ALIVE

by William H. Benson

November 1, 2007

     On Thursday, October 12, 1972 forty passengers boarded a Fairchild F-227, a prop-powered aircraft owned by the Uruguayan air force. A rugby team from Montevideo had chartered it to take the team’s members to Santiago for a match against Chile’s team. With a crew of five, the aircraft headed west toward the Andes.

     That afternoon, due to bad weather reported high in the mountains, the pilot landed at Mendoza, Argentina, at the base of the mountains, and the crew decided to spend the night there. The next day the pilot was still unsure about the tricky wind conditions above the Andes, but the rugby team begged him to go, and so he agreed.

     They crashed that afternoon, Friday, the thirteenth. An air pocket had dropped the aircraft several hundred feet, and it was unable then to climb. The right wing hit first; it whipped around, and cut off the tail. Then, the left wing was severed, and the fuselage, instead of slamming into the side of the mountain, fortunately skidded along like a toboggan on the snow field.

     Of the forty-five on board, thirty-two survived the crash. Amazingly only a handful of them had severe wounds. Nando Parrado, then only twenty-two, hit his head and was unconscious for three days. When he awoke, he was told that his cranium had broken.

     The stronger team members did what they could to survive the cold at 12,000 feet elevation. On three sides of their position, stood towering peaks. With debris from the crash, they fashioned a wall at the broken-off end of the fuselage, and thus spent their nights inside shivering due to the brutal cold, but surviving. They expected help immediately, but then they heard on a transistor radio that the search had been called off.

     Two weeks later, on the night of October 27, an avalanche buried the Fairchild and dumped three feet of snow into the interior of the fuselage, suffocating eight people who slept on the floor. Someone dug down and found Nando’s face, and thus he lived.      

    They had little protective clothing, only light jackets, no sleeping bags, no gloves, no sunglasses, and no food. To survive they resorted to cannibalism, eating the bodies of those who had died, despite feelings of revulsion, sin, shame, and guilt.

     A group formed among them, which they called the Expeditioners, to climb their way to help. Three of them walked to the west toward the closest peak, but came back that same day utterly exhausted, claiming that even though it looked close, it would take days to climb it. Another foray to the east located the tail of the aircraft, and within it, they found insulation, which they sewed with copper wires into a sleeping bag for three.

     On his own, Nando Parrado decided that he could scale that western peak. No one supported his belief. He took the sleeping bag, two other men—Roberto Canessa and Antonio Vizintin—and a ten day supply of food. Nando reasoned that to stay at the Fairchild was death, for it was all around them. The mountain wanted to consume them. Human life in the Andes was an anomaly, and the mountain would defeat them all.

     It required three days of exhausting work for the three boys to scale that western peak. The incline was often vertical, with little to hold or grab. At that altitude, over 17,000 feet high, they found that the mind shuts down, and the body is so easily tired. At the summit Nando and Canessa sent Vizintin back to the Fairchild, and the two boys rested one more night. Six days later, after walking down the Chilean side of that mountain, they saw a man on a horse, signaled him for help, and he called the authorities. The news electrified the world: some of Uruguay’s rugby team were alive after seventy days.

     Nando directed the daring helicopter rides—on December 22 and 23, which safely delivered the other survivors, reduced to fourteen, from the Fairchild to civilization.

     Human physical power is one thing; human mental will power is another. Of all those boys stranded on that mountain, only Nando Parrado had the will and strength in sufficient combination to conquer that mountain. Daily he had visualized his climb up and out, and he believed that he could hear his father coaching him each step.

     Last year Nando, now fifty-seven, published a book, Miracle in the Andes, an exciting re-telling of his ordeal.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

by William H. Benson

October 18, 2007

     On October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy received evidence that the Russians were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles off Florida’s coast. Photographs taken the day before from a U2 aircraft had revealed large-scale military activity. The Russian leader, Nikita Krushchev, was installing forty-two medium-range 1100-mile nuclear missiles, twenty-four 2,200 miles nuclear missiles, plus twenty-four SAM anti-aircraft missile groups. He was also sending 42,000 Soviet troops and technicians.

     U.S. military advisors told the President that by December fifty of these missiles would be deployed and ready to aim at U.S. targets, capable of destroying in seventeen minutes the main U. S. defenses.

     This heightened level of military activity was impossible to hide, and, yet, when Kennedy confronted Krushchev about his actions, he lied, claiming that the missiles were all only short-range. He boasted to the young President that not even Stalin would have dared exporting missiles to Cuba.

