READING AND WHY

by William H. Benson

November 30, 2006

     Today, November 30^th, marks the birthdays of three celebrated writers: Jonathan Swift in 1667, Mark Twain, in 1835, and Winston Churchill in 1874.

     Jonathan Swift, an English Protestant cleric living in Ireland, wrote a novel, Gulliver’s Travels, but primarily he wrote essays in which he displayed his satiric wit.  For example, in his essay The Battle of the Books, Swift told of a war in a library between the old books and the new books, between the classics of old and the modern books.  This reflected the actual quarrel then going on between the scholars who were proud to be modern and those who preferred the ancient thinkers.

     Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, wrote fiction.  But his best fiction—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—he lifted from his childhood experiences when growing up in Hannibal, Missouri.  In his later years, he tried to write his autobiography but became so muddled and confused about the facts that he made a jumble of it.  And so it is said that Clemens’s fiction was more autobiography, and that his autobiography was more fiction.

     In a speech, the Disappearance of Literature, Twain defined a classic as something that everybody wants to have read and yet nobody wants to read.

     Winston Churchill wrote history.  He would select a broad subject, much too large for a single text, and then write a series of volumes on that subject.  For example, he wrote the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking People and the six-volume The Second World War, and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.  

     An interesting question to ask is “which kind of writing is best to read?  Essay, fiction, history, religious, inspirational, scientific, technical, humorous?”  The obvious answer is that it depends upon a person’s tastes, preferences, and personal inclinations.  I prefer history and essay and biography.  Most modern readers prefer mysteries or romances.

     But a better question to ask is “why read anything?”  George Bernard Shaw said that “he who can does.  He who cannot teaches.”  A critic of reading might twist Shaw’s comment into “he who is does.  He who is not reads.”

     Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, recently wrote How to Read and Why in which he said, “It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. . . . We read frequently, if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.”

     Bloom then quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson who said that “the best books impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.”  And of books Emerson said, “I value them to make my top spin.”

     “Yet, “Bloom wrote, “the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional [Western] canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.”  A “difficult pleasure?”  To be found in reading?  Perhaps.

     Literate skill, letter writing, and the ability to read and then write are not as prized as one time.  “A childhood largely spent watching television yields to an adolescence with a computer, and the university receives a student unlikely to welcome the suggestion that we must endure [reading].”  In place of the deep reading of texts and the writing of term papers, our society presents us with forms dotted with blank spaces in which we drop words and numbers.

     When asked to construct a paragraph or even a sentence or two, some flinch at the request and beg for true/false, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and matching rather than the essay question.  And yet ours is a complex society, requiring a mastery of multiple texts and a tidal wave of information, and the talent to string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs to make sense of it all.

     With expansive reading, Harold Bloom also wrote, the pupil may restore her or his sense of irony, sensing that words may express something other than their literal meaning.  “Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another.”

     Swift’s essays, Twain’s fiction, and Churchill’s history.  They are all in the library, and they cost you nothing but your time.

REVOLUTION IN HUNGARY

by William H. Benson

November 16, 2006

     Josef Toth’s mother passed away in 1954, weeks after her return from a six-month prison confinement, courtesy of the AVO, Hungary’s state police.  She had spoken out against the Russians one evening while enjoying a casual meal with friends in her home, “Everywhere you look you see the Russian flag.  I long for the old Hungarian flag.”

     Somebody reported her to the AVO, and the next day two AVO agents arrived at her home and hauled Mrs. Toth away.

     Upon her return she assured her family that the AVO had done nothing to her, but then she fell sick, and it was obvious that it was caused from the exhaustion, starvation and torture she had endured in prison.  When she knew she was dying, she told her son Josef that she had been forced to stand on one leg for four hours every day.

     So begins The Bridges at Andau, James Michener’s history of the Hungarian Revolution, a revolt against the Soviets that failed.

     In the nations of post-World War II Eastern Europe, the communist parties operated in the shadow of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.  In Hungary the Chairman of the Communist Party was Matthias Rakosi, whose policies had ruined the economy and had produced widespread discontent.

     On October 23, 1956 students in Budapest, the capital, began demonstrating against the Russians’ control of Hungary.  News of their defiance spread quickly and disorder and violence erupted throughout the city.  The revolt spread, and the communist government collapsed.  By the end of October, the fighting had almost stopped, and a sense of normalcy began to return. 

     At first Krushchev, the Russian leader, said that he would permit the new government to reform the economy.  But then on Sunday morning, November 4, 1956, the Russian army rolled into Budapest.  From Gellert Hill, the highest point in the city, heavy artillery rained down shells in all directions.  The most ruthless foot soldiers in the Russian army, Mongols from central Asia, 140,000 in number, shot at anything that moved, out in the street or at a window or a door.

