PLAY

by William H. Benson

August 24, 2006

     The fall sports season at the high schools is now in full swing.  The schedules are set, and participants will soon play their first games or compete at their first matches and meets.  Some will win, others will lose, while spectators will watch and cheer.

     Preseason for professional football has begun, and baseball’s World Series, the final games, is just weeks away.  As the seasons move, so do the sports.  

    The word “play” holds within it at the same time a variety of meanings.  Players play football, baseball, basketball, cards, chess, and a thousand other games.  An audience walks into a theater to watch the performance of a play.  Children play their own games.  Musicians play their clarinet, saxophone, harp, piano, or organ.  The literary genre of drama includes plays.  And comedians play tricks with words by telling jokes and puns.

     Play is the slice cut out of life.  The moment we stop doing the ordinary or the routine and seek out performance—by ourselves or by others—we step into the world of play.  People can read dramatic literature or sheet music or a football rule book, and find it dull and lifeless things, but once acted out, or performed, or played in a stadium, each comes alive, enriching and captivating an audience and spectators for a moment.  And then the curtain falls, the game or the concert ends, and the humdrum beckons us.

     Play has a performative quality about it, in that it must be acted out, and that it takes place in both space and time.  The words “perform” and “play” have a special association with acting, and together they produce an effect upon the spectators, able to sway and even persuade an audience.  This performative aspect underscores games and sporting events, music concerts, theatre, film, and yes, even dreams.   

     A century ago the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud tried “to decipher the grammar of dreams.  A dream performs a psychological function for the dreamer.  Like a game, a dream makes perfect sense according to its own rules.”

     About this relationship between games and dreams, the Viennese literary critic Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, and yet at the same time it is completely right; put together in this strange way it makes an impression.  Why?  I don’t know. . . . things [in a dream] aren’t like that—and yet at the same time it’s quite right according to a law of its own.”

     What makes a performance great—whether it be on a football field or in a gym or a basketball court or on a stage or on film or in a dream?  It seems that those moments that stick in the mind, that are memorable, are the great ones.  I cannot ever forget John Elway’s leap into the end zone in the final minutes of his first Super Bowl win.  He made the play.

     Theatre is a vast collection of games.  Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, and Sophocles wrote of games.  They wrote about children coming to terms with their parents, and also about a boy and a girl falling in love.  King Lear feared his daughters’ lack of love for him.  Richard III, a crippled and lonely man, ruthlessly sought out power.  Richard II lost his power.  King Lear, growing old and approaching retirement, renounced his power.

     In Shakespearean theatre, there are games within the game, cross-dressing, and dressing up, with actors using masks and disguises.  Boys pretend to be girls, and girls pretend to be boys.  Each play-world has its own peculiar rules, and for a season, the audience accepts those rules.

     Shakespeare, of all the great dramatists, understood the power of the dream in the midst of play.  Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest contain plays within plays, and both cut away at the distinction between reality, performance, and the dream.

     “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, when everything seems double.”  “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits . . . We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”  “The play is the thing.”  “To sleep; perchance to dream.”

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

by William H. Benson

August 10, 2006

     He began his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with the words, “Good evening,” which he spoke slowly and precisely with an English accent while standing alone on a stage.  When he had finished and the show was about to begin, Hitchcock would turn sideways and his profile—a bulging set of lips and an enormous torso—would match up with a pencil drawing of the same.  It was his signature profile, something he had sketched years before for a Christmas card.

     Hitchcock did not act in his television shows, for he was the director.  But the plots were typical of him—about murder and terror and ordinary people swept up in extraordinary situations.  For example, a young husband and his wife might accidentally kill a guest in their home and then struggle to cover up their crime.  Hitchcock’s genius was matching up the extremes of human behavior with the routine and the common.

     He entered the movie industry in his native England and then came to America where he began directing one movie after another.  In every movie, except one, he inserted himself in a small cameo role, just for a few seconds.  And he did so at the beginning of his films because he knew that audiences were looking for him, and he did not want them distracted from the story too long.

     Critics now consider some of his movies as classics.  Birds is a story in which thousands of birds inundate a small village and terrorize the citizens.  In North by Northwest Cary Grant finds himself alone on a country road when an airplane repeatedly tries to cut him down.  Hitchcock directed Vertigo, Stagefright, and Lifeboat.  And then in 1960 he cast Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho.

     Hitchcock had noticed that a lot of trashy horror films were being produced for very little and then were making gigantic profits.  He wondered if he too could make a cheap horror film but do it superlatively well.  The story he selected was that of a single middle-aged guy, Norman Bates, who lives in a motel, the Bates Motel, with his bossy mother.  A young girl named Marion, played by Janet Leigh, checked into the motel but would never check out. 

     The Bates Motel still stands on a hill on Universal Studios property, and is on the tour, seen by thousands every year.

