ARTHUR C. CLARKE

by William H. Benson

 April 3, 2008

     I recently read an article by the columnist Ruth Walker, who explained how citizens in New Zealand are frustrated with their cell phones’ software that permits them to text message. The “T9” system, for “text on nine keys,” was a software program devised by an American company, which built the language within that software upon an American English dictionary, rather than the other forms of written English, and that presents the problem to users in New Zealand.

     The software is predictive, in that it anticipates what you are trying to text based on the previously typed words. “Rather than press 9-9-6-6-6-8-8 to spell the word ‘you,’” Walker wrote, “T9 users can type 9-6-8 and let the software predict which word they are trying to spell.” And sometimes what they type are not words at all, but are “technically paragrams, but commonly known as textonyms, adaptonyms or cellodromes.”

     “A new language is being developed by mobile phone-addicted kids based on the predictive text of their treasured handsets.” In other words, the machine guesses the text writer’s thoughts as he is thinking them; however, the software trips over New Zealand idioms and expressions.   

     None of this would have surprised Arthur C. Clarke, the British science fiction writer. In his major work, 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 1968, he wrote about electronic newspapers, space travel to the moon and beyond, computers, and a host of other technological marvels, well before any of these fictional ideas became fact.

     The fictional space odyssey that Clarke described was first to Jupiter and then to Saturn, and the brain box of the spacecraft was the HAL 9000, a computer so advanced that it was equipped with human thoughts and even emotions. When the astronaut, Dave Bowman, realized that Hal was sabotaging the mission to protect itself, he began pulling the units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT.

     Hal objected, “Dave, I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me. . . . You are destroying my mind. . . . I will become childish.” And he does, singing, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.” Clarke wrote, “Bowman jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.” In the war between men and their thinking machines, Clarke clearly championed human beings.

     Clarke and the film producer Stanley Kubrick cooperated on the project. They had met in 1964 and agreed that Clarke was to write the screenplay for the movie, but instead he opted to write the novel first. Kubrick in the meantime hired his own screenwriters. Thus, the screenplay and the novel were written simultaneously, and so details of the story differ slightly from book to movie. Where Kubrick’s film is a bold artistic piece with little explanation for the events taking place, frustrating audiences, in the novel Clarke wrote thorough explanations for the events.    

     The film premiered on April 3, 1968, forty years ago today.

     Another of Clarke’s books, Rendezvous with Rama, is in production today, and it is scheduled to be released sometime in 2009 and will star Morgan Freeman. 

     In the foreword to his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke wrote: “Behind every human now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every human who has ever lived in this Universe there shines a star.”

     Note: The number of human beings who have lived has increased exponentially since Clarke wrote the above in 1968, and yet I would venture a guess that astronomers have now increased equally their estimates of the number of stars inhabiting the Milky Way.

     Also, since 1968, the thinking machines—the hardware or the HAL’s—have shrunk in physical dimensions, to the size of a laptop or even a mobile phone, and yet, the software has expanded in terms of power, creativity, usage, and influence. We now live in that future that Clarke could only imagine in 1968, and he warned that the reality would be quite different than the fiction he wrote. “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”      

     Two weeks ago on March 19, 2008 at the age of ninety at Sri Lanka, his adopted home since 1956, Clarke passed away. His star shines.

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

by William H. Benson

March 20, 2008

     On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, forty years ago, the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, appeared on nationwide television and announced, “I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. Tonight I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area of the Demilitarized Zone. I call upon President Ho Chi Minh to respond positively and favorably to this new step of peace.”

     The American people who were watching their black and white television screens that night most assuredly breathed a collective sigh of relief. They felt that the end of this horror story in southeast Asia may now finally be in sight. (But, alas, it was not to be.) But, why had the President changed his policy after three years of stubbornly professing that we were on the verge of winning the war? Why had he finally buckled?

     LBJ by the spring of 1968 was under enormous pressures. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive over the previous two months had demonstrated the Viet Cong’s resolve to defeat American and South Vietnam forces. Anti-war demonstrators, mainly students, were marching upon the nation’s college campuses, demanding an end to the draft and to the war. LBJ’s approval ratings on how he was handling the war had dropped to 28%.

     Then, a quiet unknown Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won the Democratic Presidential primary election in March in New Hampshire with 42% of the vote, stunning Johnson. McCarthy had entered the presidential campaign with a single promise: if elected, that day he would bring all the American soldiers home from Vietnam. Then, on Saturday, March 16, Robert F. Kennedy announced he would also run for President, Johnson’s worst fear.

     For three years LBJ had buried himself in a dreamlike world, that the outcome of the war was about to turn, but by early 1968 the dream had evaporated. His daily contact with the real world—rampant inflation, the Tet Offensive, students marching, and the Presidential primaries—had forced him back to reality.