     Thoroughly shocked by Krushchev’s deception and arrogance, Kennedy called a meeting on October 16 of the executive committee of the National Security Council. Some, such as Dean Acheson and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, argued for an immediate air strike and a follow-up ground invasion. Others, such as Adlai Stevenson, suggested that they barter, offering to give away something in exchange for a Russian promise to remove the missiles. Others suggested that Kennedy do nothing

     Kennedy hesitated, unsure now of what he should do.

     Once consulted Richard Nixon, advised him, “I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.” But, the Secretary of State Dean Rusk argued against a pre-emptive air strike, in that it was not in the U.S. tradition: “The burden of carrying the Mark of Cain on your brow for the rest of your lives is something we all [would] have to bear.”

     Eighteen months earlier, the new President had approved a naïve CIA plan to send into Cuba armed Cuban exiles, intending to overthrow Castro’s Communist government. The Cuban leader had read about the operation in U.S. newspapers, and so his troops were ready: they killed 114 of the invaders and took prisoner the rest, 1189, nearly all of whom were executed or died in Cuba’s prisons. The Bay of Pigs fiasco shook Kennedy’s confidence in himself, and also in his intelligence officers.

     Finally, on October 22, Kennedy decided. He imposed a naval quarantine upon Cuba, holding in reserve an air strike. Soviet ships carrying missiles to the islands were forced to turn around. Kennedy then pledged to Krushchev that he would not again try to invade Cuba, granted other concessions. Upon those promises, on October 28, the Russian leader agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba. Castro was furious.

     Most of the world was unaware how close the U.S. and the Soviet Union were to a nuclear war. Kennedy had available 800 B47s, 550 B52s, and 70 B58s, each with their bomb-bays closed and thus poised for an immediate takeoff. Ninety B52s, each carrying multi-megaton bombs, circled above the Atlantic. He made active the nuclear warheads on a hundred Atlas, fifty Titan, and twelve Minuteman missiles and placed all military commands in a state of Defcon-2, the highest point of readiness.

     Even though Kennedy appeared to have won this contest, historians, such as Paul Johnson, have since suggested that it was more of a defeat. At that time, the U.S. had enormous advantages in military might, and the President could have demanded the removal of the missiles, without offering any concessions. As it turned out, Kennedy, according to Paul Johnson “acquiesced in the continuance of a Communist regime in Cuba in open military alliance with Soviet Russia. . . . The United States would have been well within its moral and legal rights in seeking to overthrow Castro and impose a democratic government.”

     Forty-five years have passed, and we still have a Cuba with Castro and a paralyzing but quite legitimate fear that nuclear weapons may fall into the wrong hands.

SOUTHERN LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

October 4, 2007

     The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee will celebrate the Southern Festival of Books next weekend. It is an event celebrated the second week of October each year, and its purpose is to promote reading and writing, as well as a broader understanding of the language and culture of the Southern states.

     Two of the best writers America has produced were from the South: Samuel Clemens also known as Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. Actually, they were from Southern slave states that did not join the Confederacy at the time of secession: Twain was born and raised in Missouri, and Mencken hailed from Baltimore, Maryland. Few writers since have demonstrated greater skill with the English language than did Twain and Mencken.

     Twain knew the South. He knew her people, their language, and the details of their lives. He knew the river! It was “the great Mississippi, the great majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.” From the river Clemens took his name. Rivermen would call out “mark twain” when sounding two fathoms.

     On the steamboats Clemens piloted, he met up with all types of characters: the gamblers, the fast talkers, the dull-witted, the destitute, the innocent dupes, and the downtrodden. When he set about to write his stories, Twain drew heavily from his days on the Mississippi. He created Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the slave Jim who all lived in St. Petersburg, Missouri. Jim, with the help of young Huckleberry, escaped his owner by boarding a raft, and the two slid down the mighty Mississippi.

     But Twain knew the ugly side of life in a small Southern town. Through Huckleberry Finn’s voice, Twain described the degradation of the poor slaves and of the desperate white sharecroppers. Huck Finn told how Colonel Sherburn in public shot and killed a town drunk named Old Boggs. The Colonel was never arrested, for he knew that no jury would ever convict him. With clarity, Mark Twain painted a devastating landscape of a Southern village, complete with murder, drunkenness, human ownership of other humans, mob rule, and utter hopelessness.

     It makes for great literature, but it must have been a terrible life for most. It is no wonder that Samuel Clemens as an adult chose to live in the north—in Connecticut and in New York City, and also in Europe.

     In the spring of 1882, two decades after Sam had left the Mississippi, he returned to St. Louis, and aboard a steamboat, he sailed up and down the river. He was stunned at how backwards the South was relative to the North. He thought it was because the Southern people were still gripping their feudal past. The economy of the former Confederacy was blighted, and the people were lost in sentimentality and romanticism.

     “Everybody bragged, everybody blustered,” he said, and “all over the land, two things could count upon reverence and championship—religion and slavery.”

