PALESTINE

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2007

     By the late 1940s, the British were driven to distraction as to how to solve the problem of Palestine, for both the Arabs and the Jews were contending for ownership of this land. The Arabs, or Palestinians, had lived there for centuries and had legitimate claims to the land. The Jews were recent immigrants, but they claimed that it was their ancient homeland. The problem seemed insoluble.

     It was the British who had encouraged the Jews to immigrate to Palestine in the first place. In 1917 in order to gain support for its war effort against Germany, the British had issued the Balfour Declaration, which was a promise to the Jews of Europe and elsewhere that they would have a new national homeland in Palestine someday. The Jews responded by expanding their Zionist movement. 

     But as the Jews immigrated in ever increasing numbers into Palestine, the Arabs harbored feelings of resentment, and rightfully so. After all, they were losing their land to the Jews. The Arabs demanded that the British restrict Jewish immigration, and the British complied throughout the 1930s. Jewish militants resorted to violence to ensure their foothold in Palestine.

     By 1947 the British wished to wash their hands of what seemed an insolvable problem—two very different peoples claiming the same land, and so the British turned Palestine over to the United Nations. On November 29, 1947 UN delegates in the General Assembly voted 33 to 13 to divide Palestine into two states: an Arab state, and a Jewish state—Israel. The Jews agreed to this partition, but the Arabs refused.

     On May 14, 1948 Israel declared its independence, because that was the date that the British mandate over Palestine officially ended. And all parties understood that war was imminent. The next day five surrounding Arab nations—Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt—all attacked this fledgling new nation of Israel. It was a war for independence. Some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, fearful of being caught in the middle of this war, fled their homes and lands, intending on returning after the war ended.

     By 1949 Transjordan, later renamed Jordan, controlled and had then annexed most of the territory west of the Jordan River, the West Bank; the United Nations’ delegates had designated this territory for the new Palestinian Arab state. Egypt retained the Gaza Strip. The Israelis had fought valiantly and had retained control of the territory the UN had intended for them and had taken additional lands, those intended for the new Arab state.    

     The Palestinians were suddenly, seemingly overnight, a displaced people, refugees living without land, without access to their homes. And they have remained in this position for decades, boiling with resentment at the injustices heaped upon them and their helplessness. Attempts to create their own government have met with a series of obstacles. This is a problem that must be solved someday.

     The Middle East now today has a new refugee problem—the people of Iraq, and their numbers dwarf even those of the Palestinians, half a century before. The New York Times reported last Sunday that “the overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million.” The civil war between Shiites and Sunnis have driven out all classes of people out of Iraq and into places in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey. It has been an exodus out of Iraq’s battlefields into shelter found in exile.

     The Bush government has only just begun to grapple with the question of the Iraqi refugees. John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state in the Bush administration, said that the refugees have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam. . . . Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

What that means is that the United States has passed the task of dealing with Iraq’s refugees over to Iraq’s neighbors.

     The Palestinians of a half a century ago, and the Iraqis of today are both refugees, and both are in search of a solution that seems not quickly or easily forthcoming.      

SCIENCE WRITING

by William H. Benson  

May 3, 2007

     Great writers of science need not be scientists, although some certainly were, such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, as well as the paleontologist Jay Gould. But my vote for the best modern-day science writer is Bill Bryson, an American who writes on a multitude of subjects, one of which happens to be science. Bryson married an English girl, Cynthia, and they have chosen to live in England.

     In 2003 Bryson published what became a bestseller, A Short History of Nearly Everything. In less than five hundred pages, he presents an overview of the entire body of scientific knowledge accumulated by thousands of scientists over the last four centuries. He writes in a style that is readable and yet engaging, even stimulating.

     He writes on the formation of the universe, on the Milky Way galaxy, on the stars, the solar system, the sun, the planets, the comets, the meteors, the elements, the atoms, and on the myriad forms of life on planet Earth: plants, animals, fungi, and the several forms of life on micro level. He made trips around the world to visit museums and interview living scientists, he read a number of books, and he covers a lot in a short amount of time.

     Bryson tells in chapter 13 about the crater located at Manson, Iowa, ninety miles northwest of Des Moines. Sometime in the distant past, a rock that weighed perhaps ten billion tons and traveling at perhaps two hundred times the speed of sound slammed into the earth at the point where Manson, Iowa now sits.  The resulting hole was three miles deep and more than twenty miles across.

