PRESIDENT’S DAY

 by William H. Benson

February 22, 2007 

      The Founding Fathers listed the duties of the President in Sections 2 and 3 of Article II of the Constitution.  “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy.”  “He shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons.”  “He shall have Power, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”  “He shall appoint ambassadors.”

     “He shall from time to time give the Congress Information of the State of the Union.”  “He shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.”  And then at the end of Section III they insisted that, “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.”

     Once can see that the President’s duties are not detailed nor numerous, almost vague.  In fact, the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention struggled more with the method of selecting the President—the Electoral College—than with delineating duties.

    Forty-two men have served as President of the United States.  Some, such as Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, proved dismal failures, due to the financial scandals committed by their advisors.  Others distinguished themselves, men such as Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, the two Roosevelt’s, Truman, and Reagan.

     The most embarrassed of the forty-two was James Madison who fled the White House as the British stormed and then torched Washington D.C. during the War of 1812.  From a hilltop, he looked behind his coach to see the smoke rising from the Executive Mansion, a most ignominious moment.

     The only other time that Washington was attacked was, not during Lincoln’s Presidency during the Civil War which was one of Lincoln’s real fears, but on 9-11-2001 during George W. Bush’s first year in office.

     The laziest President was not Ronald Reagan, as he was so accused, but his hero, Calvin Coolidge, who it was reported slept twelve to fourteen hours out of twenty-four hours, and even more on slow days when he would catch an afternoon nap.

     The two most successful Presidents in terms of achievements were those who faced the biggest challenges: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Lincoln watched the nation split into two nations because of his election as the Republican candidate.  He then was required to fight a four-year war that spilled the nation’s blood.

     FDR stared directly into the face of an economic tornado, the Great Depression, and then just as he was seeing some promise of hope, he faced two new challenges: Hitler and the Nazi regime in Europe and the Japanese empire in the Pacific.  Could anything have been worse for those two Presidents?

    The wealthiest President was probably John F. Kennedy, due to his father’s money.  The two Roosevelt’s—Theodore and Franklin—came from old money out of the Dutch along the Hudson River north of New York City.  The poorest of the poor was probably Lincoln, who pulled himself out of the desperate conditions he found himself in as a youngster growing up in the wilds of frontier Kentucky.

     Two Presidents were impeached—Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton—but in the resulting Senate trial neither were convicted.  A third—Richard Nixon—resigned rather than suffer an embarrassing impeachment and trial due to his coverup in the Watergate scandal.  Historians now agree that Nixon should have stayed, fought, and had his day in court, which is what Clinton did.

     The most thoroughly liked of the Presidents during their era were Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan.  The most detested were Lincoln because of the Civil War, Truman because of the Korean War, Lyndon B. Johnson because of the Vietnam War, Nixon because of Watergate, and Carter and Clinton mainly because they were from poor families from the South—Georgia and Arkansas.

     The two most incompetent Presidents were Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, the fourteenth and fifteenth Presidents.  Neither did much to stem the drift toward a disunion and war.  They passed it on to Lincoln to sort out the mess and reunite the states.

     Dwight Eisenhower would get my vote as the most bland of the Presidents.  He ran the Executive office as if he was managing a country club, more anxious to get out on the golf course than pursue a path of leadership in the post World War II era.

     Certainly, the most excitable of the Presidents was Theodore Roosevelt.  A British ambassador once remarked, “one has to remember that this President is only about six years old.”

     George Washington did at least two things right: he appointed Thomas Jefferson as his Secretary of Foreign Affairs, and Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of Treasury.  They were the nation’s two thoroughbreds, far more capable and intelligent than the President.  The difficulty was that they each disliked the other.  

     One President, Grover Cleveland, served two terms, and not consecutive, and so he became the twentieth and twenty-second Presidents.

