American in North America at that time, and it was pure coincidence that along the entire North Atlantic seaboard, the Puritan Pilgrims happened to pick the former location of Squanto’s village to build their town of Plymouth, and that Squanto was there to help them. Coincidence, random event, and Providential care came together at that first Thanksgiving for those English pioneers.

     At a Thanksgiving meal, we seat ourselves beside our family and friends at a table loaded with food. It is a day we cease from our normal human trait of aggressively striving to further ourselves, and instead we pause to join family at mealtime to think and to thank. For we, among all of life’s myriad forms, and because of our consciousness, which shines so brightly within us, can pause for a day to reflect and thank our Creator for our food, our sustenance; and for our family, the replication of our species.

     Have a great Thanksgiving!

H. L. MENCKEN AND POLITICAL CONVENTIONS

by William H. Benson

August 21, 2008

     In 1904, a cub newspaper reporter, not quite twenty-four, attended his first national political convention: his name was Henry Louis Mencken, and he wrote for a Baltimore newspaper. The Republican Convention that year was held in Chicago, and the delegates there nominated Theodore Roosevelt, whose political oratory failed to impress Mencken, calling it all “imbecilities . . . as even a Methodist conference could not match.”

     This was the first of Mencken’s eleven convention seasons that stretched over the next forty-four years. It was said of Mencken that he collected political conventions like others collected works of art. Theatre may have impressed him, but this was “living drama.”

     That same year in St. Louis at the Democratic Party’s convention Mencken stared gaping in astonishment as he watched William Jennings Bryan, dressed in an alpaca suit, bid a tearful farewell to his fellow Democrats. Mencken wrote, “I was against Bryan the moment I heard him.”

     At 2:00 a.m. on June 12, 1920, after a week of ballots and voting, the Republicans nominated Warren G. Harding for President and Calvin Coolidge his Vice-President. A disappointed Mencken wrote: “It was a poor show. Harding is of the intellectual grade of an aging cockroach.”

     Harding won the election, and Mencken attended his inauguration, walking away appalled at Harding’s speech, and saying that it was “the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights.”

     Mencken presented one of Harding’s atrocious sentences: “I would like government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved.” Of it, Mencken commented: “I assume that you have read it. I also assume that you have set it down as idiotic—a series of words without sense. You are quite right.”

     At the 1924 Republican Convention, the delegates nominated Calvin Coolidge, whom Mencken considered, “a stubborn little fellow with a tight unimaginative mind.” To fellow reporters Mencken confided, “Let us at once admit that all such affairs as this are the most dreadful buffooneries conceivable. . . . Coolidge can’t arouse any more enthusiasm than a spittoon.”

     Four years later Mencken described Herbert Hoover as “no more than a fat Coolidge,” and that he “has a complexion like unrisen dough.”

     In 1936, Alfred Landon, Governor of Kansas, received the Republican nomination for President, and even though Mencken preferred Landon over Franklin Roosevelt, he thought Landon’s speeches awful, that his voice was that of “a muted xylophone,” and that there were “no more thrills it than a game of checkers.”      

     In 1948, Mencken attended his final Presidential convention, in Philadelphia, where, approaching sixty-eight, he worked as hard as ever typing a good report. The younger reporters looked upon him with reverence, and when somebody yelled, “Mencken for President!”, he stood, bowed, and said in jest, “I accept.”

     Mencken, like most Americans, wondered why the more exceptional people do not run for President, and he decided that, “In the face of this singular passion for conformity, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. . . . This leaves the field to the intellectual jellyfish and inner tubes.”

     The Democratic National Convention will convene next week, on Monday, in Denver, Colorado, at the Pepsi Center, and if all transpires as anticipated, on Thursday, across the Interstate, at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium, the Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.

     The following week in Minneapolis-St. Paul the Senator from Arizona, John McCain, will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for the same office.

     If only we had H. L. Mencken to attend each of the conventions and give us his caustic comments of the proceedings, written in a prose style unmatched by any other.

FIGHTING

by William H. Benson

August 7, 2008

     In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of Treasury, urged Congress to pass a law that placed an excise tax on whiskey. He was anxious to lay his hands on more revenues and pay down the new government’s debts, for he “wanted the tax imposed to advance and secure the power of the new federal government.” Congress passed the law, and grain-producing farmers were forced to pay a tax between 7 and 18 cents per gallon.

