TUESDAY–SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2003

     Last week Newsweek reported that Osama bin Laden, hiding in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, spoke last January at the funeral of one of his daughters-in-law, who had died in childbirth, and he blamed America for her death.  He said, “I had enough riches to enjoy myself like an Arab shiek, but I decided to fight against those infidel forces that want to sever us from our Islamic roots.  For that cause, Arabs, Taliban, and my family have been martyred.”

        The Islamist extremists, such as bin Laden, are scathing in their denunciation of the United States and the way the American people live such shallow, casual, and undisciplined and irreligious lives.  Majid Anaraki, an Iranian, described the United States as a “collection of casinos and supermarkets linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere.”

     They are aghast that this corrupt and sinful culture through satellite television and the internet can infiltrate into what they see as the superior and purer Islamic nation and influence its citizens to abandon their committment to Allah and his prophet Mohammed.

     They are especially offended that Christian America and the Israeli Jews hold a measure of control over two of the holiest places in the Islamic faith: Mecca and Jerusalem.

     In 1998 Osama bin Laden told his followers, “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousand of its troops to the land of the two holy mosques.” 

     He was referring to the first Gulf War when the ruling elite in Saudia Arabia allowed American soldiers to step on the land of Mecca and Medina in order to defend them against Saddam Hussein.  This was a humiliation from which the Islamic nation has never fully recovered.

     All of Islam is offended by the Middle East’s weak and powerless position and the backwardness of its people, for some one thousand years ago, the Middle East was vastly superior to both Europe and Africa which were seen as outposts of ignorance and barbarity.  And then Europe caught up and surpassed the Middle East, vastly outdistancing their civilization.

     Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong makes the point that the works of Mozart, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Stravinsky, and George Orwell have traveled all over the globe.  But they stop at Islam’s borders, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, and compose.

     Just as easily as the Middle East can point out what is wrong with the West, the Western world can quickly point out what is wrong in the Middle East.  It is a closed society.  Religion is mixed up with politics.  Individual liberties are sublimated in order to maintain religious purity.  An open and liberal education is not readily available.  Women live lives as semi-slaves.  The society discourages the free flow of ideas, both political and religious.

     It is as if two men are standing on either side of a great gulf pointing an accusing finger at the other.  One is powerful; the other is weak.  One tolerates any religion; the other allows only one.  One guarantees personal freedoms; the other demands allegiance to Allah.  One is supposedly corrupted by his wealth and power; the other lives a religiously pure life.  One unleashes “shock and awe”; the other unveils terror.  And both think that they are right. 

     And the fault line that separates the two men runs through places like Ground Zero at the site of the former twin towers and at the Pentagon and in a wooded area in Pennsylvania.

     Bernard Lewis wrote that the Arab world is now continually asking itself pertinent questions, such as: Who did this to us?  What did we do wrong?  How do we put it right?  What has Islam done to the Muslims? or better yet–What have the Muslims done to Islam?

     Lewis makes the case that if the Middle East continues to follow the path the extremists demand, “the suicide bomber will become the metaphor of the Middle East and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression. The road to democracy is long and hard and full of pitfalls and obstacles.”

     Two years separate us now from the second bloodiest day in U.S. history (behind Antietam in the Civil War), when on Tuesday morning, 9/11/2001, just over 3000 people died at the hands of suicide hijackers.  The healing process, if there can be such a thing, is just beginning.  

THE WILL POWER TO WIN

by William H. Benson

August 28, 2003

     The Sixties were years marked by two massive struggles: first, the Black Americans demanded equality and an end to discrimination and second, whether to fight or give up in Vietnam.  The outcomes of both hovered around the question of who had the superior willpower.

     Young Americans today often fail to understand the widespread discrimination and racism that characterized American society up and into the Sixties.  Beginning in 1955 when Rosa Parks sat down at the front of the bus, the blacks demanded a chance to get out of the ghetto and to find better jobs, homes, and educations.  Too often black children in the ghetto had picked up the message that they were neither able nor expected to get anywhere.