     In the attack called Operation Whirlwind there were some 4000 Russian tanks, jet planes, rockets and launchers, squads of flamethrowers, bazookas, walkie-talkies, armed jeeps, sub-machine guns, and seventeen Soviet divisions.  The students, writers, factory workers, and girls who dared to stand up to this Russian onslaught fought with homemade gasoline bombs. 

     They were annihilated, but not before a number of heroic battles.  Teen-aged girls discovered ways to kill a wounded tank by dousing it with gasoline and igniting it.  By November 10, Budapest was destroyed, hundreds had been killed, and 200,000 had fled the country, each anxious to escape communism and Russian domination.

     The Hungarian Revolution failed, but it showed Russian communism its true character to the world.  Hungary laid bare the great Russian lie.  It had a prescription for dominating a satellite nation: “Infiltrate a target nation, get immediate control of the police force, initiate a terror which removes all intellectual and labor leadership, deport to Siberia troublesome people, and then destroy the nation completely if the least sign of independence shows itself.”

     It was in Hungary that the Cold War turned hot.

     In 1980 Ronald Reagan was running for president, and his speeches sounded as if they came from the 1950s.  “Let’s not delude ourselves.  The Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that’s going on.  If they weren’t engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn’t be any hot spots in the world.”  He warned Americans against “simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries,” and he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire” that had become “the focus of evil in the modern world.”

     Critics rounded on Reagan for his old-fashioned strident language, but the Hungarian people, such as Josef Toth, knew that what Reagan was saying had been their experience. 

ALGERIA, AFGHANISTAN, AND VIETNAM

by William H. Benson

November 2, 2006

     Algeria’s rebel army initiated its revolution against the French forces on November 1, 1954, fifty-two years ago.  It required eight years but the FLN, the Front for Liberacion Nationale, did succeed in convincing the French government that Algeria belonged to the Algerian people.  This complex war was one of the most important decolonization conflicts, and it included a series of guerilla strikes.  Eventually, it collapsed into a civil war between opposing factions.

     At the beginning Charles de Gaulle’s French soldiers conducted “ratonnades,” literally rat-hunts, which was synonymous with the hunting down and killing of suspected FLN members.  The FLN responded in kind with a guerilla war.

     By 1957 the FLN had a disciplined fighting force of nearly 40,000 soldiers that successfully applied hit and run tactics, ambushes, and night raids, and yet avoided direct contact with the superior French firepower by melting into the population of the countryside.  The FLN targeted army patrols, encampments, police posts, colonial farms, mines, factories, and transportation and communication facilities.

     They kidnapped French infantrymen and officers, and then murdered and mutilated these French victims, creating an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty.

     De Gaulle and France gave up, and granted Algeria her independence on July 3, 1962.

     Half a world away, in 1957, Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in the North created a new guerrilla movement for the South.  President Eisenhower declared on April 4, 1959: “The loss of South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for freedom.”

     On May 31, 1961, it was Charles de Gaulle who warned the new President, John F. Kennedy that he should disengage from Vietnam: “I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.”  He was right about that.

     Kennedy suspected as much when he told Arthur Schlesinger that he was worried about committing troops to Vietnam to support Ngo Dien Diem, South Vietnam’s leader.  “The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten.  Then we will be told to send in more troops.  It’s like taking a drink.  The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

     Kennedy nevertheless, in November of 1961 sent in the first 7,000 US troops to Vietnam, despite de Gaulle’s warning as well as Kennedy’s own suspicions.  It was the first really big US error.

     The second mistake Kennedy made was in the autumn of 1963 when he secretly authorized American support of an anti-Diem officers’ coup.  It duly took place on November 1, 1863, and Diem was murdered.  The CIA provided $42,000 in bribes for the officers who then set up a military junta in South Vietnam, which had US support.  “The worst mistake we ever made,” was Lyndon Johnson’s later verdict.

     Three weeks later on November 22, 1963 Kennedy was murdered himself, and Lyndon Baines Johnson inherited Vietnam.  He too made a series of mistakes, and the US was in a quagmire of our own making.

     In December of 1979 the Soviet Union plunged into the middle of a civil war in Afghanistan, which they had helped promote.  The Russians deployed 120,000 troops, but they could never win this war.  It placed a tremendous strain on their resources, and would last a decade, killing 16,000 Russian soldiers and wounding another 30,000.  An immense number of tanks, aircraft, and helicopters were destroyed by US-supplied weapons.  Ronald Reagan said, “The shoe is now on the other foot.”

     Mikhail Gorbachev accepted the inevitable, and on February 8, 1988 he announced that he would pull his troops out of Afghanistan within the next year.  This costly war helped in the ultimate collapse of the USSR.