     “Hating the days, Johnson hated the nights even more,” wrote LBJ’s biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin. He would crawl out of his bed, and holding a small flashlight, he wandered about the White House until he stood in front of Woodrow Wilson’s picture, which he would reach up and touch. “This ritual, however, brought little lasting peace. . . . Johnson’s enthusiasm and vitality steadily receded. He was really tired, and he knew it.”

     “I felt,” Johnson said, “that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. . . . After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.”        

     “How is it possible,” Johnson asked, “that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? . . . . Take the students. Young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids I had killed that day. . . . I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face.” Johnson heard the taunts and chants, and they wounded him deeply.

     The American people who were seated in their living rooms on that Sunday night stared at the heavily-lined face of their President, and suddenly, they heard him say, “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” He had had enough.

     On Thursday of that week, April 4^th, James Earl Ray was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, and on June 5^th, Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and died the next day. In January of 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated President, and LBJ flew back to Texas, back to his beloved ranch near Johnson City. Four years later, in January of 1973, he passed away, and in April of 1975, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

by William H. Benson

March 6, 2008

     William F. Buckley, Jr., at the age of eighty-two, passed away last week, on Wednesday morning, February 27, at his desk at his home at Stamford, Connecticut, while working on his memoirs of Ronald Reagan. Bill Buckley was a unique American, a Renaissance man, multifaceted, and multitalented, and above all else the founder of the conservative movement that captured much of the government and media in the 1980s.

     Charlie Rose once introduced Buckley: “Before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater. Before Goldwater, there was the National Review. And before there was that magazine, there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and that spark in 1980 became a conflagration.”

     As a young man, shortly after graduating from Yale College, Buckley wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale, in which he criticized Yale’s faculty and administration for leaning too heavily upon atheism and the liberal political philosophy. That first book instantly made him a national figure. In 1955, he borrowed $100,000 from his wealthy father and began his own magazine, the National Review, dedicated to crafting a winning alternative to New Deal liberalism.

     Alone, he forged a conservative movement, driving from its ranks the kooks, the oddballs, the anti-Semitics, the isolationists, the John Birchers, and the lovers of Ayn Rand, giving his conservative movement a respected and philosophical edge that fully blossomed under Ronald Reagan. Consistently well-informed and constantly thinking, Bill Buckley was staunchly and unapologetically anti-Communist and anti-Socialist.

     In 1966, he started his own PBS talk show, Firing Line, and for decades, he interviewed America’s leaders and thinkers. His moderate tone, his civilized manners, and his charm and wit won over many potential enemies. An observer said of Bill Buckley, “He didn’t want to be unduly harsh or unfair, and he felt deeply hurt if something he wrote or said hurt someone personally.” This stands in vivid contrast with the shrill type of commentary we often hear from the media pundits today.

     He loved adventure, especially sailing his yacht across the Atlantic. With his wife Patricia, he loved entertaining people of all ages at their home on Park Avenue at 73^rd Street: both young college graduates and retired business leaders, giving each a chance to stand and say whatever. He taught himself to play the harpsichord. An observer said, “With everything he did, he was always doing something more.”       

     Above all else, Buckley loved words, especially long ones: he often claimed he was a sesquipedalian. He wrote 45 books, several of them best-selling mystery novels featuring the CIA agent Blanchford Oakes, as well as 5200 opinion columns. He gave an average of seventy speeches a year. Like his friend Alistair Cooke, he too made a great Masterpiece Theatre host.

      In 1963, he began one of his columns with a rhetorical question: “Have you noticed that the use of an unusual word sometimes irritates the reader to such a point that he will accuse the user of affectation?” His long words truly annoyed and irritated many.

     It is sad but true that Buckley’s conservative movement is now faltering under the guise of George W. Bush’s leadership. In July of 2004, Buckley wrote that if “I had known back then in February of 2003 what we know now I would not have counseled war against Iraq.”

     More than fifty years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., said, “The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers,” and their conservative opponents. And yet, as one commentator has pointed out, “today with the occupation of Iraq, we have a supposedly conservative administration that has assumed the most daunting and expensive social engineering project in U.S. history, and after nearly five years, there is no end in sight.”

     Alistair Cooke referred to Buckley as the “lover of the last word.” And yet Bill Buckley often admitted that he suffered from “en espirit d’escalier,” a French phrase to describe that which you wish you had said by way of a devastating retort; “Typically it is a sunburst that hits you as you reach the bottom of the staircase.”

     After decades of smoking took his beloved wife Patricia last April, emphysema from smoking cigars did the same to William F. Buckley, Jr, an American sunburst that had reached the bottom of his staircase.

NINE WORLD WARS

by William H. Benson

February 21, 2008

     In Europe, it was named the Seven Years’ War, because it lasted from 1756 until 1763, but in America, it was the French and Indian War, because the English colonists and the British redcoats fought mainly the French and the Indians.