     Black leadership gathered around Martin Luther King, who called for a year-long boycott of  Montgomery, Alabama’s bus system until a federal court ordered desegregation.  He then led a march to Washington D.C. that included 250,000 people, and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial he spoke for sixteen minutes on August 28, 1963, forty years ago today.

     “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by their character.  I have a dream.”  His words are now chiseled into the Lincoln Memorial’s steps.

     King had argued for peaceful nonviolent resistance, using the boycott and the march, but after his assasination the pent-up frustration that discrimation had produced boiled over into city-wide destructive riots that tore at the very fabric of American society.

     However, by then the black leadership’s will to win had produced results.  President Johnson stood before Congress in 1963 and said, “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights.  We have talked for a hundred years or more.  It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”  The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment that eliminated the poll tax.

     As for the war in Vietnam, as early as July 14, 1964 the Joint Chiefs reported to President Johnson that, “There seems to be no reason we cannot win if such is our will–and if that will is manifested in strategy and tactical operations.”  The air force told him that the offensive would produce results if it was heavy, swift, repeated endlessly without pause nor restraint.

     But when General Earl Wheeler told Johnson that it would take 700,000 to a million men and seven years, Johnson was unwilling to pay this bill.  Instead, he chose the cheap way with hesitant, slow, and restricted bombing that allowed the North Vietnamese time to build shelters and adjust.

     And the North Vietnamese leaders never wavered in their determination to control the entire country at any cost; they were never influenced by the number of the casualties they received or gave.  The will to win was all on their side.

     The media turned against the war first, and so the coverage of the war became biased.  The media was misled by others, and in turn it misled its readers and viewers.  American successes became reverses when the facts were often otherwise.  Paul Johnson, the historian, wrote, “Once the TV presentation of the war became daily and intense, it worked on the whole against American interests.”

     In the face of media criticism, Johnson’s once strong spirit in Vietnam faltered, and he announced he would not run again for President in 1968.  His will to win had vanished.

     Then, on August 28, 1968 Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daly called in the police to break up an anti-war demonstration during the Democratic National Convention.  The cameras zoomed in, and finally public opinion against the war soared to record levels.

     To fight and defeat an enemy requires an overpowering will to win.  Lincoln had it, and so did Grant and Sherman, as did Churchill and FDR and Truman.

     Today across the map of the Middle East, America is fighting terrorism and totalitarianism and fundamentalism–all subverted and twisted ideologies.  To win this war, to pass on to our children the rights and privileges of Western Civilization, we must tap into a deep reserve of strength and willpower.  In so doing we can find the will as well as the way to win.

CALIFORNIA AND ILLEGAL ALIENS

by William H. Benson

August 14,. 2003

     By August 13, 1521 Cortez had effectively conquered the Aztec Indians in present-day Mexico City.  He and his fellow conquistadors established a two-tiered class structure with the very powerful ruling elite on top and always anxious to retain their control and the very poor and subservient people underneath.  A great gulf, or a chasm, stretched between the two social groups then as it still does today. 

     To prevent any chance for reform or a disastrous revolution, the Mexican government looks the other way as the more ambitious and daring of its citizens flee north into the United States to find work, and so immigration has become the ruling elite’s safety valve on Mexican society.

     If the immigrant survives the trip across the burning desert, he or she soon discovers another chasm.  Yes, there are jobs available for the alien in the United States, but they are backbreaking and mind-numbing, the kind of work that the Americans themselves do not want, like field work.

     Victor Davis Hanson, a professor in the Greek and Latin classics at California State in Fresno, described what it is like to pick peaches: “The 12-foot ladder is heavy and unstable, especially when you must clamber up among the top branches 60 or 70 times a day and then descend with 50 pounds of peaches.  You tend to run rather than walk because at piece-rate labor, you can make $90 to $120 in a 9-hour shift.”

