SOUTHERN LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

October 4, 2007

     The citizens of Nashville, Tennessee will celebrate the Southern Festival of Books next weekend. It is an event celebrated the second week of October each year, and its purpose is to promote reading and writing, as well as a broader understanding of the language and culture of the Southern states.

     Two of the best writers America has produced were from the South: Samuel Clemens also known as Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken. Actually, they were from Southern slave states that did not join the Confederacy at the time of secession: Twain was born and raised in Missouri, and Mencken hailed from Baltimore, Maryland. Few writers since have demonstrated greater skill with the English language than did Twain and Mencken.

     Twain knew the South. He knew her people, their language, and the details of their lives. He knew the river! It was “the great Mississippi, the great majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.” From the river Clemens took his name. Rivermen would call out “mark twain” when sounding two fathoms.

     On the steamboats Clemens piloted, he met up with all types of characters: the gamblers, the fast talkers, the dull-witted, the destitute, the innocent dupes, and the downtrodden. When he set about to write his stories, Twain drew heavily from his days on the Mississippi. He created Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and the slave Jim who all lived in St. Petersburg, Missouri. Jim, with the help of young Huckleberry, escaped his owner by boarding a raft, and the two slid down the mighty Mississippi.

     But Twain knew the ugly side of life in a small Southern town. Through Huckleberry Finn’s voice, Twain described the degradation of the poor slaves and of the desperate white sharecroppers. Huck Finn told how Colonel Sherburn in public shot and killed a town drunk named Old Boggs. The Colonel was never arrested, for he knew that no jury would ever convict him. With clarity, Mark Twain painted a devastating landscape of a Southern village, complete with murder, drunkenness, human ownership of other humans, mob rule, and utter hopelessness.

     It makes for great literature, but it must have been a terrible life for most. It is no wonder that Samuel Clemens as an adult chose to live in the north—in Connecticut and in New York City, and also in Europe.

     In the spring of 1882, two decades after Sam had left the Mississippi, he returned to St. Louis, and aboard a steamboat, he sailed up and down the river. He was stunned at how backwards the South was relative to the North. He thought it was because the Southern people were still gripping their feudal past. The economy of the former Confederacy was blighted, and the people were lost in sentimentality and romanticism.

     “Everybody bragged, everybody blustered,” he said, and “all over the land, two things could count upon reverence and championship—religion and slavery.”

     Fifty years later conditions had not changed much. H. L. Mencken echoed similar sentiments in his highly critical essay, The Sahara of the Bozart. “And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

     “Alas, for the South!” Mencken wrote. “Her books have grown fewer. She never was much given to literature.”

     The situation in the South has greatly improved since the days of Twain and Mencken. The former Confederate States now are economic powerhouses. Her cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Little Rock, and Charlotte—are world class. Except for Reagan, all of our Presidents since 1980 were from the South: Carter was from Georgia, both Bush’s claim Texas, and Clinton was from Arkansas. Truly, the South’s economic and political transformation is our nation’s miracle, a rags-to-riches story.    

     And slowly, Southern writers, such as William Faulkner of Mississippi, have created a respectable Southern literature. And then there are the modern popular writers: John Grisham of Mississippi and Patrick Conroy of South Carolina. The South’s books have grown, not fewer, but larger. 

SCHOOL DAYS

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2007

     The calendar and the cooling of the temperatures tell us that another school year has arrived. The fall sports schedule is in full swing, and just beyond the horizon lies the winter schedule. The presence of the book backpacks indicates that teachers are poring on the homework—their duty and a very good thing for the students, and the more serious students are responding with hours of solitary concentration.

     In 1987, twenty years ago already, a professor at the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom, published The Closing of the American Mind, a book that spent more than a year on the best-seller’s list then. A humanities scholar who specialized in the works of Plato and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Bloom issued a series of daring claims in his book about what is wrong with the university as a whole, with the disciplines included within the humanities, and with the students themselves.

      Things went wrong on the university campus, so Bloom charged, in the 1960’s when certain pieces of that vast collection known as the Western Canon, which includes Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Emerson and others, were replaced with writers more modern and also representative of women and minorities.

     The literature curriculum, in other words, was dumbed down to accommodate students unwilling to work as hard as the great writers require of readers. As the Greek and Roman classics had disappeared in the previous century, so now had other worthy writers. It was the students’ loss, and yet they and many at the universities wanted writers more relevant, what ever that may mean.

