TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2007

     On June 12, 1987, twenty years ago this week, Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two years later Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did permit the Germans to pull down the wall that had divided East and West Berlin since 1961, since the days of Khrushchev and Kennedy.

     Reagan’s injunction to Gorbachev was Reagan’s finest moment as President, for he understood better than others that America leads best when she promotes peaceful solutions to the seemingly insolvable problems that challenge the world’s nations. Always open, expansive, sunny, and self-confident, Reagan had earlier called the Soviet system “an evil empire” and had predicted that it would end up on “the ash heap of history.” Events in his lifetime proved him correct.

     Walls surround us and dictate where we are, who we are, and what we do. It is human nature to build walls with whatever materials are at hand: trees, sod, stones, or steel, for walls offer us security and protection. A home’s boundaries are determined by its walls.

     Some walls were built to stay, such as the Great Wall of China, built over thousands of years with “dedication and devotion” and “exemplary discipline,” but, as one commentator put it, “This is how the world’s energy is wasted.” And then there are those walls about the castles built all across Europe a millennium ago.

     “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls come a’tumbling down.”

     Today new walls are going up: the wall dividing Israel and Palestine, and the proposed seven-hundred mile wall between the United States and Mexico, even though at last report only two miles had been built.

     Two weeks ago Reagan’s diaries were published, and they show a man very comfortable acting and serving as President. He spent a lot of time watching television and lounging by the pool, and yet he was sensitive to the charge that he did not work hard enough as President. He wrote, “The press keeps score on office hours but knows nothing about the never ending desk & paperwork that usually goes on ‘til lights out.” He was not disengaged, but the walls of the White House determined what he did there and when.

     Above all else, Reagan championed freedom—both political and economic.

     It was Adlai Stevenson who said, “Freedom is a plant which grows only from knowledge. It must be watered by faith. It will come to leaf and fruit and flower only in the benevolent sunlight of peace.” Knowledge, faith, and peace: Let those be our garden’s walls in which freedom can flourish. Of knowledge Thomas Jefferson said, “if a people expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”

     At opposite poles from knowledge, faith, and peace live fear, worry, panic, attacks, and anxiety, and within their ugly walls dwells war, death, destruction, revenge, and utter hopelessness—an accurate portrayal of Iraq today.

     Last week in Newsweek the journalist Fareed Zakaria compared the Reagan years of the early eighties with those of President Bush. “Today the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed.”

     What Zakaria is pointing out are the walls, ugly walls, walls covered in multi-colored graffiti, walls that hem people in instead of liberating them, and walls that transform people into terrified victims instead of a freed people seeking out new challenges. He sees those walls, and so do I, and so do most people.

     I say, “Mr. President, tear down those walls.”

AMERICA’S RELIGIOUS LEADERS

by William H. Benson

May 31, 2007

     Americans have always paid homage to their religious leaders. Indeed, the persuasive influence of the religious leader has remained one of the few constants of America’s heritage. Americans from every generation seem to want to follow that person with a resonating voice who offers a new slant on the Christian faith.

     At Plymouth Rock in 1620, there was the Pilgrim Separatist William Bradford. At Massachusetts Bay in 1630, there were the Anglican preachers Jonathan Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, Richard Mather, and John Cotton. Although not separated from the Church, they wished to purify it of anything that remained from the Catholic Church.

     The deepest thinker among those early English colonists was Roger Williams, but his intellect led him to two startling conclusions: that politics should not have any bearing upon a religious service, and that religion should not ever enter into politics. Thus, he argued that it was wrong for England to have a cross emblazoned on the English flag, and that it was wrong to say an oath upon a Bible in a court of law. Winthrop thought Williams mad and gave him a choice: leave Massachusetts or live in a jail cell. He left.

     In the nineteenth century, others with their own ideas stepped forward: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers; Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons; Mary Baker Eddy, the head of the Christian Scientists; and Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

     Then, in the final decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of evangelists appeared. These were men such as Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Rex Humbard, Norman Vincent Peale, Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, James Dobson, and Jimmy Swaggert. They each wanted to lead Americans back to the Bible, to their own notion of salvation, and to an unwavering belief in ourselves as Americans and in the Christian faith. For sixty years, one after another they have stood for a moment tall as giants of the American Christian faith.

     All those men understood the power of the media. They wrote books; Billy Graham’s Peace with God (1953) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) led the way to a river of books, a few of more lasting quality than others.

