NORMA JEAN BAKER

by William H. Benson

June 1, 2006

     Norma Jean Baker, also known as Marilyn Monroe, was born June 1, 1926.  She would have turned eighty today.  She grew up in Los Angeles, during Hollywood’s golden age, a glittering dreamworld where any pretty face could become a famous actress, which was Norma Jean’s dream and obsession.

     Her friends could not quite believe she had movie star talent.  Captivatingly beautiful she was, but she had a sugary breathy voice and an had an odd habit of licking or twitching her lips.  But she was intelligent and fiercely driven to succeed, and she could use men to introduce her to other men even more powerful.  Entranced by her good looks, men were pleased to help her.

     One of her teenage friends, Eddie Friedman, met her in the summer of 1946 at the Lido Club’s pool behind the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when she was modeling bathing suits for a photo session.  Eddie later became the actor Ted Jordan, and he told the story of his sixteen-year friendship with Marilyn Monroe in his book, Norma Jean.

     Gradually he learned that “he was dealing not with an innocent and naïve girl with stars in her eyes but with a multifaceted personality of extraordinary complexity.”

     He soon discovered that Norma Jean’s family was filled with ghosts.  She had no home, but had lived in an orphanage and foster homes.  She had never met or known her father.  Her mother, Gladys Baker, suffered from bouts of insanity that drove her into an asylum.  Years before, Gladys’s husband, a guy named Baker, had deserted Gladys when he had moved to Kentucky, taking with him their two daughters, Norma Jean’s older half-sisters.  Then, Norma Jean called her foster mothers her “aunts.”

     And then Eddie discovered that Norma Jean had married a guy named James Dougherty, the boy next door, when she was sixteen.  She claimed that it was “a marriage of convenience” to avoid going back to the orphanage.  The navy drafted him during the war, and she divorced him.

     They were all ghosts: her father, mother, sisters, aunts, and husband.

     And then she found a two-minute role in a Marx Brothers movie, Love Happy.  Groucho made his famous eyebrows wiggle when Norma Jean walked away from him.

     She died her hair blonde, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, and found an agent, Johnny Hyde; Twentieth-Century Fox first gave her a contract, and her wish came true.  She became a star and over the years acted in thirty movies.

     Along the way she married baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio.  The marriage lasted all of ten months in 1954; he had not appreciated the way the soldiers in Korea had ogled and whistled at her when she was performing on stage there.  And then she married the playwright, Arthur Miller, but after four years she had divorced him also.

     Rumors linked Marilyn romantically with the President, John F. Kennedy, and later with his brother, Bobby Kennedy, both whom she had met through the actor, Peter Lawford, who was married to one of the Kennedy sisters.  Unfortunately, it was Peter Lawford who kept Marilyn well stocked in pills.

     At the age of thirty-six, she died on the morning of August 5, 1862 in her Brentwood home.  The coroner ruled it an accidental suicide, but the conspiracy theories have spun tales that the Kennedy’s, the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, or the CIA were involved in a murder and a coverup.  Her close friend Ted Jordan believed otherwise.  He said, “No one had to murder Marilyn Monroe, for she was intent on murdering herself.”  The champagne and pills had directed her life for ten years, and they finally took it.   

     Six years later on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed Bobby Kennedy, about fifty feet from the pool where Norma Jean Baker had stood in her bathing suit before a camera in 1946.

     Another popular culture icon, actually does turn eighty-years-old today—Andy Griffith.  His career began in 1962, the same year that Marilyn Monroe’s ended.  His life was a steady and respected television presence, but hers was a Fourth of July firework that exploded with a bang, lit up the sky with color and design, and then was gone.  

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

by William H. Benson

May 18, 2006

     In 1966 Chairman Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party in the China, was seventy-three, and he was still very dedicated to the task of seeing the revolution through in China during his lifetime.  So dedicated was he to socialism for socialism’s sake that he cared little about the practical consequences or the real-world human suffering that his theories and policies brought about.  The name for his new revolution, which began on May 18, 1966, was the Cultural Revolution.