     But the larger question is, “Why study the Western Canon or the humanities or history or English or philosophy at all?” In the light of the costs of a four-year degree, it does seem ludicrous to spend the time and money reading Spinoza and Nietzsche. Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor said it this way, “The big question for humanists is, ‘How do we explain why what we do is important for people who aren’t humanists?’ That’s been tough, really tough.”

     Allan Bloom tried to answer that question. A liberal arts education, he believed, should provide a student with “four years of freedom”—“a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.”

     Bloom identified certain opinions that students bring with them and also the distractions that together prevent students from receiving all they can at the university.

     He said, “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Students are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. The true believer is the real danger. . . . This is something with which they have been indoctrinated.”

     Openness has rejected the natural rights of people. Unreserved equality and total tolerance for others’ opinions has overthrown identification of evil ideas and recognition of the world’s injustices. Suddenly, everything, including truth and beauty, is relative. And so Bloom entitled his book as he did: the American mind is closed, and yet thinks it wide open. The word sophomore unites two disparate Greek words: wise and fool.

     Music is the major distraction for students, Bloom claimed, a not so surprising comment. “Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it.”

     Yes, music is still a powerful influence among students, but I see that the cell phone and the internet have gradually replaced music as the students’ source of distraction. The cell phone seems a permanent fixture today, something Bloom did not foresee in 1987.

     Education is there at the university, available for anyone willing to work. The learning is profound and life changing. Bloom put it this way: “The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures.”

THE GREAT SEPARATION

by William H. Benson

September 6, 2007

     In May of 2006 Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent to President George Bush an open letter in which he began by listing the grievances he had against American foreign policy. But, then, he turned from political to religious issues, mentioning certain Biblical prophets—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, and Joseph. He then asked Bush a question: “if they were with us today, how would they have judged such behavior?”

     He further admonished Bush that “according to divine verses, we have all been called upon to worship one God and follow the teachings of divine Prophets.”

     He then finished his letter with a dire prophecy: “Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. . . . Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.”

     Ahmadinejad’s letter appeared in a number of newspapers around the world.

     A week ago, The New York Times Magazine featured an article entitled “The Great Separation”, in which they reprinted portions of that letter and then pointed out the crucial difference between Western thinking and that of the Middle East. In the Islamic countries it is “political theology”; politics is within theology, and theology is bound up within politics. They are united. But in the West politics by law is separated from theology. Each are distinct spheres of influence, and neither intrudes upon the other.

     How was it that in Western Civilization certain thinkers chose to divorce religion from politics?

     The answer is that this Great Separation came out of the devastation resulting from the European Wars of Religion during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Catholic was pitted against Protestantism in all its forms: Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, etc. Each side fought viciously against the other.

     Bells rang in Paris on August 24, 1572, St. Bartholomew’s Day, as a signal to massacre all the leading Huguenots, the French Protestants. For three days and nights, the massacre went on, and some two thousand Protestants were killed. And, then, the killing extended into other cities. Protestantism ceased to be a viable alternative in France.

     Germany’s religious war was even more intense and frenzied. Called the Thirty Year War, 1618-1648, it laid waste to entire villages, towns, and cities. Thousands were killed. Many others starved or fled the country in terror. The fighting reduced the population of Germany from fifteen million to less than five million. The savage killing ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a truce between Catholic and Protestant.

     In that same year the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, looked back over the previous century’s religious wars and asked why? He understood that religious convictions often lead to political conflicts, and that the potential for violence is always there. In his great work, The Leviathan, published in 1651, he dared to set aside questions of God and His commands and focused instead upon human beings and why they believed so strongly in their religion.      

      Hobbes further planted an idea that took hold in the West—“that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God’s politics; instead it would try to keep men from harming one another.” Security and peace were what mattered most, not divine commands.

     There are those who want politics and religion united, such as Iran’s President. Such a view is comprehensive, magnificent, and thus powerfully attractive. God and man and nature are linked into a single all-encompassing cosmos. But in the West philosophers split religion away from politics. Such a view leaves God’s commands out of political decision-making, and instead concentrates upon the betterment of human beings— promoting peace, fostering justice, and diminishing fear and ignorance.