     Fifty years later conditions had not changed much. H. L. Mencken echoed similar sentiments in his highly critical essay, The Sahara of the Bozart. “And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

     “Alas, for the South!” Mencken wrote. “Her books have grown fewer. She never was much given to literature.”

     The situation in the South has greatly improved since the days of Twain and Mencken. The former Confederate States now are economic powerhouses. Her cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Little Rock, and Charlotte—are world class. Except for Reagan, all of our Presidents since 1980 were from the South: Carter was from Georgia, both Bush’s claim Texas, and Clinton was from Arkansas. Truly, the South’s economic and political transformation is our nation’s miracle, a rags-to-riches story.    

     And slowly, Southern writers, such as William Faulkner of Mississippi, have created a respectable Southern literature. And then there are the modern popular writers: John Grisham of Mississippi and Patrick Conroy of South Carolina. The South’s books have grown, not fewer, but larger. 

SCHOOL DAYS

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2007

     The calendar and the cooling of the temperatures tell us that another school year has arrived. The fall sports schedule is in full swing, and just beyond the horizon lies the winter schedule. The presence of the book backpacks indicates that teachers are poring on the homework—their duty and a very good thing for the students, and the more serious students are responding with hours of solitary concentration.

     In 1987, twenty years ago already, a professor at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, published The Closing of the American Mind, a book that spent more than a year on the best-seller’s list then. A humanities scholar who specialized in the works of Plato and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bloom issued a series of daring claims in his book about what is wrong with the university as a whole, with the disciplines included within the humanities, and with the students themselves.

      Things went wrong on the university campus, so Bloom charged, in the 1960’s when certain pieces of that vast collection known as the Western Canon, which includes Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Emerson and others, were replaced with writers more modern and also representative of women and minorities.

     The literature curriculum, in other words, was dumbed down to accommodate students unwilling to work as hard as the great writers require of readers. As the Greek and Roman classics had disappeared in the previous century, so now had other worthy writers. It was the students’ loss, and yet they and many at the universities wanted writers more relevant, what ever that may mean.

     But the larger question is, “Why study the Western Canon or the humanities or history or English or philosophy at all?” In the light of the costs of a four-year degree, it does seem ludicrous to spend the time and money reading Spinoza and Nietzsche. Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor said it this way, “The big question for humanists is, ‘How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists?’ That’s been tough, really tough.”

     Allan Bloom tried to answer that question. A liberal arts education, he believed, should provide a student with “four years of freedom”—“a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.”

     Bloom identified certain opinions that students bring with them and also the distractions that together prevent students from receiving all they can at the university.

     He said, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Students are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. The true believer is the real danger. . . . This is something with which they have been indoctrinated.”

     Openness has rejected the natural rights of people. Unreserved equality and total tolerance for others’ opinions has overthrown identification of evil ideas and recognition of the world’s injustices. Suddenly, everything, including truth and beauty, is relative. And so Bloom entitled his book as he did: the American mind is closed, and yet thinks it wide open. The word sophomore unites two disparate Greek words: wise and fool.

     Music is the major distraction for students, Bloom claimed, a not so surprising comment. “Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it.”

     Yes, music is still a powerful influence among students, but I see that the cell phone and the internet have gradually replaced music as the students’ source of distraction. The cell phone seems a permanent fixture today, something Bloom did not foresee in 1987.

     Education is there at the university, available for anyone willing to work. The learning is profound and life changing. Bloom put it this way: “The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures.”

THE GREAT SEPARATION

by William H. Benson

September 6, 2007

     In May of 2006 Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent to President George Bush an open letter in which he began by listing the grievances he had against American foreign policy. But, then, he turned from political to religious issues, mentioning certain Biblical prophets—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, and Joseph. He then asked Bush a question: “if they were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?”

     He further admonished Bush that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.”

     He then finished his letter with a dire prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

     Ahmadinejad’s letter appeared in a number of newspapers around the world.

     A week ago, The New York Times Magazine featured an article entitled “The Great Separation”, in which they reprinted portions of that letter and then pointed out the crucial difference between Western thinking and that of the Middle East. In the Islamic countries it is “political theology”; politics is within theology, and theology is bound up within politics. They are united. But in the West politics by law is separated from theology. Each are distinct spheres of influence, and neither intrudes upon the other.

     How was it that in Western Civilization certain thinkers chose to divorce religion from politics?

     The answer is that this Great Separation came out of the devastation resulting from the European Wars of Religion during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Catholic was pitted against Protestantism in all its forms: Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, etc. Each side fought viciously against the other.