     Some built exotic churches: Rex Humbard’s in Akron, Ohio was circular, and Robert Schuller’s in Garden Grove, California is made of glass. They published magazines. They built colleges. They bought businesses. They went on the radio, and they all went on the television, for they clearly understood its power.

     Some, such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert, failed in their attempts to build ever-bigger media empires; both were brought down and defrocked by their own scandalous actions—Jim Bakker in 1987 and Jimmy Swaggert a year later, and neither have been seen much since. Some, such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, were without scandals. 

     But this old guard of religious leaders must pass, like those before them, to others, to a new generation. One can only wonder what brand of cleric will appear in the twenty-first century. Ted Hager of Colorado Springs offered much promise, but he fizzled out in a spectacular scandal last fall before he had achieved national fame.

     Norman Vincent Peale died in 1993. Had he lived he would be 109 today, for his birthday was May 31, 1898. Billy Graham is retired to his home in Montreat, North Carolina, content to end his former globe-trotting days at home with his wife Ruth beside him, and two weeks ago, Rev. Jerry Falwell of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia passed away, due to heart failure.

     One conclusion. Roger Williams would never have approved of James Dobson’s lobbying group—the Family Research Council, nor of Pat Robertson’s feeble attempts to run for President, nor of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Roger Williams insisted upon the absolute separation of the church and the clergy away from the state’s “wicked” political processes. Williams was most concerned about ensuring the purity of the church, and that, he believed, was achieved by avoiding the corrupting influence of the state.

     Politics and religion do not mix easily, something that Roger Williams instinctively believed. Would that all future American religious leaders so believe.

PALESTINE

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2007

     By the late 1940s, the British were driven to distraction as to how to solve the problem of Palestine, for both the Arabs and the Jews were contending for ownership of this land. The Arabs, or Palestinians, had lived there for centuries and had legitimate claims to the land. The Jews were recent immigrants, but they claimed that it was their ancient homeland. The problem seemed insoluble.

     It was the British who had encouraged the Jews to immigrate to Palestine in the first place. In 1917 in order to gain support for its war effort against Germany, the British had issued the Balfour Declaration, which was a promise to the Jews of Europe and elsewhere that they would have a new national homeland in Palestine someday. The Jews responded by expanding their Zionist movement. 

     But as the Jews immigrated in ever increasing numbers into Palestine, the Arabs harbored feelings of resentment, and rightfully so. After all, they were losing their land to the Jews. The Arabs demanded that the British restrict Jewish immigration, and the British complied throughout the 1930s. Jewish militants resorted to violence to ensure their foothold in Palestine.

     By 1947 the British wished to wash their hands of what seemed an insolvable problem—two very different peoples claiming the same land, and so the British turned Palestine over to the United Nations. On November 29, 1947 UN delegates in the General Assembly voted 33 to 13 to divide Palestine into two states: an Arab state, and a Jewish state—Israel. The Jews agreed to this partition, but the Arabs refused.

     On May 14, 1948 Israel declared its independence, because that was the date that the British mandate over Palestine officially ended. And all parties understood that war was imminent. The next day five surrounding Arab nations—Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt—all attacked this fledgling new nation of Israel. It was a war for independence. Some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, fearful of being caught in the middle of this war, fled their homes and lands, intending on returning after the war ended.

     By 1949 Transjordan, later renamed Jordan, controlled and had then annexed most of the territory west of the Jordan River, the West Bank; the United Nations’ delegates had designated this territory for the new Palestinian Arab state. Egypt retained the Gaza Strip. The Israelis had fought valiantly and had retained control of the territory the UN had intended for them and had taken additional lands, those intended for the new Arab state.    

     The Palestinians were suddenly, seemingly overnight, a displaced people, refugees living without land, without access to their homes. And they have remained in this position for decades, boiling with resentment at the injustices heaped upon them and their helplessness. Attempts to create their own government have met with a series of obstacles. This is a problem that must be solved someday.

     The Middle East now today has a new refugee problem—the people of Iraq, and their numbers dwarf even those of the Palestinians, half a century before. The New York Times reported last Sunday that “the overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million.” The civil war between Shiites and Sunnis have driven out all classes of people out of Iraq and into places in Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey. It has been an exodus out of Iraq’s battlefields into shelter found in exile.

     The Bush government has only just begun to grapple with the question of the Iraqi refugees. John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state in the Bush administration, said that the refugees have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam. . . . Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”

What that means is that the United States has passed the task of dealing with Iraq’s refugees over to Iraq’s neighbors.

     The Palestinians of a half a century ago, and the Iraqis of today are both refugees, and both are in search of a solution that seems not quickly or easily forthcoming.      