     Hanson is a fifth-generation California farmer as well as a member of California’s educational system–the 10 campuses that make up the University of California, including Berkeley and UCLA, and the 23 campuses that compose the California State University system.  Plus there is a web of community colleges.  Together it is a vast public university system and an invaluable source for upward mobility for the recent arrivals–legal or illegal.

     To crawl up that social ladder, up and out of the peach orchard and into the classroom teaching Plato’s Dialogues, required for Hanson’s family 5 generations.  Some families can climb quicker, in just a couple of generations, but most require three or more.

     The news coming out of California is that the Governor, Gray Davis, will face a recall election, and that a variety of personalities, including Arnold Schwartznegger, want the state’s top job.  The chasm in the state’s projections this year yawns wide, and Gray Davis is catching the blame.

     I think that the columnist Mona Charen unfairly pinned the blame when she wrote, “The huge array of government services that these newcomers expect and get are bankrupting the state and will continue to do so absent an abrupt change of direction.”  The presence of the illegal aliens is  only one of several reasons that together have created the state’s crisis.

     But what should California do about the illegal aliens?  And here another chasm gapes open; this one over ideologies.  Victor Hanson in his new book, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming argued forcefully for “assimiliation” which as a model has worked well for centuries in creating happy and productive American citizens.  Immigrants were expected to learn English, adopt America’s history and culture as their own, and form close ties to their new country.

     But then over the past four decades a new ideology, “biculturalism,” has eclipsed assimilation.  The bicultural teachers have taught that the immigrant’s government, language, and culture are superior to anything that America has, which is then depicted as cruel, demanding, and intolerant. The immigrants tend to end up loaded with resentment and feeling victimized when asked to learn English and American history.  It is difficult to climb a social ladder carrying such feelings.

     Californians will work toward resolving their current crisis–with or without Arnold Schwartznegger’s help.  California will continue to deal with the illegal aliens, and the California educational system will be forced to trim its excess fat, to the bone if necessary.

     And today’s immigrant, from whichever corner of the planet, will have a choice: nurse his or her wounded pride that his language and culture and history are not appreciated here or learn the English language and adopt the American culture, which is what Arnold Schwartznegger did.

HERMAN MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK

by William H. Benson

July 31, 2003

     Unlike Jonah’s great fish, the White Whale had a name–Moby Dick, and unlike Jonah’s short story, Herman Melville wrote a lengthy novel.  But like Jonah and the whale, Moby Dick is a fish story.

     Captain Ahab’s crew included an odd assortment of sailors–Starbuck, the first mate, Stubb, and Flask; the harpooners– the tattooed Queequeg and Tashtego and Daggoo; and Ishmael, the narrator of the story.  Melville began his novel with the words, “Call me Ishmael”.

     And then there is Captain Ahab who had lost a leg on a previous expedition when this great White Whale he had named Moby Dick had somehow bitten it off.  Motivated by hate and anxious for revenge, Ahab finally told his crew of his true intentions of finding and killing Moby Dick after they had set sail, and the crew agreed to join him in his hate campaign; after all, what choice did they have?  And so the objective of the voyage shifted from that of gathering whale oil and bone to that of seeking revenge.

     Few readers today have the patience to get through to the final pages, but Ahab and his crew eventually find and chase the White Whale for three days.  Then, at one point the crew could see that Moby Dick seemed determined to swim away from the ship.  “Oh! Ahab,” cried Starbuck, “not too late is it, even now, the third day to desist.  See! Moby Dick seeks thee not.  It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him.”

     It was strange that a first mate on a whaling vessel did not want to harpoon a whale, but Starbuck by then understood that Captain Ahab’s obsession to kill the whale had driven him and his crew along a self-destructive path that could consume them all.

     And then Moby Dick turned and head-butted the ship, the Pequod, seriously damaging the hull, and the crew realized that the voyage was over.  A harpooning mechanism knocked Captain Ahab into the ocean, and was never seen again. 