     “The Manson impact,” Bryson writes, “was the biggest thing that has ever occurred on the mainland United States. Of any type. Ever. The crater it left behind was so colossal that if you stood on one edge you would only just be able to see the other side on a good day. It would make the Grand Canyon look quaint and trifling.”

     But then, after 2.5 million years of ice sheets which ground and scraped and dumped rich glacial deposits into it, the crater filled in and left a landscape that “is as flat as a tabletop. Which is of course why no one has ever heard of the Manson crater.” The occasional visitor to the site is disappointed.

     The latter half of the book he devotes to Earth’s different life forms.

     One of the most interesting is the trilobite, a prehistoric arthropod—three-bodied with a head, thorax and abdomen, like insects and crustaceans—that lived everywhere on the planet for about 300 million years, which is twice the span of the dinosaurs. The trilobites were mostly the size of beetles, but some were as big as crabs, and they included some 60,000 species.

     In the Natural History Museum in London stand a series of file cabinets with drawers filled with trilobites in fossilized form, some twenty thousand specimens. Richard Fortey of the Museum said, “It seems like a big number, but you have to remember that millions upon millions of trilobites lived for millions upon millions of years in ancient seas, so twenty thousand isn’t a huge number.”

     Bryson writes, “As with all extinct creatures, there is a natural temptation to regard them (the trilobites) as failures, but in fact they were among the most successful animals ever to live.”

     But it is the microscopic life forms—the bacteria—that demands humans’ undivided attention. We tend to think that we can banish bacteria or kill them off through antibiotics and disinfectants. “Don’t you believe it, Bryson writes. “Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be. Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn’t survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make them usable again. . . . Microbes, such as algae, provide us with the air we breathe.”

     Craters that do not exist anymore because of the action of the ice ages, trilobites that lived for eons and then died, and bacteria who appear indestructible—all that and much more appear in Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything.         

CONNECTIONS

by William H. Benson

April 19, 2006

     Years ago I found a job working for a contractor who had a gift of expressing his thoughts in precise blue-collar language. For example, when he described a person he thought incredibly smart, he would say, “He’s forgotten more than most people ever learned.” And for people he considered ignorant, he delivered his choicer epithets.

     His connection between the reception of information, his formulated judgment of other people’s ideas or behavior, and his voiced opinion was immediate, as are most people’s. In an instant he connected thoughts.

      Five and a half years ago, the author and historian William Manchester announced that at age 79 he would not complete the third volume of The Last Lion, his biography of Winston Churchill. He said, “I can’t put things together. I can’t make the connections.”

     A writer’s greatest fear is the loss of the ability to connect ideas, for writers depend on their ability to draw lines from one dot to another, from one idea to another, to make those connections out of thin air, or out of no air.

1. L. Mencken suffered a stroke late in life and suddenly could no longer read nor write. He said that the date of the stroke was the day that he had died. The connections he had depended upon to write his columns and books had short-circuited.

     Scientists have determined that intelligence and skill and prowess is regulated by the depth of interaction between the nerve fibers and the myelin which covers those fibers. Nerve fibers act like switches, instantaneous, but then why does it take so long to learn a set of complex skills?

     Douglas Fields, a lab director at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, explained, “Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch. But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that’s what myelin is good at.” As the myelin thickens, the better it insulates, and the faster the signals travel.

     Of memory St. Augustine said, “All these things the great recesses, the hidden and unknown caverns of memory receive and store, to be retrieved and brought forth when needed, each entering by its own gate. Yet, the thing themselves do not enter, but only the images of the things perceived are there, ready to be recalled in thought. But how these images are formed, who can tell?”

     “Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who has ever sounded the depths of it?”

     The brain’s architecture includes this unlimited memory supply, but also the ability to believe, to judge, to discern who and what to trust, and to accept without question a set of religious beliefs. Some believe quickly; others not at all.

     Recently, three neo-atheists—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennet—have argued that “religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.” And yet certain scientists disagree, arguing instead that “religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during human history. Religious belief permeates all human cultures throughout all human history.” These scientists are convinced that religious belief was a necessary ingredient for our specie’s survival.

     Walter Isaacson has just written a new biography on Albert Einstein. At age 12 he decided that religion was propaganda. “It was a crushing impression,” he later wrote. In other words, his connection with religion failed. But he developed connections with other things. For example, he wondered what light would look like if you rode beside a light beam, and so his intellect led him to the special theory of relativity.