     Some men never did become President and probably should have.  In this category I would include: John Jay, Henry Clay, Roger Tawney, Stephen Douglas, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

LINCOLN AND GENIUS

by William H. Benson

February 8, 2007

     A week ago on Sixty Minutes, Morley Safer interviewed Daniel Tammet, a twenty-eight-year old autistic savant living in Kent, England.  Daniel holds the European record for memorizing pi, all 22,514 digits, both forwards and backwards.  He then recited them over the course of five hours on March 14, 2004 at a museum in Oxford, UK, as part of a public charity challenge.

     Daniel has suffered from epilepsy since the age of three, and somehow this handicap gave him a special affinity for numbers.  He said, “When I looked at the numbers I ‘saw’ images.  It felt like a place I could go where I really belonged.  I would sit on the floor in my bedroom and just count.  I did notice that time was passing.”

     He claims now that he experiences numbers as colors or sensations and that they have textures.  Each number has its own unique shape and feel, and he can “sense” whether a number is prime or composite and “see” results of calculations as landscapes in his mind.  To him the number 289 is ugly, but the number 333 is beautiful.  He actually drew a watercolor of pi.

     Daniel’s skill with numbers is matched with that in languages.  In addition to English, he speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, and Esperanto.  When challenged to learn Icelandic in a week, he did, and was then interviewed on Iceland’s television news.  He now is creating his own language, Manti, which his own personal exploration of the power of words and sounds and their inter-relationship.

     For all of his gifts, he suffers from certain disabilities: he cannot drive a car, tell his left hand from his right, or remember people’s faces.  What he will remember are the details of a person, such as the number of stitches in Morley Safer’s shirt, the color of his shirt and jacket, the date and day of the week of his birth, what day they met, etc.

     Daniel recently met Kim Peek, the savant whom Dustin Hoffman recreated for his character Rainman.  What they share in common is their love for books.  Daniel’s favorite book is the dictionary, and Peek’s is the phone book.  Where Daniel memorizes definitions, Peek memorizes names, addresses, and phone numbers.

     Genius is an overworked term today.  It is difficult to determine where simply “talented” leaves off and true “genius” begins.  It is more precise where genius ends and savant begins.  The literary critic Harold Bloom wrote, “Our confusions about standards for genius are now institutionalized confusions, so that all judgments as to the distinction between talent and genius are at the mercy of the media.”  In other words, we defer to the journalists to separate the two.

     According to Harold Bloom, the literary geniuses, those authors of our western canon, possess that uncanny ability to make “the reader identify with what she or he feels is a greatness that can be joined to the self, without violating the self’s integrity.  It is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary.”  Truly, we read to discover the extraordinary, or as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “I read for the lustres.”

     Our nation’s literary geniuses are few in number: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Thoreau, and Emerson.  Franklin’s genius was his marketing skill—first his newspaper, then himself, and finally his nation.  In the formulation of political theory, none have exceeded Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and  Jonathan Edwards is our nation’s sole theological thinker.

     Monday, February 12 is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  A savant he was not; a savvy politician he was.  His literary talent with a pen equaled and surpassed the other Presidents, even Jefferson’s.  If he approached the level of genius at any point, it was on the subject of morality, especially on the issue of slavery.

     His fellow lawyers on the legal circuit often remarked upon Lincoln’s brooding silences when astride his horse, and they wondered what had consumed Lincoln.  Like Daniel Tammet of today, Lincoln had gone to a place where he belonged, and he did not notice that time was passing. 

BILLY GRAHAM

by William H. Benson

January 25, 2007

     In September of 1936, sixty years ago, a North Carolina farmer drove his seventeen-year old son west across the Appalachians to Cleveland, Tennessee to enroll as a freshman in Bob Jones College.  The lad had a dream of maybe someday becoming a preacher, but in his dorm room he stared dumbfounded at the sign on the wall: “Griping Not Tolerated!”

     Soon, he discovered that Bob Jones College was about rules, authority, and discipline, not at all what this North Carolina native son had expected.  He had to learn first that Bob Jones, the college’s founder and head, restricted the boys’ and the girls’ social life.  Dating was governed by the dean’s scheduling book.