     In his last few moments before the ship sank, Stubb cried out, “Cherries! cherries! cherries!  Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”  And Flask replied, “Cherries?  I only wish that we were where they grow.”

     The Pequod took on water and sank along with the crew.  The phrase at the top of the half-page Epilogue is a quote from the book of Jonah: “And I only am escaped to tell thee,” because Ishamel, the narrator, survived to supposedly write the story.

     At the end of Candide, another major literary work, the French thinker Voltaire summarized his philosophy with the sentence, “Each of us must cultivate our own garden,” a conclusion that philosophers and thinkers have pondered over much through the years, often wondering how to apply it to humans and to their institutions and to their individual circumstances.

     Applied to Moby Dick one can conclude that it is difficult to cultivate a garden out at sea, certainly when following someone else’s crazed notions of righting past wrongs and of seeking vengeance.  It is difficult to bite into a garden’s fruits and vegetables when we have not planted and cultivated and then harvested from our own garden.  For at sea we can only dream of tasting a bing cherry.

     August the first is Herman Melville’s birthday, and perhaps it can be a day to go fishing, but perhaps  not for a whale.  But it is also the season to cultivate and yes even harvest tomatoes and cucumbers and watermelons and green peppers and onions from our own gardens.  

THEORIES

by William H. Benson

July 17, 2003

     So much of how we, the members of the Western tradition, see and experience our world is derived from, or at least shaped by, the theories presented by a series of original thinkers.

     For example, Karl Marx, a German intellectual, wrote about class conflict between the bourgeoisie, the merchant class, and the proletariat, the labor class, and he predicted a revolution where the proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie and that a classless society would result where everyone would share equally.

     Albert Einstein, a Swiss patent clerk, presented his special and general theories of relativity and his vision of the relationship between space and time and energy and the speed of light within the universe.

     Charles Darwin, the English biologist, thought deeply about the variations in the species of animal life and arrived at a theory of evolution based upon “survival of the fittest” in a process he called “natural selection.”

     Sigmund Freud, the Viennese medical doctor, delved into the inner workings of the human mind and came up with his own vocabulary: repression, renouncing desire, the unconscious, the id, the ego, and the superego, the Oedipal-complex, libido, as well as his own science which he called psychoanalysis.

     Each produced a theory within a distinct body of knowledge: political/social, physics, biology, and psychology, and in the years since each of their theories have been accepted by some, rejected by others, tried by many, attacked by a few, or denounced by the multitudes.

     In whichever country it has been applied, Marxist Communism has proven a failure, a bankrupt ideology, where all the people end up poor, for Karl Marx failed to understand how powerful capitalism was as an engine for human advancement.

     On the other hand, astrophysicists have made gigantic strides in understanding the workings of our universe by incorporating Albert Einstein’s ideas into their ever advancing theories.

     Darwin’s theory of evolution is today accepted by the anthropologists and biologists as a cornerstone in knowing how animal life has progressed through the eons, but it is still a live issue that continues outraging the fundamentalists who argue instead for a creationist theory.  Some scientists have even tried to unite the two theories into one–a creationist evolution.

     But psychologists have pushed aside Freud’s theories, as if they were “stuffed birds on the shelf”, as the literary critic Harold Bloom put it.  “Freudian psychoanalysis arrived, had its equivocal triumph, and then departed forever.”  As a science Freud’s provocative ideas are today remembered as relics, one-time novel concepts that had merit only for a moment, and so  psychologists have forged ahead, leaving Sigmund Freud behind in the dust.

     Within each body of knowledge theories appear and then are overshadowed by new theories, and it may seem that the most recent proves the previous wrong.  Actually new theories may include information from a preceding theory, and some old theories once discarded then can and do re-emerge at a later point. 

