WORDS

by William H. Benson

December 28, 2006

     At the encouragement of a family member, I slowed down for two hours last Friday night to watch a video: Alkeelah and the Bee, and strangely enough, I liked it.  It is the fictional story of Akeelah Anderson, an 11-year-old African-American girl with a talent for spelling words.  She attends Crenshaw Middle School in Los Angeles and wins the school’s spelling bee.  She goes to the regional contest and wins that.  She then goes to Washington D.C. to participate in the Scripps National Spelling Bee Contest.

     In the process of preparing, she meets a UCLA college professor who coaches her and who tells her, “Akeelah, you can win the national contest, for you have a brain like a sponge.”  She makes friends with the other spellers, and she discovers that her family and friends want to help her succeed.

     In the process of preparing for the national contest, she memorizes the spelling of five thousand words, such as xanthosis—the yellow discoloration of cancerous tumors; argillaceous—of or relating to clay; ratiocination—the process of exact thinking; prestidigitation—sleight of hand; pulchritude—physical comeliness; and logorrhea, excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness. 

     Although Akeelah and the other national spellers reside in a verbal universe quite apart and superior from that of the common person, human beings build much of their lives upon language, and upon its building blocks, the individual words.  Words surround us, define us, determine us, emanate from us, strike us, soothe us, and comfort us.  With assistance from facial expressions and body gestures, words communicate any number of moods and ideas.

     Words have the talent of leaving traces of themselves as they course through our brains, and these traces we call memories.  It seems to me that poetry or lyrics set to music burn even deeper into our brains than without the music.  We can hear a song after the passage of decades, and it stimulates a series of associations, memories, emotions, and attachments.  A radio station in Denver plays music from the 70’s for commuters on the way to work, and they call it the “morning glow.”

     Here it is Christmas, and we reflect upon the shepherds standing upon those Judean hillsides caring for their flocks.  They heard the angel’s message, and then they heard the heavenly host singing.  From the perspective of the shepherds, the angels were the superior beings, capable of greater movement and possessing a deeper insight and knowledge of a spiritual universe quite separate from ordinary men and women.

     But from the perspective of the sheep, it was the shepherds who were the superior beings, for it is they who have the greater movement, and they have language and words, communication tools that the dumb and brutish sheep cannot even dream of possessing.

     Logos was the Greek word for Word, and it referred to the Greek philosophy that reason was the controlling principle in the universe.  Christian writers then attached an additional meaning to Logos: that it was the divine wisdom which manifested itself in the acts of creating, governing, and redeeming the world.  In the dictionary you can find “Logos” immediately after logorrhea.

     At one point in the movie, Alkeelah’s coach tells her: “The question we should ask of ourselves is not ‘Who am I to believe that I am brilliant, talented, and gorgeous?’, but rather ‘Who am I not to believe that I am brilliant, talented, and gorgeous?’”  Because men, women, boys, and girls possess words, we all dwell in this Word, in this Logos.

     The verbal or literary is a way of conceiving the universe, as is pure mathematics, and yet each have their limits.  The literary critic Northrop Frye wrote, “Whenever we construct a system of thought to unite earth with heaven, the story of the Tower of Babel recurs: we discover that after all we can’t quite make it, and that what we have in the meantime is a plurality of languages.”  In other words we end up with “logorrhea”.   

WAR AND PEACE

by William H. Benson

December 14, 2006

     The calendar tells us that we are midway between Pearl Harbor and Christmas, between War and Peace, between an attack upon a Pacific Island and Advent.

     The history of the world constantly shifts between war and peace.  The one constant seems to be war, punctuated by fleeting moments of a fretful peace.  War disrupts people’s lives whether they are the aggressor, or the recipient, or the observer, who looks on amazed at how war can transform people into grotesque beings. 

     The twentieth-century seemed to be one of constant war across the Pacific, beginning first at the turn of the century in the Philippines against a guerrilla movement.  

     And then against the Japanese empire, the US relied upon a strategy that the historian Paul Johnson called the Jupiter-complex.  The pilot seated within a cabin at the front of an aircraft carrying bombs is like the Roman god seated upon the clouds who hurls down thunderbolts to strike those unsuspecting villagers wandering about upon the ground.

     The strategy worked only to a degree.  On Okinawa and Iwo Jima the Japanese army dug itself into the ground, into tunnels, a move that rendered the enormous firepower dropping from the sky ineffective.  It was the Army and the Marines, ground troops, who ferreted out the enemy from those tunnels with flame-throwers and hand grenades and ultimately secured those islands.

     The two atomic bombs ended the War in the Pacific, and the Americans and the Japanese cooperated in rebuilding Japan into a democracy and a capitalist country.

     In Korea during the last two years of that war, American jets carpet bombed North Korea daily, reducing the country to rubble.  One reporter said, “Every city was a collection of chimneys.  I saw thousands of chimneys and that was all.”  And so the North Koreans under Kim Il Jong have built a series of enormous underground train stations that can serve someday as bomb shelters.

     But against North Vietnam President Johnson unleashed unprecedented numbers of bombs.  The historian Stephen Ambrose wrote, “First, headlines proclaimed that America had dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II.  By 1967 it was more bombs than in the European Theater.  Then more in the whole of World War II.  Finally, by 1969, more bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, North and South, than on all targets in the whole of human history.”

     The US military failed in its venture to build a democratic nation in Vietnam, and  certain lessons can be drawn from that failure: that firepower does not always prevail; that in the war between machine and men, men can win; and that the power to destroy is not the power to control.  “We had to destroy the city to save it,” said one officer.

     President Johnson had wanted to bring democracy and prosperity to Southeast Asia, and instead he had only brought death and destruction.

     Stephen Ambrose said that “Americans should not be engaged in nation-building.  It is costly and worse, unworkable.”

     Walter Lippmann wrote, “America can exert its greatest influence in the outer world by demonstrating that she can solve the problems of modernity.  Example, and not intervention and firepower, has been the historic instrument of American influence on mankind.”

     The Hebrew prophet Joel called for war.  “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears.”  But the voice for peace argues that we should pound those swords and spears back into plowshares and pruning hooks.  Bomb shells gutted of their explosive innards and cut up would make interesting bathtubs or furniture.

     The objectives for attacking Iraq were immediately completed: we separated Saddam Hussein from his WMD’s that like a ghost had never even existed.  But another goal snuck in the back door—that of nation-building, converting Iraq into a democracy, a policy that has proven costly, unworkable, and a failure.

     At the Constitutional Convention, Pierce Butler urged his fellow delegates to “follow the example of Solon, who gave the Athenians not the best government he could devise, but the best they would receive.”  Americans in Iraq should do the same.

READING AND WHY

by William H. Benson

November 30, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVOLUTION IN HUNGARY

by William H. Benson

November 16, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     It was in Hungary that the Cold War turned hot.

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

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

ALGERIA, AFGHANISTAN, AND VIETNAM

by William H. Benson

November 2, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YORKTOWN AND LEWIS AND CLARK

by William H. Benson

October 19, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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