SCIENCE WRITING

by William H. Benson  

May 3, 2007

     Great writers of science need not be scientists, although some certainly were, such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, as well as the paleontologist Jay Gould. But my vote for the best modern-day science writer is Bill Bryson, an American who writes on a multitude of subjects, one of which happens to be science. Bryson married an English girl, Cynthia, and they have chosen to live in England.

     In 2003 Bryson published what became a bestseller, A Short History of Nearly Everything. In less than five hundred pages, he presents an overview of the entire body of scientific knowledge accumulated by thousands of scientists over the last four centuries. He writes in a style that is readable and yet engaging, even stimulating.

     He writes on the formation of the universe, on the Milky Way galaxy, on the stars, the solar system, the sun, the planets, the comets, the meteors, the elements, the atoms, and on the myriad forms of life on planet Earth: plants, animals, fungi, and the several forms of life on micro level. He made trips around the world to visit museums and interview living scientists, he read a number of books, and he covers a lot in a short amount of time.

     Bryson tells in chapter 13 about the crater located at Manson, Iowa, ninety miles northwest of Des Moines. Sometime in the distant past, a rock that weighed perhaps ten billion tons and traveling at perhaps two hundred times the speed of sound slammed into the earth at the point where Manson, Iowa now sits.  The resulting hole was three miles deep and more than twenty miles across.

     “The Manson impact,” Bryson writes, “was the biggest thing that has ever occurred on the mainland United States. Of any type. Ever. The crater it left behind was so colossal that if you stood on one edge you would only just be able to see the other side on a good day. It would make the Grand Canyon look quaint and trifling.”

     But then, after 2.5 million years of ice sheets which ground and scraped and dumped rich glacial deposits into it, the crater filled in and left a landscape that “is as flat as a tabletop. Which is of course why no one has ever heard of the Manson crater.” The occasional visitor to the site is disappointed.

     The latter half of the book he devotes to Earth’s different life forms.

     One of the most interesting is the trilobite, a prehistoric arthropod—three-bodied with a head, thorax and abdomen, like insects and crustaceans—that lived everywhere on the planet for about 300 million years, which is twice the span of the dinosaurs. The trilobites were mostly the size of beetles, but some were as big as crabs, and they included some 60,000 species.

     In the Natural History Museum in London stand a series of file cabinets with drawers filled with trilobites in fossilized form, some twenty thousand specimens. Richard Fortey of the Museum said, “It seems like a big number, but you have to remember that millions upon millions of trilobites lived for millions upon millions of years in ancient seas, so twenty thousand isn’t a huge number.”

     Bryson writes, “As with all extinct creatures, there is a natural temptation to regard them (the trilobites) as failures, but in fact they were among the most successful animals ever to live.”

     But it is the microscopic life forms—the bacteria—that demands humans’ undivided attention. We tend to think that we can banish bacteria or kill them off through antibiotics and disinfectants. “Don’t you believe it, Bryson writes. “Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be. Bacteria, never forget, got along for billions of years without us. We couldn’t survive a day without them. They process our wastes and make them usable again. . . . Microbes, such as algae, provide us with the air we breathe.”

     Craters that do not exist anymore because of the action of the ice ages, trilobites that lived for eons and then died, and bacteria who appear indestructible—all that and much more appear in Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything.         

CONNECTIONS

by William H. Benson

April 19, 2006

     Years ago I found a job working for a contractor who had a gift of expressing his thoughts in precise blue-collar language. For example, when he described a person he thought incredibly smart, he would say, “He’s forgotten more than most people ever learned.” And for people he considered ignorant, he delivered his choicer epithets.

     His connection between the reception of information, his formulated judgment of other people’s ideas or behavior, and his voiced opinion was immediate, as are most people’s. In an instant he connected thoughts.

      Five and a half years ago, the author and historian William Manchester announced that at age 79 he would not complete the third volume of The Last Lion, his biography of Winston Churchill. He said, “I can’t put things together. I can’t make the connections.”

     A writer’s greatest fear is the loss of the ability to connect ideas, for writers depend on their ability to draw lines from one dot to another, from one idea to another, to make those connections out of thin air, or out of no air.

1. L. Mencken suffered a stroke late in life and suddenly could no longer read nor write. He said that the date of the stroke was the day that he had died. The connections he had depended upon to write his columns and books had short-circuited.

     Scientists have determined that intelligence and skill and prowess is regulated by the depth of interaction between the nerve fibers and the myelin which covers those fibers. Nerve fibers act like switches, instantaneous, but then why does it take so long to learn a set of complex skills?