     Einstein was one individual who did forget more than most people ever learn, and Isaac Newton was another. It was said that he would awaken in the morning but then sit on the edge of his bed for hours because a storm of ideas was bombarding his mind. The connections were literally bouncing off each other.

POETRY

by William H. Benson

April 5, 2007

     Bill Clinton, when President, designated April as the National Poetry Month. He called it “a welcome opportunity to celebrate . . . the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today’s American poets.” Yes, indeed, our nation’s poets, especially those of the past, are a cloud, not of witnesses, but of “disturbers of the peace,” which is what Plato called them, and “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” which is what the poet Shelley called them.

      It seems that April and poetry belong together. It was usually in April, close to the end of the school year, that the English teachers would dust off their poetry books and try to teach us frightfully worrisome things like iambic pentameter and rhyme and alliteration, and a hundred other literary devices. Alas, the lessons often fell on deaf ears, for carefree school girls and energetic school boys normally do not pursue poetry with enthusiasm.

     And yet the young of America are not without poetry. They are inundated in it. They swim in it. They live their lives surrounded by it. They cannot get enough of it. It is piped into their heads through earplugs and ipods and other electronic gadgetry. It is lyrics, accompanied by electronically-produced music.

     Most of this poetry set to music is of little value, communicating nothing that can be called intelligent, laced with vulgarities, drowned out by the drums and guitars if not slurred by the vocalists, or nonsensical: “ABC. 123. Baby you and me.” And yet once people hear that music, they recognize the words and can recite them: they know poetry, but that of the popular kind.

      George Will, the Newsweek columnist, a month ago pointed out that February 27^th was the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the New England poet who wrote the familiar phrases: “Ships that pass in the night,” “footprints on the sands of time,” “the patter of little feet,” “Into each life some rain must fall,” “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” and “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Alas, Longfellow now belongs to those poets considered unpopular.

      And then there is Edgar Allan Poe who staked a claim on gloomy strangeness: “It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;—And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.” And who can ever extract from his or her mind Poe’s haunting words, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’”?

     And then there is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a dense multi-layered lengthy work that succeeds in captivating the American spirit: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with every-returning spring.”

      Robert Frost wrote of the simplest things. For example, late one evening he was riding in a carriage pulled by his horse, when he stopped to admire the “woods fill up with snow.” He wondered that his “horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near.” But then Frost concluded his short poem with the gentlest of words: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”  

     A good poem communicates much with a minimum of words. For example, A. H. Houseman in his I To My Perils described a pessimist: “The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, Of lovers’ meeting Or luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady, So I was ready When trouble came.”

     Longfellow, Poe, Whitman, Frost, and Houseman—along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—stand tall today as our nation’s poets, our literary treasure. They thought and saw that which others did not think or see. As Cezanne said of the artist Monet, “He is only an eye—but what an eye!”

by William H. Benson

March 22, 2007

     A fire broke out on the 8^th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s factory just off Washington Square in New York City at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 25, 1911. It was a beautiful spring day, and the employees—mostly Italian and East European Jewish girls, nineteen to twenty—were anxious for the weekend. They had worked six days that week, and normally they sent all the money they earned back to their homes in Europe to pay for others to cross the Atlantic. This was an opportunity, and only America offered it.

     The fire lasted eighteen minutes, but it was long enough for 146 women to die that day while those strolling around downtown New York City watched from below.

     A series of mistakes contributed to the tragedy. For five minutes, the owner of the factory tried to put out the fire, rather than sound the alarm. When he finally did, the workers rushed to the fire escape, but then it collapsed. One of the doors out of the 9^th floor had been locked intentionally to prevent theft, and the 250 workers on that floor could not escape quickly enough by the one open door. When the fire engine arrived and cranked up the ladder, the girls watched in horror as it extended only up to the sixth floor.

     Of the 146 girls who would die that day, 54 chose to jump to their deaths.

     This tragedy underscored the suffrage movement. Women were coming off the farms in America and going to work in the cities. Women found the popular shirtwaist or blouse when worn in combination with a skirt liberating, replacing the dress with its hoops, bustles, and corsets.

     Women in the workplace are today an accepted part of American life, but in 1911 it was a recent phenomenon. We sometimes forget the social progress made in this country.