     The farmers hated this tax, arguing that it was discriminatory. They had little cash to pay it, for their medium of exchange and barter was the gallon jug of whiskey. The corn, wheat, barley that they grew they immediately converted to whiskey on their homemade stills because the jug was easily and cheaply transported. To haul grain to the eastern markets cost more than the price that they could receive for the grain.

     In the summer of 1794, the farmers of western Pennsylvania rebelled and rioted, even going so far as to tar and feather the revenue agents. On August 7, 1794, President George Washington warned the rioters, but they laughed him off.

     Hamilton urged Washington to call out the troops. Thirteen thousand soldiers from neighboring states converged upon western Pennsylvania, with Hamilton leading their way. Unfortunately, most of the rioters had retreated into the woods, but the two who were tried and convicted Washington pardoned.

     Washington’s government meant business: the farmers would obey Congress’s laws.     

     On August 7, 1882, an election day, somewhere along the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, three boys from the McCoy clan stabbed and killed Ellison Hatfield. Because of this murderous action, the animosity that had run like an undercurrent between the two families for four years now erupted into an all-out fiery war that raged for the next eight years.

     On the evening of August 8, 1974, President Nixon spoke to the American people and announced that he would resign as President of the United States at noon the next day for the cover-up he had directed within days after the Watergate Hotel break-in in June of 1972. For two years, he had lied to Congress, to his family, to his staff, and to the American public that he had not participated in any cover-up, and yet, he had.

     On July 16, 1973, Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon associate, had revealed to a Congressional committee of the existence of recording tapes Nixon had installed in the White House and in the Oval Office. For a year, Nixon had stone-walled and refused to submit those tapes to the investigating committee, but on August 5, 1974 after the Supreme Court insisted that he turn over those tapes, the transcripts revealed the truth. Faced with the absolute certainty of impeachment, conviction, and perhaps jail time, Nixon resigned.

     Some people—like those western Pennsylvania farmers, or the Hatfield’s, or the McCoy’s, or Richard M. Nixon—naturally gravitate toward a fight. It is a part of their nature. The political process is a fight, and only fighters need apply.

     This summer Barack Obama and John McCain are in the fight of their lives: which of the two will garner the majority of the electoral votes in November and become our next President. The Democratic and Republican conventions will soon arrive, and we can expect to hear plenty of harsh fighting words.                  

     Critics are ridiculing Senator John McCain because he refuses to e-mail and is not internet-savvy, that he is too old to be President for the age and the time we now live in. To that I say, “So what?” It was Richard

RICHARD NIXON AND BILLY GRAHAM

by William H. Benson

August 7, 2008

     The two men—Billy Graham and Richard Nixon—were great friends. They had known each other since 1950. About the same age with children about the same age, the two families often visited each other. Graham was an unabashed and loyal supporter of Richard Nixon, something that observers who detested Nixon could not understand.

     In January of 1969, Billy Graham attended Nixon’s inauguration and gave the prayer, offering his thanks to God that, “in Thy sovereignty, Thou hast permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of our history.”

     During Nixon’s first four years in the White House, Billy Graham had immediate access to the President. In 1970 a Nixon aide said, “Others may have trouble getting through the White House switchboard, but not Billy; Billy can get through right away.”

     “But it was as if Graham, in his confederation with Nixon, proceeded in a kind of perceptual and moral glaucoma,” wrote the journalist Marshall Frady.

     Billy was so trusting in Nixon’s integrity that he invited the President to attend and speak briefly at the Billy Graham Crusade in Knoxville, Tennessee in May of 1970. This came shortly after Nixon had authorized the raids into Cambodia and the resulting violence that had erupted at Kent State and other college campuses across the country. Hecklers showed up that night to shout at the President, “Peace Now!”

     Nixon easily won the 1972 election, trouncing George McGovern, and again Billy prayed the prayer at Nixon’s second inauguration. Even the news of crimes being committed at the Watergate Hotel in June of 1972 did not disturb Graham, who said, “I don’t think anyone, even the President, knows the whole truth. . . . I have known him a long time, and he has a very strong sense of integrity.”