     Hitchcock suffered from certain phobias.  Small children terrified him as did policemen.  He never received a driver’s license because of his fear that a policeman might stop him.  And he loved to play practical jokes, some of which were cruel.  If he discovered someone was terrified of mice or spiders, he would send them an entire box filled with mice or spiders.

     Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for best director, but in 1967 he did receive the Irving Thalber Memorial Award.  He gave the shortest speech in Oscar history, just two words, “Thank you.”  Unlike the rest of Hollywood, he did not socialize, for he preferred an evening at home with his wife and daughter.

     He wore a suit everyday to the studio, and after drinking his afternoon tea, he would throw cup and saucer over his shoulder letting it fall and break behind him.

     For all of Hitchcock’s strangeness, oddities, and devotion to the macabre,  Entertainment Weekly recently voted him the greatest director of all time.  And for all of his professionalism, artistry and technique with a camera, Alfred maintained a level head.  He once told an actress, “It’s only a movie, and, after all, we’re all grossly overpaid.”

     He was born on August 13, 1899 and died in 1980 at the age of eighty.  On his tombstone, it reads, “I am in a plot.”           

KOREAN WAR

by William H. Benson

July 27, 2006

     Following the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, the allies had divided the Korean peninsula into two halves: north and south.  The Russian army controlled the north and the Americans the south.  An American military officer had looked at a map, pointed at the 38^th parallel and said, “Why not there?”  The idea believed by both sides then was that the line was only temporary, that the Russians and Americans would eventually leave once the Korean people had set up a government that would reunify the country.

     But the Russians supported a communist government, headed by Kim Il Sung, and the Americans fostered a republican government under Syngman Rhee.

     On Sunday morning, June 25, 1950, in a heavy rain, North Korean Forces crossed the 38^th parallel and attacked Rhee’s forces, which collapsed and fell back all the way to a perimeter around Pusan, on the tip of the peninsula.  President Truman immediately sent in American troops to support South Korea.

     General Douglas MacArthur engineered an amphibious landing at Inchon on the west coast on September 15, 1950.  Troops broke out of the Pusan perimeter, and soon North Korean troops faced two fronts.  This time it was their turn to run, and they did, all the way north across the 38^th parallel and through North Korea to the Yalu River, the traditional border with China.  The UN forces now controlled the entire peninsula.

     MacArthur dismissed the notion of a Communist Chinese counterattack, and in that judgment he was wrong.  The Chinese came in waves, poorly trained, lacking adequate clothing and weapons, but in huge numbers.  During that bitter cold winter of 1950-1951, some 200,000 Chinese soldiers drove UN forces south until General Mathew Ridgeway’s troops firmed their position and marched north again up to and beyond the 38^th parallel.

     After a year of fierce fighting up and down the five-hundred-mile Korean peninsula and thousands of casualties, the war stalled at where it had begun—at that 38^th parallel.

     At the ground level it was a brutal, bruising, physical war, fought on mountainous terrain, in temperatures that ranged from a 100 degrees in summer to 50 below in winter.  One soldier described it: “I don’t remember being afraid.  I don’t remember fear, ever.  I just wanted to sleep.  An hour’s nap.  Half an hour.  You’d give anything for just a little sleep.  You can be cold, you can be hungry, but I think the need for sleep is the most overpowering human need.”

     Truce talks began in October of 1951, but they drug out for two years, neither side willing to budge.  They stared at each other across the table as the war droned on.

     What happened during those two disturbing years is, as one historian said, “difficult to write and read about; it is what accounted for the remarkable civilian death toll of more than two million.  By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely leveled.  What was left of the population survived in caves, the North Koreans creating a life underground, in dwellings, schools, hospitals, and factories.”

     From bases in Japan, the American jets carpet bombed huts, villages, and cities across North Korea daily.  One eyewitness, Tibor Meray, a Hungarian correspondent, said, “Everything which moved in North Korea was a military target, peasants in the field often were machine gunned by pilots. Every city was a collection of chimneys.  I saw thousands of chimneys and that—that was all.”

     On June 20, 1953 the New York Times reported that planes had bombed dams at Kusong and Toksan in North Korea, causing floods that caused great damage and immense numbers of deaths through the valley and fields below.  “The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of [rice] has for the Asian.”

     A month later, on July 27, 1953, 53 years ago today, North and South Koreans, Russians and Americans, signed the truce that set the line at the 38^th parallel.

     Today, the North Koreans endure a Communist dictator, Kim Jong Il, who laughs at President Bush’s inability to intimidate him: on the fourth of July he launched his own missiles, a defiant act that terrified the Japanese.

     But after the truce South Korea became an economic miracle, which would never have happened if not for American soldiers who fought at places, like Pork Chop Hill, Old Baldy, Punch Bowl, Sniper’s Ridge, Triangle Hill, and Heartbreak Ridge.