     Chairman Mao told children and teenagers, those nine to eighteen, that it was acceptable to rebel against authority figures: their parents, teachers, bosses, village government bosses and even communist party officials.  Mao then dispensed armbands, and called them Red Guards.

     They responded to his urging.  They left school and took to the streets where they criticized anyone who dressed or acted like a foreigner, who was less than zealous for Communist ideals, or who had even a smattering of Western education.  Without students or teachers, the schools and colleges closed down.  Mao had tipped upside down China’s social structure, and anarchy erupted.

     Throughout that summer and fall of 1966, the Red Guards demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, shouting their praise for Mao, calling him “our great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander, and great helmsman.”  Each waved high their own little red copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao.  The largest rally was held in November of 1966 when more than 2.5 million attended.  The Revolution had deteriorated into a personality cult.

     “Bomb the headquarters,” and “learn revolution by making revolution,” he told his Red Guards, and they responded with violence.  They especially liked to burst into their former teachers’ homes in search of anything that could possibly prove them an enemy of Mao.  People who aroused the least suspicion were forced to endure a “struggle session” in which they were required to wear a dunce hat and endure verbal and physical abuse before large crowds of accusers.

     The Red Guards would expect their victim to stand in the “airplane” position, bent forward with their arms extended behind them.  Then, they would force them to bow down at the name of Mao.  One victim who refused to bow said, “What kind of Cultural Revolution is this?  There is nothing ‘cultural’ about it!  There is only brutality!”

     By the fall of 1966 Mao was shocked by the viciousness of the attacks upon the teachers and other authorities, but he did little to rein them in for three years.  After all, it was he who had said, “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle.”

     And then Mao turned on the Red Guards.  In 1969 he sent millions of these former students, who had lashed out at others in blind obedience to him, to work on the farms, dealing with pigs and night soil.  There in the countryside they learned little but bitterness for Mao, who, they now believed, cared little now that he no longer needed them.

     In the spring of 1969, Mao officially ended his Cultural Revolution, but in reality some remnants of it continued until his passing in 1976.  Estimates of the number of victims of the Cultural Revolution now hover around a million, and of them tens of thousand did not survive.  Many simply chose suicide.  The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s grand social experiment, and it proved a colossal failure.

     Forty years now separate the Chinese people, some 1.2 billion, from the lunacy and madness that marked the beginning of Mao’s call for the students’ to revolt.  China has since clearly outgrown Mao whose mistakes are today recognized.  In the process of re-establishing their schools, they learned that respect for teachers and for education are necessary.  And now China today is an economic miracle, a beehive of activity.

     In the United States this is the season when teachers and school officials honor those students who have obeyed the rules, met the schools’ requirements, and now are graduating.  Fortunately, no one along the way suggested that they “learn revolution by making a revolution.”

FOUR DEAD IN OHIO

by William H. Benson

May 4, 2006

     On Thursday, April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced that a massive American / South Vietnamese troop offensive was moving into Cambodia with intentions of inflicting damages upon the enemy, the North Vietnamese.  He said, “We take these actions not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.”

     These words were not what the war-weary public wanted to hear, and they were not believed.  The war was in its seventh year by then with no end in sight and already tens of thousands of American soldiers had been killed.  (Indeed, it would be another four years before America ended its tragic involvement in Southeast Asia.)

     To most Americans, Nixon’s decision was an escalation of a war that America could not ever win, and that it meant more deaths and casualties.

     The President was quite unprepared for the American public’s hostile reaction that emanated mainly from students at college campuses.  At Kent State in Kent, Ohio, close to Akron, Ohio, students on Friday, May 1, threw some rocks, broke some windows, and attempted to burn down the ROTC building.  Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, sent in the National Guard.

     On Monday, the fourth of May, a school day, 96 guards marched down a hill to a field in the middle of several hundred student demonstrators.  The crowd was initially peaceful and quiet but with the advance of the guards, the students retreated.  Then, as the guards retreated back up the hill, the students followed and began to throw rocks at them.

     None of the students were armed, and none of the guards were in any immediate danger.  Then, when the guards were just within seconds of stepping around the corner of a building and thus would have been protected from any stone-throwing, certain of the Guardsman wheeled around and began shooting into the crowd of students.