      Sixty-three years before the Triangle factory fire, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had stated her Declaration of Sentiments at the Women’s Convention at Seneca Falls, New York:

     “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. . . . The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. . . .He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. . .  As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. . . . He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry.”

     More shocking were Stanton’s resolutions in the final section of the Sentiments:

     “Resolved, that woman is man’s equal, was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such. Resolved, that the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.”

     The 19^th Amendment, ratified in 1920, granted women the right to vote.   

     Then, on March 22, 1972 the Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the 27th, which read: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of gender.” Thirty-five states would ratify it, but that was still three short of the required 38, or ¾’s of the 50. Twelve states would not ever ratify it, and so in 1982 it failed ratification. This demonstrated that some Americans wanted an Equal Rights Amendment, but not quite enough to see it ratified.

     The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire brought into sharp focus the divisions between the American people: between immigrants and current residents, between different races, between employers and employees, and between men and women. As long as there are people, there will be differences, and those will contribute to divisions in the workplace.

     Women do belong in the workplace, and they have achieved many of the goals that came out of the Seneca Falls Convention, but women, as well as men, need instant fire alarms, solid fire escapes, and ladders that reach to the 9^th floor.  

CHINA

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2007

    Americans are bewildered by the rest of the world. Twenty years ago, Americans feared that Japan would swallow up America. These worries amaze us now, for Japan growth slowed in the mid-1980’s, “its feared dominance having dissolved into dreary ordinariness.”

     Today we are suspicious of China, for it has enjoyed double-digit annual economic growth over the past fifteen years, and one wonders how the Chinese can continue this phenomenal rate. “Is China now poised to turn the 21^st century into its own century?” They may, and then they may not. However, nearly all Sinologists have pointed out the potholes that the Chinese people and government face in this and the next decade.

     Most worrisome is the environmental damage that this rapid industrialization is creating. Hundreds of coal-burning electric power plants spew volumes of waste into the atmosphere, and the Chinese are building dozens more, “turning the Chinese landscape into a wasteland.” This damage is bound to cripple future economic growth.

     Will Hutton, a British journalist, in his book on China, The Writing on the Wall, argues that it is the authoritarian, anti-democratic Communist regime that is holding back its citizens from the Information Age. “The PC (personal computer) is incompatible with the C.P. (Communist Party).” Without a free press to counter and oppose the government leaders’ decisions, orderly change is difficult and corruption is rampant. People have little voice in the decisions that affect them, and no free press will take up their causes.

     Inconsistencies between the country’s economic and social progress are so apparent. Education falls far short of the demand that a rapidly-growing economy demands. The problem is especially acute in the vast poverty-stricken rural areas. The illiteracy rate in those rural regions may be as high as 11.55% of the adult population. Health-care is woefully inadequate, again most pronounced in the rural areas, as is the cultural opportunities, such as access to libraries and theatres.

     The unemployment rate in the cities and towns may be as low as 4.3%, but in those rural areas there may be some 150 million redundant rural workers who need to find employment but who do not have the skills required by modern industry.

     Environmental damage, a lack of a free press, a heavy-handed government, lack of education and health care, and unemployment are all major problems, but they are dwarfed by an even bigger and most immediate problem—the population explosion.

     In the late 1970’s the government instituted the one-child policy as a means to curb the ever-expanding population. Official census figures as of July of 2006 placed the Chinese population at 1,313,973,713, but unofficial figures estimate that it may actually be closer to 1.5 billion. Because of the one-child rule, parents may hide the second, third, and fourth child when the census worker arrives in the village to count noses.

     Because of the historical preference for boys, the Chinese now have 119 boys born for every 100 girls, when the average in other countries is only about 106 boys. With modern technology, Chinese parents have been able to identify the gender and then choose to abort, if it is a girl. The difficulty with this current boy/girl imbalance is that in fifteen years China may have 40 million lonely and unhappy bachelors.

     John King Fairbank, in his book The United States and China, wrote thirty-five years ago, “the rate of population increase seems to lock the Chinese people irrevocably into their struggle to increase production through conformity and at the expense of personal choice. Pressure of numbers is still the most grievous part of China’s inheritance. Every year famine waits around the corner. Like it or not, the Chinese populace will have to put up with some kind of centralized and dictatorial planning.”

     The China of today is an eye-opening miracle, but it will need a series of miracles to sustain it going forward. America, the rest of the world’s nations, and the Chinese government will have to deal with what will soon be two billion Chinese people.