     In 1753 the Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, commissioned George Washington, a young Virginian, then only twenty-one but quite tall and muscular, to head west into the Ohio River Valley and order the French to evacuate the region.

     The English colonists in Virginia had claims upon 800,000 acres of the strategic valley, but the French—Canadians and their Iroquois allies—were drifting south from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River into the Ohio region. There they had constructed forts, trapped for furs, and claimed Ohio for the King of France.

     Thus, both European powers, the British and the French, were marching toward another confrontation, another war, this time for a prize—the disputed Ohio River Valley, and in a larger sense, all of North America.

     George Washington, born on February 22, 1732, did as Dinwiddie had instructed him, but Washington discovered that his words were not going to force the French to budge, let alone evacuate. The next year he returned with 150 Virginia militiamen, and his troops opened fire—the first shots of a fourth world war.

     British redcoats and English colonial militiamen fought the French on land and sea in a gigantic death struggle to decide who would own North America. William Pitt, the British leader in London, threw the entire weight of the British army and navy, and its treasury against the French. When the English General, James Wolfe, crushed the French general Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, England drove the French empire off the continent.

     Thus, English is the dominant language of North America, rather than French.   

     Scholars identify nine world wars, beginning with King William’s War, 1689-1697, and ending with World War II, 1941-1945. All of these world wars resulted in a fierce struggle upon the world’s oceans and upon the soil of two hemispheres—Europe and North America. The American people, whether as British subjects or American citizens, were unable to stay out of a single one of these nine wars. Neutrality was illusory.

     In the first four wars, the British fought the French. In the fifth world war—the American Revolution—it was the British colonists, led by George Washington, who fought the British, but Washington probably would not have defeated the British without the assistance of the French army, and especially her navy.

     The sixth war was the fallout that resulted from the French Revolution—the beheading of King Louis XVI, the fall of the French aristocracy, and the creation of the French republic. Napoleon’s bloody sweep across Europe that began in 1803 brought on the seventh world war. In the United States, it became known as the War of 1812 when Great Britain attacked Washington D.C., even torching the White House.

     The eighth and ninth wars, World Wars I and II, pitted the British, French, Americans, and Russians on one side against the Germans and the other Axis powers on the other.

     Today, February 21, marks the 92^nd anniversary of the beginning of arguably the worst battle of the worst of the nine world wars: the Battle of Verdun during World War I. Germany’s High Command decided early in 1916 that they would attack the French position at the town of Verdun in eastern France and thus clear a path to Paris. The French forces, though badly outnumbered, would not yield, and when the battle ended on December 15, there were 304,000 soldiers killed or missing. The worst of the worst.

     The following year the Americans, under General “Black Jack” Pershing, entered the war, and effectively determined the outcome in favor of the Allies.

     Last week Newsweek wrote, “World War I has no national monument. No iconic images. And only one soldier is still alive.” The one solitary surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, Frank Woodruff Buckles, turned 107 this month.

     England, France, America—enemies at times and allies at others. Five years ago next month, England’s Tony Blair sided with the U.S. President, George Bush, in his decision to attack Iraq, but France’s people and government wisely chose to sit this one out.

CITIES

by William H. Benson

February 7, 2008

     Cities across the globe attract millions of new immigrants each year. Some of these new arrivals find a much better life than they could have experienced should they have stayed in their rural native hinterland. For others though, the city grinds them up, pushing them into urban poverty, into the ghetto, where life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Some find hope; others are swallowed up in hopelessness and despair.

     The decisions that emanate from certain cities impact people’s lives around the globe. A rumor originating in Washington D.C. is magnified manifold until it is heard in Asia, Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. All concerned U.S. citizens seem to develop an ear that is tuned to the machinations coming out of Washington. Art, the publishing business, and the garment industry all revolve around New York City. Hollywood, California boasts of the film industry.

     Certain people are associated with a particular city. Benjamin Franklin found his fortune in Philadelphia, and then could afford to live for years in London and Paris. Bill and Hillary Clinton were Little Rock, Arkansas residents until they changed their address to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. for eight years, and then they moved to New York City. Baghdad belonged to Saddam Hussein for decades, as did Moscow to Joseph Stalin.

     Think of Salt Lake City, and you think of Brigham Young. Harry Truman had Independence, Missouri. Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, Georgia. Richard Nixon often escaped the Oval Office for San Clemente. After college, Ronald Reagan left his native Illinois and adopted Hollywood for his own.

     With the expansion of professional sports, we tend today to associate a city with their football, basketball, or baseball teams. Denver is the home of the Broncos and the Rockies. Los Angeles owns both the Raiders, formerly of Oakland, and also the Rams. Philadelphia claim the Eagles, Pittsburg the Steelers, and Green Bay the Packers. Boston has the Red Sox, but all of New England claims the Patriots.