     Bells rang in Paris on August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, as a signal to massacre all the leading Huguenots, the French Protestants. For three days and nights, the massacre went on, and some two thousand Protestants were killed. And, then, the killing extended into other cities. Protestantism ceased to be a viable alternative in France.

     Germany’s religious war was even more intense and frenzied. Called the Thirty Year War, 1618-1648, it laid waste to entire villages, towns, and cities. Thousands were killed. Many others starved or fled the country in terror. The fighting reduced the population of Germany from fifteen million to less than five million. The savage killing ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a truce between Catholic and Protestant.

     In that same year the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, looked back over the previous century’s religious wars and asked why? He understood that religious convictions often lead to political conflicts, and that the potential for violence is always there. In his great work, The Leviathan, published in 1651, he dared to set aside questions of God and His commands and focused instead upon human beings and why they believed so strongly in their religion.      

      Hobbes further planted an idea that took hold in the West—“that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; instead it would try to keep men from harming one another.” Security and peace were what mattered most, not divine commands.

     There are those who want politics and religion united, such as Iran’s President. Such a view is comprehensive, magnificent, and thus powerfully attractive. God and man and nature are linked into a single all-encompassing cosmos. But in the West philosophers split religion away from politics. Such a view leaves God’s commands out of political decision-making, and instead concentrates upon the betterment of human beings— promoting peace, fostering justice, and diminishing fear and ignorance.

     Neither side is all right or all wrong. But if ever given a choice, I, and most others I am convinced, would choose the Great Separation over the Great Unification.

ANTI-HEROES

by William H. Benson

August 23, 2007

     In August of 1967, forty years ago, the movie Bonnie and Clyde opened in the nation’s theatres. It featured two young actors—Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker. The movie, according to the New York Times, “was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate.”

     Audiences gasped in shock at the final scene: Beatty’s and Dunaway’s bodies twitching and writhing inside their parked car, a Ford V-8, as the lawmen fired a fusillade of bullets at them. That scene seemed to open the Hollywood gate for more and more violence, and no one seems to know how to shut it.

     Of course, the real life Bonnie and Clyde got what they deserved. Across the states of Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana for four years during the early days of the Great Depression, this husband and wife team had cut a swath of destruction that included robbery at gunpoint, cold-blooded murder, and high-speed chases and shootouts to elude officers of the law.

     Their story has since become a legend, and what added to the story was the way they promoted themselves. They would have photographs taken, showing them in various poses in front of their car smiling, smoking cigars, and holding their machine guns. Also, Bonnie Parker wrote poetry and sent her work to newspapers. “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” has 13 stanzas with five lines in each. Here is the final stanza:  

     “Some day they will go down together;

      And they will bury them side by side.

       To a few it means grief,

      To the law it’s relief,

      But it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.”

     Their story is like those of Frank and Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and John Dillinger—bandits who for a time eluded the strong arm of the law, but who in the end were trapped and each went out in a blaze. They are the anti-heroes, people whose deeds are wicked, and yet the public flatters them with fawning attention and notoriety for their daring.

     Robin Hood was an anti-hero. He claimed to rob from the rich in order to give to the poor. He and his band of Merry Men, which included Friar Tuck and Little John, slunk around Sherwood Forest, while the Sheriff of Nottingham failed to capture them.

     Both Richard III and Macbeth were anti-heroes. Audiences watch and cheer them on as they ruthlessly pursue the thrones of England and Scotland, but then at a certain point audiences turn on them and are repelled in disgust at their lawless ways.

     During the CB radio craze thirty years ago, the movie “Smokey and the Bandit,” came out. It featured Jackie Gleason who played the part of Smokey, a state trooper who was ignorant, obnoxious, and easily outwitted by the sophisticated, handsome, and sharp-minded Bandit, the anti-hero, played by Burt Reynolds. Watching such a movie, audiences find themselves twisted into cheering the criminal and booing the lawman.

     Much of Mark Twain’s humor was iconoclastic—irreverent attacks on pretense, sham, and hypocrisy. He noticed that the Sunday School books he had read had stories of naughty boys who were invariably punished and of nice boys who were eventually rewarded. In opposition to those, he wrote two short stories; the first was “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief,” in which little James commits all kinds of mean acts, never has anything bad happen to him, grows up, “and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature.” “The Story of the Good Little Boy” is about Jacob who does only good deeds, and yet he receives only grief and punishment.

     Twain wanted to poke gentle fun at the common knowledge believed by most that bad deeds are at some point punished and that good deeds are justly rewarded. Not always—at least not in this world, he suggested. Innocent good people are destroyed everyday by disease or accident or the evil intentions of others.

     The anti-hero has his or her place in our American popular culture, for when we tire of our saints, we still have Macbeth, Richard III, Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, and Bonnie and Clyde.