     The reason behind this action was never determined.  Some said that a sniper had fired first, and others said that their lives were in danger—neither of which was proven true.

      In 13 seconds they fired 67 shots.  Thirteen students were hit, and of them 4 died: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder.  Some of the 13 hit were not even part of the demonstrators but were onlookers or were students passing on their way to class.  One of the students hit was 700 feet away from the guards.  The closet hit was 60 feet away.  None of the thirteen presented any threat to the guards.

     Because the investigation afterwards was botched, the prosecutors failed in their case to convict any of the guards.  The judge ruled that it was impossible to prove which of the guards shot which of the victims.  In the civil case $675,000 was divided 13 ways.

     President Nixon called the parents of only one of those four students because that student had been a member of the ROTC.  The phone never rang for the parents of the other three.  White House tapes later revealed that Nixon believed that the demonstrators were bums, that he felt that those wounded had it coming, and that he deliberately stalled the federal prosecution against the guards..  

     Over 4 million students protested the guards’ actions, and over 900 colleges and universities shut down, more than 500 of them for the rest of the semester.  It was the first national student strike.  Nixon was staggered by this hostile reaction, pushed to the point of physical and emotional collapse, and he withdrew his U.S. military invasion into Cambodia.  The White House soon looked like a besieged city when policemen and parked buses surrounded the President’s home.

     H.R. Haldeman later wrote, “Kent State, in May 1970, marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate.  None of us realized it then; we were all too busy trying to calm the national furor over the Cambodian invasion.”

     The Greek dramatist Euripides centuries ago wrote: “Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having a reserve of youthful citizens, while a king counts this a hostile element and seeks to slay the leading ones, all such as he deems discreet, for he feareth for his power.”

CIVIL WAR AND EASTER

by William H. Benson

April 20, 2006

     The calendar said it was Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865.  While truce flags snapped in the breeze outside, Lee met Grant in Wilmer McLean’s brick home in the town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

     In the artist’s rendition of that moment, a solemn Grant, seated at his own table and dressed in blue, looks on while Robert E. Lee, dressed in gray, signs his signature to the document that specified the terms of surrender that Grant had dictated.  Standing beside Lee was his secretary, Lt. Col. Charles Marshall, also in gray.  Behind Grant were eight Union officers, all in blue, and among them was Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, with his wavy blonde hair and drooping moustache.

     And then the calendar said it was Holy Week, and the President, Abraham Lincoln, admitted to his wife Mary Todd and others that he had had a vivid dream that had deeply shook him.  In that dream he had left his bed, awakened by sobs.  Lincoln had walked into the East Room and found a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.  He had asked one of the guards, “Who is dead in the White House?”  The soldier replied, “The President was killed by an assassin.”  A loud burst of grief from the crowd then awakened Lincoln.

     Mary Todd exclaimed, “That is horrid!  I wish you had not told it.”

     Lincoln calmed her, “Well, it is only a dream, Mary.  Let us say no more about it, and try to forget it.”  But Lincoln was shook to his depths.  Later to his aide, Ward Hill Lamon, he quoted Hamlet’s words: “To sleep; perchance to dream! ay, there’s the rub!”

     Despite the dream, that final week of Lincoln’s life, he was cheerful.  The war was over.  The Union was preserved.  The bloodshed had ended.  And the strain was lifted from his shoulders.  He should be cheerful.  But the final photograph of his life, taken that week by Alexander Gardner, showed a haggard face with eyes sunk deep, and a mass of wrinkles around the eyes.  The face told of the years of sadness.

     The calendar said it was Good Friday, April 14.  That day a ceremony was held at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor.  Retired Maj. Gen. Robert Anderson raised Old Glory high atop the flagpole, for it was he who had lowered it on April 14, 1861 when he and his Union troops had surrendered to the Confederates after a ferocious cannon attack.

     Reverend Henry Ward Beecher spoke at this national event, and he blamed the war on a small ruling class of the South and predicted that the common people of North and South would join and rule the country.  Psalms of thanksgiving were then read: “The Lord hath done great things for us: whereof we are glad. . . . Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.”