SAM CLEMENS

by William H. Benson

July 13, 2006

     In July of 1861, Sam Clemens and his brother Orion boarded the sailing packet the Sioux City  that departed St. Louis.  It took them up the Missouri River, and dropped them off in St. Joseph.  There, Sam bought two tickets on a stagecoach, and on July 26^th, they headed west across Nebraska.  Sam often sat atop the stagecoach and drank in the scenery mile after mile while Orion sat inside the coach bouncing on top of the mailbags.

     In early August, they walked among the Mormons in Salt Lake City, and on August 14, 1861, the twentieth day of their journey, they arrived in Carson City, Nevada.  Sam described the desert: “Imagine a vast, wave-less ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage bushes.”

     Sam was dodging the Civil War that had begun in April.  Being from Missouri—a slave-holding state that refused to secede from the Union—Sam was ambivalent about which side to join—North or South.  Because he felt no desire to fight, he sat out the war in the west, over two thousand miles away from the ghastly and bloody battle sites.

     William Seward, the Secretary of State under the new President, Abraham Lincoln, had appointed Orion Clemens to be the Secretary of State of the territory of Nevada.  When Sam heard this news, he had appointed himself to be his brother’s assistant and even offered to pay their way to Carson City, for he understood that if he stayed in St. Louis, one of the two armies would grab him.

     In Carson City, Orion worked with the territory’s governor and legislature, but Sam, intoxicated by gold fever, combed the Nevada hills digging for gold or silver.  “We were stark mad with excitement—drunk with happiness—smothered under mountains of prospective wealth—arrogantly compassionate toward the plodding millions who knew not our marvelous canyon—but our credit was not good at the grocer’s.”

     He stayed at it for a year.  His hands blistered, and his back was breaking before he gave up.  “I was discharged just at the moment that I was going to resign,” he wrote.  “I could not endure the heavy labor; and on the company’s side they did not feel justified in paying me to shovel sand down my back.”  He found a job as a newspaper reporter.

     Determined to make something of himself in the west, he wrote of his ambition to his brother Orion, “I shall never look upon Ma’s face again until I am a rich man.”

     His reporting skills extended to exaggeration and outright hoaxes that got him into serious trouble and that took him to San Francisco and even to the Hawaiian Islands.

     The winter of 1864-1865 when held up in the Sierra foothills in a mining camp, Sam met a stranger who told him a story about a jumping frog and a gambler who bet on the frog but lost because someone had poured buckshot down the frog’s mouth.  Sam wrote down the story and mailed it back east where “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published, and Mark Twain’s name was suddenly well-known.

     In San Francisco Sam rented a theatre for $50, and posted advertisements that read, “Doors open at 7 o’clock.  The Trouble to begin at 8.”  On October 2, 1866 Sam stepped in front of the crowd and began talking in his slow Missouri drawl.  Soon he had everyone laughing, even the Governor of the State of California and the socially elite.  He made $400 that night, and continued to perform across California and Nevada.

     On January 1, 1867 after five and a half years in the west, Mark Twain boarded a ship in San Francisco bay and sailed south.  At the isthmus at Panama he walked the few miles to the Atlantic side, and from there he sailed north to New York City.  Sam Clemens had outgrown the west and was now ready to conquer the east and Europe and the world.  He had transformed himself into Mark Twain, America’s eminent humorist and writer.

     Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune on July 13, 1865 had advised, “Go West, young man, go West, and grow up with the country.”  Sam Clemens had done just that, but he had not needed a New York City publisher to tell him to do so.

WOMEN’S LIBERATION

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2006

     Revolution is an overused word today.  Its root, “revolt”, refers to a violent confrontation against the existing powers, especially a king: the American, French, or Russian Revolutions.  But today a revolution describes any change, mild or otherwise—in industry, the economy, in transportation or in communication.

     The historian Jacques Barzun identified Western Civilization’s four great revolutions in his work From Dawn to Decadence.  The 17^th century witnessed the religious revolution in which the many shades of Protestantism revolted against the unified Catholic Church, the many against the one.  The 18^th century proved that the people could successfully revolt against the Kings of both England and France.

     The 19^th century ushered in liberal thought—that individual human beings possessed rights of their own that were distinct and superior to the divine right that the kings for ages had claimed for themselves.  Beginning with Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason and ending with the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution, liberal thought freed the Western nations’ citizens.

     People of the 20^th century who found themselves marginalized in society due to their gender, race, or class demanded a voice and their rights.

     And so we the living of today are all heirs and beneficiaries of those four revolutions, fought across the span of five centuries.  Barzun further identified a number of themes that runs through all of them.

     One is emancipation.  “The individual wields a panoply of rights, including the right to do ‘his own thing’ without hindrance from authority.  And any right is owed to all that lives: illegal immigrants, school children, criminals, babies, plants, and animals.  It requires more and more limitations in order to prevent my right from infringing yours.”