     As the Senate hearings droned on through 1973 and into 1974, Billy Graham began to feel that Nixon had cut him off. Of this, he seemed baffled, saying, “I don’t know what my relationship is now. I heard from a friend of the President that he didn’t want to get Billy Graham involved, so maybe he just wanted to keep me entirely out of it.”

     Billy was floored when Nixon’s financial records were made public: he had tapped into government funds to enhance his plush personal retreats at San Clemente and at Key Biscayne, and he had given so little to charities or to church.

     Graham said, “I just couldn’t understand it. He’d never seemed to me to really want things like that. He never wanted clothes or fancy things around him or money or anything like that. . . . I could hardly believe it.”

     In the spring of 1974, the transcripts of Nixon’s private Oval Office sessions, with all the “expletives deleted,” were released. Publicly, Billy Graham said, “I just didn’t know that he used this type of language in talking to others.” But privately, Billy wept, so devastated was he. “I’d thought he was a man of such great integrity. . . . I’d never, ever, heard him tell a lie. But then the way it sounded in those tapes—it was all something totally foreign to me in him. He was just suddenly somebody else.”

     On the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon announced that he would resign the next day at noon.

     Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s aides, later said, “Nixon had a penchant for knowing how to use and manipulate people. He was the consummate politician. He would demand great loyalty, but as Watergate proved, he never quite gave it back.”

     For years after Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, Billy was entirely sincere when he insisted that Nixon had not ever manipulated the world-renowned evangelist for his own political purposes. Leighton Ford, Billy’s brother-in-law, said, “I have never heard him say one thing that made me believe he thought he was being used.”

     Another close associate stated it more bluntly, “For the life of me, I honestly believe that after all these years, Billy still has no idea of how badly Nixon snookered him.”

DEAN MARTIN AND JERRY LEWIS

 by William H. Benson

July 24, 2008

     Joseph (Jerome) Levitch, aka Jerry Lewis, of Russian Jewish heritage and from Newark, New Jersey, had an act: on stage, he would play records of famous singers and then pantomime their voices. In 1946, he was twenty years old, a geeky-acting kid who did not get many laughs, but he kept finding work.

     Dino Paul Crocetti, aka Dean Martin, of Italian heritage and from Steubenville, Ohio, had an act: he would sing, as a crooner, as did Harry Mills and Bing Crosby. In 1946, Dean was twenty-nine years old, handsome, with curly black hair, loveable, and he too kept finding work. Yet, neither had earned a top billing.

     Coincidentally, they found themselves working the same clubs at the same time up and down the Atlantic seaboard. On one occasion, late at night at the Harvard-Madrid on Broadway between Fiftieth and Fifty-first, Jerry started to tease Dean, who was trying to sing, and Dean heckled him back. They were just having fun, blissfully unaware.

     Weeks later, Jerry was performing at Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City, when the lead singer came down sick. For a replacement, Jerry suggested Dean Martin, and Skinny agreed. Dean showed up thinking that he was going to sing, but Skinny thought the two of them should try some comedy. Quick-thinking Jerry improvised.

      Dean played the part of the smooth and easy singer, who was always cool, who loved the women. He would play it straight. Jerry played the part of a child, a comic with outrageous and unpredictable antics. Jerry explained the act to Dean: “I’m the kid, and you’re the big brother. I’m the busboy, you’re the captain. You’re the organ-grinder, I’m the monkey. You’re the playboy, I’m the putz.”

     Dean would sing, but Jerry would drop plates, toss people’s steaks like a Frisbee, and make a shambles of Dean’s performances. It was slapstick with a smattering of old jokes—whatever popped into their heads. On the night of July 24, 1946, the two took the stage together for the first time, and the effect on the audiences was electric. Later Skinny D’Amato said to them, “Now that is what I call lightning in a bottle.”

     The press reported: “These two crazy kids are a combination of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. They will leave their mark on the whole profession.” Years later, Alan King, the comedian, said: “I have been in the business for fifty-five years, and I have never to this day seen an act get more laughs than Martin and Lewis. They didn’t get laughs—it was pandemonium. People knocked over tables.”     

     The act lasted for ten years. It brought them fame and fortune, and took them to Hollywood, where they made 17 movies together. Jerry was intense about the movie business, a workaholic, anxious to get it right, but Dean was far less so. Somehow, the movies never did capture the spontaneity that their live act had. There were arguments, and Dean and Jerry decided to end their partnership.