     Neither side is all right or all wrong. But if ever given a choice, I, and most others I am convinced, would choose the Great Separation over the Great Unification.

ANTI-HEROES

by William H. Benson

August 23, 2007

     In August of 1967, forty years ago, the movie Bonnie and Clyde opened in the nation’s theatres. It featured two young actors—Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow, and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker. The movie, according to the New York Times, “was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate.”

     Audiences gasped in shock at the final scene: Beatty’s and Dunaway’s bodies twitching and writhing inside their parked car, a Ford V-8, as the lawmen fired a fusillade of bullets at them. That scene seemed to open the Hollywood gate for more and more violence, and no one seems to know how to shut it.

     Of course, the real life Bonnie and Clyde got what they deserved. Across the states of Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana for four years during the early days of the Great Depression, this husband and wife team had cut a swath of destruction that included robbery at gunpoint, cold-blooded murder, and high-speed chases and shootouts to elude officers of the law.

     Their story has since become a legend, and what added to the story was the way they promoted themselves. They would have photographs taken, showing them in various poses in front of their car smiling, smoking cigars, and holding their machine guns. Also, Bonnie Parker wrote poetry and sent her work to newspapers. “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” has 13 stanzas with five lines in each. Here is the final stanza:  

     “Some day they will go down together;

      And they will bury them side by side.

       To a few it means grief,

      To the law it’s relief,

      But it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.”

     Their story is like those of Frank and Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and John Dillinger—bandits who for a time eluded the strong arm of the law, but who in the end were trapped and each went out in a blaze. They are the anti-heroes, people whose deeds are wicked, and yet the public flatters them with fawning attention and notoriety for their daring.

     Robin Hood was an anti-hero. He claimed to rob from the rich in order to give to the poor. He and his band of Merry Men, which included Friar Tuck and Little John, slunk around Sherwood Forest, while the Sheriff of Nottingham failed to capture them.

     Both Richard III and Macbeth were anti-heroes. Audiences watch and cheer them on as they ruthlessly pursue the thrones of England and Scotland, but then at a certain point audiences turn on them and are repelled in disgust at their lawless ways.

     During the CB radio craze thirty years ago, the movie “Smokey and the Bandit,” came out. It featured Jackie Gleason who played the part of Smokey, a state trooper who was ignorant, obnoxious, and easily outwitted by the sophisticated, handsome, and sharp-minded Bandit, the anti-hero, played by Burt Reynolds. Watching such a movie, audiences find themselves twisted into cheering the criminal and booing the lawman.

     Much of Mark Twain’s humor was iconoclastic—irreverent attacks on pretense, sham, and hypocrisy. He noticed that the Sunday School books he had read had stories of naughty boys who were invariably punished and of nice boys who were eventually rewarded. In opposition to those, he wrote two short stories; the first was “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Did Not Come to Grief,” in which little James commits all kinds of mean acts, never has anything bad happen to him, grows up, “and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature.” “The Story of the Good Little Boy” is about Jacob who does only good deeds, and yet he receives only grief and punishment.

     Twain wanted to poke gentle fun at the common knowledge believed by most that bad deeds are at some point punished and that good deeds are justly rewarded. Not always—at least not in this world, he suggested. Innocent good people are destroyed everyday by disease or accident or the evil intentions of others.

     The anti-hero has his or her place in our American popular culture, for when we tire of our saints, we still have Macbeth, Richard III, Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, and Bonnie and Clyde.

IN RETROSPECT

by William H. Benson

August 9, 2007

     Here are the lessons we have learned:

1. We misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries, and we exaggerated the dangers to the U. S. of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for and a determination to fight for freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our misjudgments reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area.
5. We failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of wining the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale U.S. military involvement before we initiated the action.
7. We failed to retain popular support in part because we did not explain fully what was happening and why we were doing what we did. We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess but, rather, in the unity of the people. We failed to maintain it.
8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose.
9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action—other than in response to direct threats to our own security—should be carried out only with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
11. We failed to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal with the complex range of political and military issues. With this organizational weakness, we thus failed to analyze and debate our actions with intensity and thoroughness.

