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.”

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