     Algeria, Vietnam, and Afghanistan all succeeded in ousting another nation much larger and more powerful than themselves from their land.  Today, the Iraqi people and again the people in Afghanistan are fighting for the same.  It appears now that they will succeed.  Someday in the future a President—either Bush or his successor—will announce that the US troops will come home.  May it be soon.

YORKTOWN AND LEWIS AND CLARK

by William H. Benson

October 19, 2006

    Writing teachers tell us that authors build their most successful stories upon one of two themes: a stranger comes to town or somebody goes on a journey.  In each scenario, an author presents captivating characters, unusual settings, plots guaranteed to enthrall, point of view, and conflict.  Readers gravitate to these stories.

     In August of 1781 the British general Cornwallis and his troops encamped at Yorktown, in Virginia, just inside the Chesapeake Bay.  There, Cornwallis requested supplies from General Clinton in New York, but Clinton dawdled.

     George Washington, the American general, heard that a French admiral, the Count Francois deGrasse, was sailing from the West Indies to the Chesapeake Bay with 3000 French troops and 25 warships.  Washington scrapped his other military plans and raced his best units from Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey down the coast to the bay area where he then surrounded Cornwallis.

     Count deGrasse arrived in early September and crippled the British fleet off the coast, forcing a hemmed-in Cornwallis on October 17 to beg Washington for terms of surrender.  And surrender he did on October 19, 1781, 225 years ago today.

     So humiliated was Cornwallis by his defeat that he feigned illness and sent his aide to surrender his sword to George Washington, as the British army band played, “The World Turn’d Upside Down.”

     This final battle of the American Revolutionary War is a story about a stranger who came to town and disrupted the order of things.  King George III had sent his royal officials, military officers, and British redcoats to his English colonies and tried to establish his authority.  The Americans did not appreciate his efforts, and soYorktown is about booting out a heavy-handed King.

     On October 20, 1804 the Lewis and Clark Expedition met the great bear of the West—the grizzly.  Its track was “three times as large as a man’s track.”  The Native Americans had warned them of it, and now they had seen it.  A member of the expedition attempted to shoot it, but its size so scared him that he ran, leaving his tomahawk and gun behind.

     That same day Lewis and Clark met the earthen lodge people of the Upper Missouri, deep in modern-day North Dakota: the Mandan, the Arikara, and the Hidatsa, all Sioux tribes.  Days later they met Toussaint Charbonneau and his slave Shoshone wife, the fifteen-year-old Sacagawea.  For the winter of 1804 to 1805, Lewis and Clark camped there at what they called Fort Mandan.

     At first glance, the Lewis and Clark expedition is a story about someone going on a journey, but seen from the Native Americans’ point of view, it is about a stranger coming to their town.

     For that matter, Yorktown, seen through the eyes of those British officers and soldiers, is about going on a journey to crush the revolting Americans.  A history depends upon the writer’s point of view: opposite sides of the same coin—a stranger comes to town or someone goes on a journey.

     Setting off on a journey to see unknown lands and people represents freedom; seeing strangers in our midst incites fear.  The surrender at Yorktown ended the fear and initiated the freedom, that which we call liberty.  Lewis and Clark was the result and evidence of that freedom.  Fear and freedom seem constantly at war with each other; freedom is never absolute in that governments never destroy fear completely.  But they do have a duty to drive fear into a tiny corner.

     Americans in recent years have gone off on a journey to a foreign land where they had hoped to deliver freedom to the Iraqi people, and along the way they have got themselves lost.  The Iraqi people see these strangers, these Americans, in and around them and are fearful.  They then look around the Americans and see each other—Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd—and are suspicious of each other.  Fear has driven freedom into a tiny corner.

     The Iraqi people are yearning for a Yorktown, and the strangers there—like Lewis and Clark—must return home someday, hopefully soon.

MULTICULTURALISM

by William H. Benson

September 21, 2006

     Serendipity catches us unaware.  It brings us up short.  It happens when we go to watch a fight, and right in the middle of it an ice hockey game breaks out.  We are astonished when something good jumps out of a miserable beginning.  

     Truly, when future historians will write about race relations in the United States, they will point out the serendipitous way in which relations between blacks and whites improved in the latter half of the twentieth century.  Few social scientists had predicted such a turn of events, but there was one who did: the Swedish sociologist and economist, Gunnar Myrdal.

     In 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression, the Carnegie Corporation decided to conduct an in-depth study of African-Americans.  The person they selected to head the study was Myrdal, because, coming from Sweden, he was without prejudice, unlike most of the American scientists, and thus he was capable of writing a more objective study.

     Nine years later in 1944 Gunnar Mydal and his associates published their report: An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.  It was a 1500-page painstakingly detailed study of the overwhelming obstacles that African-Americans faced when they tried to integrate into American society.