     I have recorded these eleven lessons, taken more or less verbatim, from pages 321 to 323 of Robert S. McNamara’s book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, which he published in 1995. McNamara had served as Secretary of Defense under both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

     He was at the head of the Pentagon on August 2 and 4, 1964 when North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the American destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. Three days later on August 7, Congress passed a resolution, which gave President Johnson the power “to repel any armed attack and to prevent further aggression.”

     McNamara saw, and was part of, the debacle in Vietnam as it unfolded. Thirty years later, in hindsight, or “in retrospect,” as he called it, he could admit to the mistakes that he and others made and then list the lessons learned. Hindsight is always 20-20 vision.

     Of course, most striking are the parallels between the failures in Vietnam in the 1960’s and those the current administration made in Iraq. Certain of McNamara’s words jump out: “we misjudged,” “we failed,” “we underestimated,” “our profound ignorance,” “we are not omniscient,” “there are no immediate solutions,” “an imperfect untidy world,” “we do not have the God-given right,” and “not merely cosmetically,” when referring to multinational forces. McNamara’s admissions are so pertinent today and will be.

     Perhaps, someday a cabinet officer from the Bush administration will admit to these eleven lessons to describe their disaster in Iraq, but they refuse to do so today.  

MIDSUMMER DREAMS

by William H. Benson

July 26, 2007

     Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, European-trained physicians, each in turn, drew a map of the human mind, and features on that map included their own inventions: psychic agencies (id, ego, superego), the death drive, the libido, extrovert versus introvert, the mechanisms of defense (repression, projection, regression, and more), and most importantly the unconscious.

     Born on July 26, 1875, Carl Jung explained the formation of the unconscious. Because there are limits to what human beings perceive happening about them, in that their senses have limits, “there are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note.” These events have happened to us, but without our conscious knowledge. We may realize of their existence through intuition, as a sort of afterthought, but most generally the unconscious wells up to our conscious, often through the form of dreams.

     Jung wrote, “The unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought, but as a symbolic image. Psychologists first investigated the unconscious through the study of people’s dreams.”

     It is a fact that human beings, when asleep, do dream. The psychologists, trained in the schools of Freud and Jung, believe themselves best equipped to study the human phenomenon of dreaming, through supposed scientific experimentation. The patient lies on the couch and recounts his or her dreams while the psychoanalysis listens. 

     There are others—literary critics, essayists, and dramatists—who would disagree. Ludwig Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s theories and called psychoanalysis “speculation,” not even a hypothesis, only “a powerful mythology.”

     Harold Bloom, the literary critic, believes that psychoanalysis is nothing more than shamanism. “Transference to a shaman is an ancient, worldwide technique of healing. . . . Shamanism preceded psychoanalysis and will survive it; it is the purest form of dynamic psychiatry.”

     Great writers have explored the dream world, using their own resources and literary techniques. Both Mark Twain and also George Bernard Shaw, born on July 26, 1856, wrote of Joan of Arc, the teen-aged French girl who dreamed, heard voices, saw visions, and led the French people in an all-out war against the English.

     The Old Testament writer knew the importance of dreams. At harvest time, Joseph told his brothers of his dream, that their sheaves of wheat bowed down before his. They promptly sold him into slavery bound for Egypt, and there he interpreted dreams.

     One of Shakespeare’s best comedies is about a dream—A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Two girls—Helena and Hermia, and two boys—Lysander and Demetrius, wander into the moon-drenched forest outside of Athens. They are separated, they fall asleep, and they are blissfully unaware of the fairies—Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed—who live in that forest and come out at night.

     The fairies sprinkle on the boys’ and girls’ eyes the juice from a flower called Love-in-idleness, which makes them fall in love with whatever they see upon awakening. There are some delightful confusions, but by the end of the play all is put right.

     A fairy alone on the stage ends the play, “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumb’red here while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.”

     Both the scientist, such as Jung, and the fiction writer, such as Shakespeare, have explored this mysterious dream world, which every human being inhabits for seven, eight, or nine hours every night, and it is there that we find our best rest. It is a world that remains for the most part unexplored, a situation that Freud and Jung instinctively understood and tried to remedy, when they equated dreams as symbols with the real world. It may be a correct hypothesis; it may only be speculation, a powerful mythology.

     A full moon will appear on Monday, July 30. Do we dare on that night, a mid-summer night, to walk into an Athenian forest? “To sleep; perchance to dream.”