     It was worse in the classroom in that instructors offered only one interpretation, Bob Jones’s.  No questioning, discussion, or give and take was permitted.  “Dr. Bob” often stated publicly that his institution had never been wrong.

     One student named Wendell Phillips was so frustrated that he packed his bags and left for the Florida Bible Institute, east of Tampa Bay.  He wrote letters back to Bob Jones urging the students there to join him in the south and abandon Bob Jones.

     The North Carolina farm boy turned eighteen in November, and the cold and damp in Tennessee left him suffering from the flu.  Feeling that he was not fitting in, he scheduled an appointment with Bob Jones and told him of his dissatisfaction with the school and that he was considering going to Florida.

     Without hesitation, Bob Jones said, “If you leave and throw your life away at a little country Bible school, the chances are you’ll never be heard of.  At best all you could amount to would be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks.”  Decades later the student still felt the pain of those words:  “His voice booming, he pronounced me a failure and predicted only more failure ahead.  I left his office disillusioned and dejected.”

     The student’s name was Billy Graham; Bob Jones could not have been more wrong.  Billy went to Florida in January and ran across the golf course again and again, “like an animal that had been in captivity and had finally got its freedom.” 

     What was it that motivated Billy Graham to become the evangelist to the world?  What was it that drove him away from his wife and children repeatedly for long periods of time?  I suppose that there were a variety of factors, but I think that Bob Jones’s cruel words played a crucial role.  Who knows, but without them, Billy Graham may not have driven himself so relentlessly to build his own global organization.

     What motivates people best?  Warm encouraging uplifting words or the hostile angry verbal assault?  There is no clear answer.  People may need both, but in moderation.

     We each have differing levels of ambition, and the crucible of life—the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes—can crush out what we have, or it can whip it up into a potent mixture.  One never knows how a man or a woman will react.  Human character grows, expands, and develops as we slam into immovable blocks, people like Bob Jones.  

     What was it that drove Washington on to keep the British from destroying his pitiful army?  What was it that drove Lincoln on for four years to win what seemed an un-winnable war?  Either of them could have given up, quit, and surrendered at a low moment, but neither would think or do so.  Defeat was not in their make-up.

     What is it that drives our current President?  In the face of Congressional and public opposition to sending in more troops, he will not yield. “Not until we get the job done, will we leave Iraq,” he says.  In the long run he may be right, or he may be utterly wrong.  One wonders what happened in his past that has brought him to this position of such unwavering stubbornness.  Perhaps, and it is just a guess, there was a Bob Jones in his past.    

COMMON SENSE

by William H. Benson

January 11, 2007

     In last Sunday’s New York Times “Book Review” section, P. J. O’Rourke reviewed Adam Smith’s massive work on economics The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776.  The publisher’s idea was to give an often-cited but rarely-read classic to a current writer who would then solidify that classic’s major ideas into two or three hundred pages.  The first was P. J. O’Rourke’s On “The Wealth of Nations”, and is to be soon followed by the Koran and Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

     This publishing venture is an extension of that long and growing list of “The Idiot’s Guide to (whatever)“ and also “(whatever) for Dummies.”  Marketing gurus know that people want to learn but that they do not want to devote the time or energy required to thoroughly know a subject by reading and rereading it and by working at it with a passion.  People falsely believe that the abridged version is the shortcut to accomplishment.

     But certain tomes cry out for a quicker ending: Moby Dick, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamozov, and The Tales of the Genji.  An abbreviated format of those heavyweights would catch more readers.  As usual, brevity is in short supply these days, especially when one considers that publishers release some 10,000 novels every year in this country alone.

     Quality is a different matter.  It is like television channels: dozens to choose from, but nothing worth watching.  Christian Wilman, the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote in an editorial entitled “In Praise of Rareness,” “The more respect you have for poetry, the less of it you will find adequate to your taste and needs.”  The same can be said for prose.