     Another theme is primitivism. “The longing to shuffle off the complex arrangements of an advanced culture recurs again and again.  It is a main motive of the Protestant Reformation, it reappears as the cult of the Noble Savage, it warns against global warming, and it cries out, ‘Bring back the wolf!’.”

     David Denby, the writer and movie critic, in his book Great Books, said that “the women’s liberation movement is the only successful revolution of the twentieth century.”  That seems a startling, if not exaggerated, statement, and yet it very well may be true; there has been a change, perhaps even a revolution over the last three decades in which women are accepted in the work place and in positions of leadership.

     Denby wrote that “women are no longer dependent on men physically.  At their very luckiest, men and women exhibit a graciousness in their relations with one another that is something new on earth.  They are trying to make equality work.”

     Denby then quoted the French writer, Simone de Beauvoir, who in 1949 wrote, “those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”  Now I take her words to mean that she equated marriage and being a housewife, and a mother with stagnation (her word).

     Although Beauvoir denigrated the typical female roles, she was wise enough to understand the costs.  She wrote, “I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.”  Now that is interesting.

     As Americans we believe that liberty will produce happiness.  Did not Thomas Jefferson write of, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”?  We tend to see them as equal, or that liberty will inevitably lead to happiness.  But George Bush’s gamble in Iraq has proven that greater liberty need not necessarily result in greater happiness.

     Simone de Beauvoir understood the same for women—that happiness is so elusive that it is only found in its pursuit.  Women’s rights might mean emancipation in the work place and a lessening of the responsibilities at home, but to be liberated can be difficult, and it can be painful, and it does not always guarantee happiness.  Now that is a revolting thought. 

FATHERS AND SONS

William H. Benson

June 15, 2006

     On June 15, 1752 Benjamin Franklin decided to spend some quality time with his son William.  Even though it was lightning outside, together father and son flew a kite.  Pictures of Franklin holding the kite and touching a key dangling at the end of the string with lightning bolts darting across the sky often include a small boy standing alongside Benjamin.  That would be William, Franklin’s illegitimate son.

     Scholars have never been able to determine the identity of William’s mother, but Benjamin claimed the child as his own.  Once Benjamin had entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Reed, he brought William into their home, and together Ben and Deborah raised William.

     The kite and the key made Benjamin Franklin world famous in both America and Europe, as a scientist and a discoverer of scientific laws.  London, the center of the world’s intellectual learning and the seat of the British empire of which he was a citizen, beckoned, and Ben answered.  In 1754 father with his son sailed east across the Atlantic.

     Deborah stayed in her home.  She never would spend one night of her life outside of  

her native Philadelphia, but Benjamin would not settle for just what America offered.  He wanted more for himself and his son.

     Benjamin and William had a grand time in London, seeing the sights, traveling the countryside, which was “too beautiful to be outdoors,” and enjoying the intellectual stimulation they felt when they met English thinkers and writers.  Young William especially loved to party until late every night with his friends.  Both Father and son chose to stay together in England for the most part of nearly two decades.

     Then, Ben became quite concerned that William was not growing up to appreciate hard work, frugality, industriousness, and patience—those qualities that had served him well and which Poor Richard Saunders had preached in his almanac.  Like most good dads, Benjamin wanted to help William.  Through his contacts, Ben was able to earn for William an appointment as the Royal Governor of the colony of New Jersey.

     This was a plum, a prize normally given to a native British citizen living in London and not to an American commoner, especially one of illegitimate birth.  But William by then was prepared to display the regal nature of British royalty among the Americans.  A Loyalist, he obeyed the King’s commands, and he expected Americans to do the same.  He had learned those ideals under Ben’s tutelage when living in London.  William moved into the Governor’s mansion in New Jersey.

     Then, a rift developed in the relationship between this father and his son, and it was over politics.  The colonies began to disagree with Parliament over its supposed right to rule and tax the colonies.  Benjamin moved ever more closely towards the radicals’ view, arguing for a complete break with King George III and Parliament and for independence and the inception of a new country.

     William was repulsed by the thought of breaking up the British empire; he loved England too much.  When an adolescent living in London, William’s eyes had opened, and he now perceived the Americans as most British saw them: raw country cousins, who were backwards, ignorant, unsophisticated, incapable of grand ideas, and less than regal.

     The rift grew into a separation and finally a permanent estrangement.  With a vengeance Ben cut William out of his will, saying: “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for me leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”  William died in exile, destitute, in 1813.

     Fathers do not always agree with their sons.  As the son moves towards independence, tension and division can emerge. It is too bad when it ruptures and breaks as it did between Ben and William.

     Sunday is Father’s Day, a day to set aside ill will and tensions and celebrate the idea of being and becoming a great dad.