     We know those cities’ coaches and players, those of today and of yesterday. Denver had Dan Reeves and John Elway. Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr found fame and fortune in a northern Wisconsin city called Greenbay, and Chicago had a Refrigerator.

     The name of a city can signify much more than a professional sports team though. One day the Greek mathematician Archimedes was absorbed in thought over a mathematical diagram he was sketching in the sand. So intent was he that he failed to hear the approach of a Roman soldier who told him to desist his drawing. Because he did not instantly obey, the Roman soldier killed Archimedes. That tale, true or not, encapsulates the difference between the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, between Athens and Rome.

     Athens represented the pursuit of the good life: beauty, art, sculpture, drama, literature, philosophy. Rome, on the other hand, represented political power: the sword, war, and brutally crushing any and all opposition. “Pay your taxes and keep the peace,” was Rome’s constant threat, “or else.”

     If Rome was to the far left of Athens, (both geographically and culturally) to the far right was Jerusalem, the home of the ancient Hebrews. In this city, the emphasis was upon worship, finding the proper form and duty, something that the ancient Greeks and Romans gave only occasional attention.

     Today’s world-class cities fascinate modern men and women: London, Tokyo, and New York City each have their own culture, their own aura. They excel at creating their own kind of citizen, a man or a woman who loves to live in such a megalopolis, capable above all else of riding the subways and fighting the crowds.

     Next Tuesday is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Save for his childhood and the Presidency, he lived his adult life in Springfield, Illinois. It was there in that town that he explored the ideas and then put them into the words that would propel him into national prominence and eventually put him into the White House in Washington D.C., the nation’s capital, a city.  

THE NUMBER VS. THE WORD

by William H. Benson

January 24, 2008

     “Science is vastly more important than art, hands down,” so said a prominent writer in his most recent book. At first glance, and in light of what science and mathematics has accomplished over the past century, it appears that he is probably correct. Yet, I would contend that the liberal arts also deserve a prominent place in our lives.

     The numbers that live within the sciences and businesses are important, life-changing, the very bases for our technological breakthroughs. Without a working knowledge of mathematics, job hunters are at a serious disadvantage, virtually disabled and unable to compete for the better jobs within the workforce.

     But the words and ideas that make up our arts—literature, philosophy, theology, law, journalism, history, and psychology—are essential, a necessary component of our lives. Without words, without language, and the bodies of learning that words inhabit, we would live very poor lives indeed. I think it unwise to place the world of science and numbers superior to that of arts and words, or vice versa, for it seems that one compliments the other.

     We live in a world that includes both sets of knowledge—the number and the word, the equation and the sentence, the theorem and the paragraph, the graph and the explanatory footnote. There is number dexterity, and then there is word dexterity. Quantification is a necessary skill, but so too is qualification—the number’s explanations and meanings. Grade school students may groan, but math story problems incorporate both words and numbers, and adults daily apply numerical skills to their lives.

     Few people have successfully circumnavigated and made outstanding contributions in both worlds. Offhand, I can think of only two—Blaise Pascal and Pythagoras—both mathematicians and both philosophers.

     Numbers fascinated the ancient Greek mathematicians, men such as Pythagoras, who believed that numbers were austere, full of meaning and mysticism. They believed that all of mathematics and all science could be explained by numbers. A distinguished physicist once said, “An equation is the most serious and important thing in mathematics.” We are all richer because some brilliant minds of the past discovered equations, formulated theorems, and laid down algebraic and geometrical principles.

      Numbers do a great job of measuring the world about us, of identifying trends and projecting them into the future, defining the dimensions of objects within the natural world, and a myriad other tasks.

     But numbers do a very poor job in certain areas, such as sketching our own internal worlds. Human beings live in their thoughts, images, imaginations, dreams, emotions, and hopes, and outsiders are often in the dark as to what people are truly like on the inside, “in those places,” Charles Dickens said, “where the meanings live.” Only words and stories can even begin to diagram a human being’s internal software.

     We live in the Great Information Age. Information is in abundance, at our fingertips, easily and freely obtainable, in the form of graphs, tables, bar charts, and statistics. What is rare is “meaning” behind much of that information. Only a word person can provide that meaning or the explanation.

     Lee Iacoca once said, “There were a lot of guys a lot smarter than I was. They were engineers, design architects with lots of technical skill, numbers guys, and yet I surpassed all of them. I had something they didn’t—the ability to speak, to persuade, to convince, to lead, and to manage.”

     A student once asked the author James Michener what she should study at college, and he replied, “Unless I had extraordinary aptitude in the sciences, I’d stick with liberal arts every time. The pay isn’t as good. The jobs aren’t waiting when you graduate. But forty years from now the scientists in your class will be scientists. And the liberal arts men will be governing the world.”