     On Tuesday night, July 24, 1956, ten years to the day after their first performance together at the 500 Club, Martin and Lewis played their final three shows at the Copacabana at 10 East 60^th Street. Each show ended with a song, “Pardners,” in which they sang, “You and me, we’ll always be pardners. You and me, we’ll always be friends.”

     Alas, it was not to be. Their break-up was marked by a mountain of animosity, and years passed when they never spoke nor saw each other. Both enjoyed enormous success as a solo act, Jerry as a movie actor and Dean as a singer at Las Vegas and on television. 

     One day in 1983 Jerry with his wife, Sandra, walked into an Italian restaurant, La Famiglia, on Rodeo Drive, and they saw Dean Martin eating alone. Jerry was stunned at how Dean, then almost sixty-six, had aged. They spoke, but it was clear that Dean wanted to be left alone. Jerry wrote: “As we ate, I watched him eat. It’s a very strange thing to watch someone you know well eating alone. I tried my hardest not to be sad, but the feelings washed over me.”       

     The ancient Greeks had two masks—one with a smile and the other with a frown. Comedy usually first and then comes the tragedy. For Martin and Lewis the smiles had indeed turned to frowns.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

by William H. Benson

July 10, 2008

     Next Monday, July 14, marks the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille, the day that the French Revolution began in 1789 in Paris. The Bastille was the King’s prison, a hated symbol of oppression under the absolutist monarchy, and on that day, the people had captured it to secure arms and release any political prisoners.

      The Revolution turned violent and bloody, and thousands perished under the knife of the guillotine during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, but by 1799 when the Revolution breathed its last, French royal power was gone, swept aside. The King, Louis XVI, and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, too had been marched to the guillotine.

     Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French writer and philosopher, had died a decade before the Revolution began, and yet, many, including Louis XVI and Napoleon, blamed him for the Revolution. The English philosopher Edmund Burke, said of the revolutionaries: “There is a great dispute among their leaders which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. . . . He is their standard figure of perfection.”

     To whom do the people listen? Who best can diagnose the difficulties of any society and offer solutions? Who holds the power to change a society?

     For centuries, people in Europe had looked to the Church and to the clergy for direction, but by the eighteenth century clerical power had waned. The Kings in the principalities spread across Europe had then claimed a “divine right,” to rule, a philosophy crushed by revolution. In democratic societies, people listen either to the glib politicians, or to the journalists who often slant the news toward their own bias.

     Over two hundred years ago, people began to listen for the first time to the secular “intellectuals,” men such as Thomas Paine in America and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Rousseau did not have any authority or power; all he had was his own common sense, his vision of what was wrong in France and what needed changing, and an especially agile ability to write. And the people read and heeded his words.

     Rousseau wrote of the importance of staying close to nature, for there, he believed, people were essentially good. It was when people formed communities that they became evil because of competitiveness, inclined toward aggression and egotism. He believed that children should be taught with sympathy by appealing to their interests and not through discipline and harsh lessons.

     In his major work, The Social Contract, Rousseau argued that governments should be established only by the sovereignty of the people, not by the Church or the King. This was revolutionary, a stunning and liberating idea. Governments, he argued, are formed by a compact among the people themselves.

     People accept Rousseau’s ideas today, and consider them modern, but they were not when he first wrote them. “He shifted around the furniture of the human mind.”

     What is surprising is that Rousseau may have been a visionary genius when dealing with society, but as a person, he was weak, quarrelsome, supersensitive to injustices, and filled with vice: he gave away to an asylum each of his five children immediately after their birth. Those who befriended him came away convinced that he was unhinged.

     David Hume said that he was “a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe.” Diderot labeled him “deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and full of malice.” Another said he was “odious, monstrous.” Voltaire, called him “a monster of vanity and vileness.” A woman’s last words to him were, “I have nothing left for you but pity.”     

     All this is baffling. That anyone would read anything that such a social pariah would write is astonishing, evidence of human gullibility, and yet people did and still do read him. The historian Paul Johnson summed up Rousseau. “[He] was a writer of genius but fatally unbalanced both in his life and in his views.”

     Again, the question is before us—to whom should we the people listen? The religiously-inspired televangelist? The persuasive politician? The media talking head? The maniacal intellectual? Rousseau is proof that grand ideas that will dramatically improve our lives can originate from even the most unlikely sources.