     And yet, Myrdal predicted that race relations would improve, in that the laws, the courts, and the American ideals of democracy were a guiding influence and would allow those who had been excluded from participation to be included.  Those who were isolated from the full benefits of American citizenship could carry out a legal and constitutional fight for their rights.  Myrdal called these ideals “the American Creed.”

     Except for the breakup during the Civil War, the United States has held together now for 230 years.  It seems to me that we Americans should pay better attention to what things hold this nation together and that we should be sensitive now to the need to find other things that would bind us together.  The world has witnessed when nations break apart, when their government folds up, or when the citizens turn on each other.

     America contains many different cultures: it is the multicultural society.  And yet the people of each culture have agreed to pledge their allegiance to the flag and also bind themselves to this American Creed.  It is in this talent to unite differing peoples together through “a melting pot” transformation that American society has been extraordinarily lucky in maintaining her peace.  We consider this a given and that it always will be here.

     That may be a false assumption.  Last spring Congress debated the issue of making criminals out of the eleven million illegal immigrants in our country, and the uproar was loud and intense.  “Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote,” they shouted from the streets.  The legislation died due to lack of support in the face of this storm of protest.

     It is the ethnic, religious, tribal, and cultural differences among us that lie under our feet, like time bombs ticking away, set to explode.  These differences can tear our world and our nation apart quicker than the deadly work of hundreds of terrorists.

     And yet I am hopeful that this will not happen, as is the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  He wrote: “The most telling statistic is the rate of intermarriage, marriage across ethnic lines, marriage across religious lines, marriage across racial lines.  More Japanese Americans marry Caucasians than marry other Japanese Americans.  So many Jewish Americans marry non-Jews that people are worried about the future of a Jewish community.  The black-white marriages have quadrupled over the last generation.  And the attitude toward what used to be called miscegenation has been absolutely transformed.  I have confidence that love will defeat those in the end who wish to disunite America.”

     Gunnar Myrdal prediction came true, and few believed him then.  Serendipity is what we shall label this miraculous transformation in attitude.

PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

by William H. Benson

September 7, 2006

    “The quality of mercy is not strain’d; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”  So said Portia, a woman acting as a lawyer, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

     It is upon this “quality of mercy” that the notion of clemency is based.  For ages, kings and rulers have reserved the right for themselves to forgive those caught up in the gears of justice.  Pontius Pilate had had the right to grant a pardon to Jesus who stood before his accusers but then had refused.

     In Federalist Paper No. 74, Alexander Hamilton argued in favor of a Presidential pardon as a loophole or a release from the heavy machinery of justice.  “The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”

     Hamilton also believed that this power should be exclusively vested in a single person, the President.  “One man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government than a body of men,” he wrote.

     In Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers granted to the President the exclusive “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.”

     Franklin Roosevelt granted the most pardons: 3687.  Two Presidents did not live long enough to grant any: Garfield and William Henry Harrison.  Of those who did, the least granted was George Washington with only 16, including those who had defied Washington’s government in the Whiskey Rebellion.

     The most magnanimous pardons ever given were those by Lincoln and then Andrew Johnson, who pardoned the Confederate officers who had seceded from the Union.

     But the most controversial was Gerald Ford’s pre-emptive pardon of Richard Nixon for all crimes associated with Watergate, before he had even gone to trial.  Ford had become President upon Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, and a month later on September 8 he granted Nixon a pardon, causing an immediate uproar and howls of protest.  Ford defended his decision on October 17 before the House Judiciary Committee, arguing that it was a matter of public policy in that he wanted to end the national divisions that Watergate had created.

     Jimmy Carter pardoned those who had evaded military service in the Vietnam War by dodging the draft or fleeing to Canada.  Then, in 1992 George Bush, Sr., pardoned six Reagan officials involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including Caspar Weinberger.

     But the strangest display of clemency was Bill Clinton’s.  On his last day in office in January of 2000, he signed his name to 140 pardons and 36 commutations.  Why he did that he never adequately explained, but one of those he pardoned was Marc Rich, a high-profile financier who had fled the country years before for income tax evasion and other crimes.  The Justice Department was very anxious to get their hands on Rich, but then Clinton pardoned him.  The outrage at Clinton’s inexplicable action was quite intense.

     Lawyers in the George Bush’s new administration were hoping to undo Clinton’s actions by arguing that pardons were like warrants in that they might require delivery to be valid, but that line of reasoning was not pursued.  George Bush announced that he would allow all Clinton’s pardons to stand.  But there was little he could do: a Presidential pardon cannot ever be reversed.  The best that Congress can do is pass a resolution condemning a Presidential clemency order, which is what Congress did in 1999 for another of Clinton’s pardons.

     In the wake of Clinton’s highly controversial action, it is unlikely that Bush will grant many pardons: only 69 through the end of 2005.

     Justice and mercy.  They both call out for our attention.  “Consider this, that in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation.  We do pray for mercy, and that same prayer doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.”