     But certain other works should not be filtered through a modern writer.  Every American should read for her or himself Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau and James Michener and Willa Cather and a host of superior American writers.

     And absolutely no person should stand as mediator between the reader and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words:  “There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion. . . . Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.  With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

     Cut those words and they would bleed, a phrase that Emerson himself could say.

     Another work that every American should read on their own, without deciphering is Common Sense.  On January 10, 1776 the first edition of Thomas Paine’s shout for independence arrived on the streets of Philadelphia, and soon the British colonists in America were considering revolting against Parliament in England and declaring their independence from the British crown.

     The historian Paul Johnson said that Thomas Paine was “a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler, and in a later age he would have become a trade union leader or a back-room lawyer.”  Above that, Paine had the talent of writing at lightning speed in a white heat a work of political philosophy that is still highly readable.  An edition is only 56 pages long: in this case, the shortened edition is the actual edition.

     Paine wrote: “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that every lived. . . . But, admitting that we were all of English descent, what does it amount to?  Nothing. . . . . Europe is too thickly planted with Kingdoms to be long at peace, and whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power, the trade of America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain.”  And so he argues for revolution and independence.

     When common sense steps forward and makes an appearance, it is usually in an abbreviated form, a rare thing worthy of praise. 

WORDS

by William H. Benson

December 28, 2006

     At the encouragement of a family member, I slowed down for two hours last Friday night to watch a video: Alkeelah and the Bee, and strangely enough, I liked it.  It is the fictional story of Akeelah Anderson, an 11-year-old African-American girl with a talent for spelling words.  She attends Crenshaw Middle School in Los Angeles and wins the school’s spelling bee.  She goes to the regional contest and wins that.  She then goes to Washington D.C. to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee Contest.

     In the process of preparing, she meets a UCLA college professor who coaches her and who tells her, “Akeelah, you can win the national contest, for you have a brain like a sponge.”  She makes friends with the other spellers, and she discovers that her family and friends want to help her succeed.

     In the process of preparing for the national contest, she memorizes the spelling of five thousand words, such as xanthosis—the yellow discoloration of cancerous tumors; argillaceous—of or relating to clay; ratiocination—the process of exact thinking; prestidigitation—sleight of hand; pulchritude—physical comeliness; and logorrhea, excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness. 

     Although Akeelah and the other national spellers reside in a verbal universe quite apart and superior from that of the common person, human beings build much of their lives upon language, and upon its building blocks, the individual words.  Words surround us, define us, determine us, emanate from us, strike us, soothe us, and comfort us.  With assistance from facial expressions and body gestures, words communicate any number of moods and ideas.

     Words have the talent of leaving traces of themselves as they course through our brains, and these traces we call memories.  It seems to me that poetry or lyrics set to music burn even deeper into our brains than without the music.  We can hear a song after the passage of decades, and it stimulates a series of associations, memories, emotions, and attachments.  A radio station in Denver plays music from the 70’s for commuters on the way to work, and they call it the “morning glow.”

     Here it is Christmas, and we reflect upon the shepherds standing upon those Judean hillsides caring for their flocks.  They heard the angel’s message, and then they heard the heavenly host singing.  From the perspective of the shepherds, the angels were the superior beings, capable of greater movement and possessing a deeper insight and knowledge of a spiritual universe quite separate from ordinary men and women.

     But from the perspective of the sheep, it was the shepherds who were the superior beings, for it is they who have the greater movement, and they have language and words, communication tools that the dumb and brutish sheep cannot even dream of possessing.

     Logos was the Greek word for Word, and it referred to the Greek philosophy that reason was the controlling principle in the universe.  Christian writers then attached an additional meaning to Logos: that it was the divine wisdom which manifested itself in the acts of creating, governing, and redeeming the world.  In the dictionary you can find “Logos” immediately after logorrhea.