     In Washington the President and Mary Todd had plans to attend Fort’s theatre that evening to see the British play Our American Cousin.  It had been well publicized that they would be there.  Ulysses and Julia Grant were to go with them, but at the last moment they begged off.  Instead Maj. Henry Rathbone, acting as Lincoln’s bodyguard, and his fiancé, Clara Harris, joined the Lincolns.

     John Wilkes Booth, the hard-drinking actor and Southern sympathizer, stepped into the President’s theatre box, shot at Lincoln’s head, stabbed at Rathbone, and jumped over the rail onto the stage, catching his spur in the Union flag on the way down and ripping it.  Breaking his left shinbone above the instep on landing, he struggled to his feet and shouted, “Sic simper tyrannis,” Virginia’s state motto.  “Thus be it ever to tyrants.”

     The President was carried across the street to Mr. Peterson’s home, and there he lingered until Saturday morning, April 15 when he breathed his last and his heart quit beating.  The clock said  it was 7:22 a.m.

     That day a lot of Sunday sermons were tossed aside once the news of Lincoln’s passing was received.

     The calendar said that it was Easter Sunday, April 16.  Many of the sermons that day drew parallels between Lincoln and Christ, for both had a Judas.  Often Matthew 9:15 was quoted: “And Jesus said unto them, ‘Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?  but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.’”

     And then someone remarked, “A tree is best measured when it’s cut down.”         

TRIBALISM

by William H. Benson

April 6, 2006

     Tribalism seems the scourge of our generation.

     Scholars and observers find it convenient to carve nations and societies along sectarian, ethnic, and tribal lines.  To pigeonhole others seems an easy way to understand people.  But  tribalism carries the meaning that the tribes in a geographical region are actively hostile towards one another, which is often the case.  Civil conflict constantly churns up a society, one group battling another.  Examples are easily found.

     April 6 is Genocide Remembrance Day in the nation of Rwanda in east Africa.  On that day in 1994, Rwanda’s President was killed when his plane was shot down near Kigali Airport.  Hutu extremists were fearful that he was about to implement the Arusha Peace Accords, and that night the killings began.

      The Hutu armed militia set up road blocks and then went from house to house killing the Tutsis and the moderate Hutus.  Thousands died the first day.  By April 21, two weeks later the International Red Cross estimated that hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead.  By mid-May the estimate stood at 500,000, and when the killing finally ended in mid-July after 100 days, the figure stood at 800,000.

     The survivors struggle daily with the lingering impact of the atrocities: 400,000 children do not attend school because of a lack of teachers, 95,000 children are still orphaned even after twelve years, and the mental anguish can never be measured.

     Three weeks ago Slobodan Milosevic dropped dead of a heart attack in his jail cell in the Hauge, Netherlands, where he had been on trial since 2001 for crimes against humanity.  In the early 1990’s he had pursued a policy of “ethnic cleansing,” in which he had encouraged his Serbian followers to attack other sects in the former Yugoslavia.

     Communism had collapsed in eastern Europe, and Milosevic and his ultranationalist troopers had swept into the power vacuum, bringing with them hatred, mistrust, and suspicion of other ethnic groups, people whom the Serbs had lived beside for centuries.  At one point Milosevic authorized the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebenica, Bosnia.  That this Butcher of the Balkans lived his final years in a prison cell is at least one consolation.

     Rwanda and the Balkans are reminders of what happens in peoples’ minds.  They think, “It is us against them.  They are different, to be feared, skeptical and jealous of, hated, and eliminated.  Their culture, manners, language, and way of life is not like ours.”  Gentility, charity, and magnanimity gives way to suspicions, anger, a fear of a loss of power, grudges, and prejudices.

     Iraq is now split between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.  After the February 22^nd bombing of a Shiite shrine, a wave of sectarian bloodletting was unleashed.  Some 900 Iraqi civilians died in March and 700 in February.  Between 30,000 and 36,000 Iraqis have fled their homes because of sectarian violence or fear of reprisals.  “Everything has become sectarian and ethnic,” a U.S. army officer recently said. 