     Douglas Fields, a lab director at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, explained, “Everything neurons do, they do pretty quickly; it happens with the flick of a switch. But flicking switches is not how we learn a lot of things. Getting good at piano or chess or baseball takes a lot of time, and that’s what myelin is good at.” As the myelin thickens, the better it insulates, and the faster the signals travel.

     Of memory St. Augustine said, “All these things the great recesses, the hidden and unknown caverns of memory receive and store, to be retrieved and brought forth when needed, each entering by its own gate. Yet, the thing themselves do not enter, but only the images of the things perceived are there, ready to be recalled in thought. But how these images are formed, who can tell?”

     “Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who has ever sounded the depths of it?”

     The brain’s architecture includes this unlimited memory supply, but also the ability to believe, to judge, to discern who and what to trust, and to accept without question a set of religious beliefs. Some believe quickly; others not at all.

     Recently, three neo-atheists—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennet—have argued that “religion is nothing more than a useless and sometimes dangerous, evolutionary accident.” And yet certain scientists disagree, arguing instead that “religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during human history. Religious belief permeates all human cultures throughout all human history.” These scientists are convinced that religious belief was a necessary ingredient for our specie’s survival.

     Walter Isaacson has just written a new biography on Albert Einstein. At age 12 he decided that religion was propaganda. “It was a crushing impression,” he later wrote. In other words, his connection with religion failed. But he developed connections with other things. For example, he wondered what light would look like if you rode beside a light beam, and so his intellect led him to the special theory of relativity.

     Einstein was one individual who did forget more than most people ever learn, and Isaac Newton was another. It was said that he would awaken in the morning but then sit on the edge of his bed for hours because a storm of ideas was bombarding his mind. The connections were literally bouncing off each other.

POETRY

by William H. Benson

April 5, 2007

     Bill Clinton, when President, designated April as the National Poetry Month. He called it “a welcome opportunity to celebrate . . . the vitality and diversity of voices reflected in the works of today’s American poets.” Yes, indeed, our nation’s poets, especially those of the past, are a cloud, not of witnesses, but of “disturbers of the peace,” which is what Plato called them, and “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” which is what the poet Shelley called them.

      It seems that April and poetry belong together. It was usually in April, close to the end of the school year, that the English teachers would dust off their poetry books and try to teach us frightfully worrisome things like iambic pentameter and rhyme and alliteration, and a hundred other literary devices. Alas, the lessons often fell on deaf ears, for carefree school girls and energetic school boys normally do not pursue poetry with enthusiasm.

     And yet the young of America are not without poetry. They are inundated in it. They swim in it. They live their lives surrounded by it. They cannot get enough of it. It is piped into their heads through earplugs and ipods and other electronic gadgetry. It is lyrics, accompanied by electronically-produced music.

     Most of this poetry set to music is of little value, communicating nothing that can be called intelligent, laced with vulgarities, drowned out by the drums and guitars if not slurred by the vocalists, or nonsensical: “ABC. 123. Baby you and me.” And yet once people hear that music, they recognize the words and can recite them: they know poetry, but that of the popular kind.

      George Will, the Newsweek columnist, a month ago pointed out that February 27^th was the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the New England poet who wrote the familiar phrases: “Ships that pass in the night,” “footprints on the sands of time,” “the patter of little feet,” “Into each life some rain must fall,” “By the shore of Gitche Gumee,” and “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Alas, Longfellow now belongs to those poets considered unpopular.

      And then there is Edgar Allan Poe who staked a claim on gloomy strangeness: “It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;—And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.” And who can ever extract from his or her mind Poe’s haunting words, “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’”?

     And then there is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a dense multi-layered lengthy work that succeeds in captivating the American spirit: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with every-returning spring.”

      Robert Frost wrote of the simplest things. For example, late one evening he was riding in a carriage pulled by his horse, when he stopped to admire the “woods fill up with snow.” He wondered that his “horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near.” But then Frost concluded his short poem with the gentlest of words: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.”  

     A good poem communicates much with a minimum of words. For example, A. H. Houseman in his I To My Perils described a pessimist: “The thoughts of others were light and fleeting, Of lovers’ meeting Or luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady, So I was ready When trouble came.”

     Longfellow, Poe, Whitman, Frost, and Houseman—along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—stand tall today as our nation’s poets, our literary treasure. They thought and saw that which others did not think or see. As Cezanne said of the artist Monet, “He is only an eye—but what an eye!”