     At one point in the movie, Alkeelah’s coach tells her: “The question we should ask of ourselves is not ‘Who am I to believe that I am brilliant, talented, and gorgeous?’, but rather ‘Who am I not to believe that I am brilliant, talented, and gorgeous?’”  Because men, women, boys, and girls possess words, we all dwell in this Word, in this Logos.

     The verbal or literary is a way of conceiving the universe, as is pure mathematics, and yet each have their limits.  The literary critic Northrop Frye wrote, “Whenever we construct a system of thought to unite earth with heaven, the story of the Tower of Babel recurs: we discover that after all we can’t quite make it, and that what we have in the meantime is a plurality of languages.”  In other words we end up with “logorrhea”.   

WAR AND PEACE

by William H. Benson

December 14, 2006

     The calendar tells us that we are midway between Pearl Harbor and Christmas, between War and Peace, between an attack upon a Pacific Island and Advent.

     The history of the world constantly shifts between war and peace.  The one constant seems to be war, punctuated by fleeting moments of a fretful peace.  War disrupts people’s lives whether they are the aggressor, or the recipient, or the observer, who looks on amazed at how war can transform people into grotesque beings. 

     The twentieth-century seemed to be one of constant war across the Pacific, beginning first at the turn of the century in the Philippines against a guerrilla movement.  

     And then against the Japanese empire, the US relied upon a strategy that the historian Paul Johnson called the Jupiter-complex.  The pilot seated within a cabin at the front of an aircraft carrying bombs is like the Roman god seated upon the clouds who hurls down thunderbolts to strike those unsuspecting villagers wandering about upon the ground.

     The strategy worked only to a degree.  On Okinawa and Iwo Jima the Japanese army dug itself into the ground, into tunnels, a move that rendered the enormous firepower dropping from the sky ineffective.  It was the Army and the Marines, ground troops, who ferreted out the enemy from those tunnels with flame-throwers and hand grenades and ultimately secured those islands.

     The two atomic bombs ended the War in the Pacific, and the Americans and the Japanese cooperated in rebuilding Japan into a democracy and a capitalist country.

     In Korea during the last two years of that war, American jets carpet bombed North Korea daily, reducing the country to rubble.  One reporter said, “Every city was a collection of chimneys.  I saw thousands of chimneys and that was all.”  And so the North Koreans under Kim Il Jong have built a series of enormous underground train stations that can serve someday as bomb shelters.

     But against North Vietnam President Johnson unleashed unprecedented numbers of bombs.  The historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, “First, headlines proclaimed that America had dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II.  By 1967 it was more bombs than in the European Theater.  Then more in the whole of World War II.  Finally, by 1969, more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, North and South, than on all targets in the whole of human history.”

     The US military failed in its venture to build a democratic nation in Vietnam, and  certain lessons can be drawn from that failure: that firepower does not always prevail; that in the war between machine and men, men can win; and that the power to destroy is not the power to control.  “We had to destroy the city to save it,” said one officer.

     President Johnson had wanted to bring democracy and prosperity to Southeast Asia, and instead he had only brought death and destruction.

     Stephen Ambrose said that “Americans should not be engaged in nation-building.  It is costly and worse, unworkable.”

     Walter Lippmann wrote, “America can exert its greatest influence in the outer world by demonstrating that she can solve the problems of modernity.  Example, and not intervention and firepower, has been the historic instrument of American influence on mankind.”

     The Hebrew prophet Joel called for war.  “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”  But the voice for peace argues that we should pound those swords and spears back into plowshares and pruning hooks.  Bomb shells gutted of their explosive innards and cut up would make interesting bathtubs or furniture.

     The objectives for attacking Iraq were immediately completed: we separated Saddam Hussein from his WMD’s that like a ghost had never even existed.  But another goal snuck in the back door—that of nation-building, converting Iraq into a democracy, a policy that has proven costly, unworkable, and a failure.

     At the Constitutional Convention, Pierce Butler urged his fellow delegates to “follow the example of Solon, who gave the Athenians not the best government he could devise, but the best they would receive.”  Americans in Iraq should do the same.