     One might wonder what new theories are waiting in the wings off the stage of our awareness for some thoughtful person to discover.  It is just speculation but I think that men and women of the twenty-first century will present new and startling and breath-taking theories that will attempt to unite various bodies of knowledge together into a single theory.  

     As typical Americans our lives this summer are hemmed in by concerns about family, job, home, food, ball games, travel, vehicles, the war in Iraq, and the approaching political campaigns.  But beyond those matters, beyond the outer reaches of our thoughts, an ideological war is raging, where theories as to what is truth are battling for pre-eminence and for power.  Some are wrong in that they do not benefit all the people.  Others are ill-conceived.  Others are dangerous.  But  cccasionally, some theories fit the facts, benefit the people, and are over time accepted as good and true.  We can hope that the twenty-first century will be a new Age of Discovery of the best theories.

THOMAS PAINE

by William H. Benson

July 3, 2003

     Thomas Paine has never received a place equal among the other Revolutionary leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, even though Paine’s assistance may have made the difference in the War for Independence.

     But Paine had some serious detractions.  He was filthy.  He bathed infrequently and as a result smelled badly.  Most days food stains covered his shirts.  His clothes were cheap-looking and out of style.  He drank heavily all of his adult life.

     Besides being physically repulsive, he was usually penniless and often failed to pay his bills.  He refused to accept any royalties for his written works, such as Common Sense and The American Crisis, but then after the war he begged Congress for a house and land, which Congress grudgingly gave him.  But all of his adult life he moved from one room to another, dependent upon the generosity of others, who ended up often evicting him, causing a big fight.  Visitors found his room always dirty.

     He married twice when still a young man in England.  He buried his first wife just months after their wedding, and his second wife he abandoned when he came to America.  He never pursued a divorce from her and never remarried, preferring young French harlots.

     The British despised him during the Revolutionary War, and then later convicted him of treason when he tried to foment a Revolution against the King in Britain.  He encouraged the French Revolution which threw out their King, but then the Reign of Terror swept him up and tossed him into prison, where he narrowly missed facing the guillotine.

     Once released from prison he finished his The Age of Reason, a diatribe against Christian beliefs, pointed and blunt.  Whatever fame he had enjoyed as a writer during the war he lost due to this work which detailed his deistic beliefs.  A hundred years later Theodore Roosevelt referred to Thomas Paine as “that dirty little atheist,” which he was not, but is still misunderstood today.

     Still in France Paine wrote a vicious letter to President George Washington, accusing him of trying to become a King in America as well as deliberately keeping Paine locked in a French prison, both untrue accusations.  Paine went so far as to have the letter printed in a Philadelphia newspaper.  Washington wisely shrunk back in a reserved and dignified silence, preferring not to get into a public fight with a former friend.

     In casual conversations, usually at a tavern, he came across as a know-it-all, who would not listen to others opinions.  People soon learned to steer around Thomas Paine.

     On a more positive note, Thomas believed in revolution, because as he saw it, the status quo was always wrong.  As for government, he believed that people should rule themselves because the idea of a monarchy was an injustice.  Also, he hated the slave trade in the colonies, and pushed a law through Pennsylvania’s Assembly outlawing it there.  He favored a social welfare system with care for the poor and the elderly, but above all he believed in independence for the thirteen colonies.  “There is something absurd,” Paine wrote, “in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.”

     Paine’s personal habits, his behavior, his attitude, and his bearing all combined to prevent him from ever achieving anything more than that of a controversial and indeed influential writer who stirred up his readers with novel ideas.  One reads his biographies and is struck less by the genius of his thoughts and words than by the missed opportunities.  He could have remained in America after the war and helped with the new government, serving as President, or Vice-President, or as a Secretary in the Cabinet.  Instead he chose to live fifteen years in France where he did not ever learn to speak French.

     Is Thomas Paine a Founding Father?  Perhaps yes.  Perhaps no.  One could say that in 1776 it took all kinds of characters to stand up to the British.  It took the likes of an oddball like Thomas Paine who wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country.”