     “Culture—what a word!” wrote the historian Jacques Barzun in the Prologue to his work, From Dawn to Decadence.  Today the word stands for “a hodge-podge of overlapping things.”  We now have multiculturalism, cross-cultural events, an arts or science or literary culture, and cultural wars.  But underneath the pile of meanings, “culture” originally referred to a well-groomed mind, free of day-to-day interests and scraped free of provincialism.

     “Culture in this sense,” Barzun suggested, “is a simple metaphor from agri-culture.”  It refers to the process of digging up the weeds of faulty thinking, capturing or fencing out the wild animals of passion and suspicion, and planting seeds of hope and kindness and justice.  Like a garden, a person’s thoughts repeatedly need watered and weeded.

     Tribalism and sectarian ideology are familiar ruts that people so easily fall into, but they are a jungle of disappointing ideas without hope or solace or promise.

FILIPINO INSURGENTS

by William H. Benson

March 23, 2006

     President McKinley had won the war without much loss of life.  In 1898 in 113 days the U.S. army and navy had defeated the Spanish and driven them out of the Caribbean and Asia.  Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders had charged up San Juan Hill, liberating the Cubans, and in the Philippines in Manila Bay, George Dewey had bombed the Spanish navy out of existence.  John Hay called it a “splendid little war.”

     On December 10, 1898 the United States and Spain signed a peace treaty, in which the U.S. agreed to pay Spain $20 million.  Spain agreed to grant Cuba her independence and turn over the Philippine Islands to the Americans.  On February 6, 1899, the Senate ratified the Peace Treaty by a vote of 57 to 27.

     America now owned the 7,100 islands that make up the Philippine Islands and her 7 million subjects.  America had an empire.

     President McKinley felt it his Christian duty to take the islands.  He said, “I am not ashamed to tell you, Gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance that one night.  And one night later it came to me this way. . . . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could.”

     But because the Spanish missionaries had done their work, the Filipinos were already Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, a thing that the President did not understand.  Another was that he failed to foresee the extent of Filipino resistance to American rule.  America was ill-prepared for nation-building and had assumed that the Filipinos would appreciate American institutions and the ideals of American life.  

     The President and the Senate could not have been more wrong.  The Filipinos felt betrayed.  Cuba had received her independence, and they had not.  Led by Emilio Aguinaldo, the insurgents geared up for war.  McKinley believed the insurgents were a small isolated band, when in fact they were 80,000 strong.

     On a Saturday night, February 4, 1899, even while the Senate debated the treaty in Washington, a Beatrice, Nebraska army volunteer, Willie Grayson, while on patrol, fired on four Filipino insurgents, and the war began.

     It quickly turned ugly, sordid, and shameful.  It was fought in a tropical jungle where the men sweated and dropped due to malaria.  So enraged were the American soldiers when they saw their buddies mutilated by bolo knives, that they would slaughter an entire village—men, women, and children.  The insurgents took to guerilla warfare, melting into the jungle whenever the Americans attacked a village.

     General Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s father, told Washington that the situation required drastic action and he requested more troops.

     The American public began to hear of atrocities.  There was the water torture where  American soldiers would pour water down a prisoner’s throat until he either yielded information or died.  Then, soldiers rounded up insurgents and stuck them into camps.

     President McKinley believed it would be cowardly to simply pull up anchor and sail away.  He thought that if the native Filipinos were left alone to govern themselves, they would fall into anarchy.  While the war raged in the jungle, Congress poured millions into the islands to improve roads, sanitation, public health, and the school system.  All of this vast expenditure was little appreciated because the Filipinos hated compulsory civilization, preferring less sanitation and more liberty.

      Finally, in March of 1901 the U.S. army captured Emilio Aguinaldo, and he signed an oath of allegiance to the U.S. even though fighting continued for years.  Some 5,000 American soldiers had died of battle or disease, and also so had about 200,000 Filipinos.

     On March 24, 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill granting independence to the Philippines, and it took effect on July 4, 1946, ending fifty years of U.S. control.

      March 19th marked the third anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. war in Iraq, another American attempt at nation-building, and of civilizing a foreign people who would prefer less sanitation and more liberty.