TRANSITIONS IN CAREERS

by William H. Benson

April 11, 2002

    George Washington started out as a surveyor before owning a plantation, becoming a military leader, a founder of a new country, and its first President.  Ralph Waldo Emerson began his working career as a school teacher before serving as a Presbyterian minister in Boston.  Then, abruptly he quit to begin a speaking and writing career, and in the process he became the best philosopher America has produced.

     Lincoln swung an axe, failed as a storekeeper, read enough law to set up a law practice, moved into politics, and ended up as President.  Harry Truman failed in a men’s clothing store and then farmed with his father for years before entering politics.

     I find this biography fascinating, especially the jerks and false starts of a convoluted path that winds its way to the top.  How do some people get so far ahead?  Is it energy level, intelligence, the willingness to take risks, or inner drive?  Or is it some combination of those?  Billy Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, said of Lincoln, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

     James Michener wrote that two things are required for a successful career–dedication and re-education.  He wrote, “Men and women who wish to accomplish anything must apply themselves to tasks of tremendous magnitude.  The good work of the world is accomplished principally by people who dedicate themselves unstintingly to the big job at hand. . . . The average man or woman can expect to work in three radically different fields before he retires, and adults who are unwilling to re-educate themselves periodically are doomed to mediocrity.”

     Adele Scheele, who wrote Skills for Success, suggested that career transitions are often more the result of using the non-technical skills, such as positioning, self-preservation, and connecting, than the acutal job’s technical skills.  Ther is much to be said for developing appropriate relationships with people and letting them know what you want to do.

     Mike Ditka’s son complained to his dad about his first job after college.  Mike told his son to quit.  “If you cannot give 100% of yourself to that job, go find something where you can.”

     In the late 70’s Steve Martin was at the very top of his career as a standup comedian, and on occasion he was good, very funny.  But then suddenly he quit and announced that he wanted to do more, and so he pursued motion pictures.  Robin Williams did the same.

     And then there was Arnold Schwartznegger, a champion Mr. Universe, the best in a body building competition, and yet he wanted to be an actor.  Hollywood laughed at him, “With your Austrian accent and muscles and huge body, what part could you possibly play?”  He found the answer–Conan the Barbarian, and so he launched his movie career.

     Newsweek‘s lead story last week was an interview with Bill Clinton who is now in his second year of adjusting to his new position as former President.  A whirlwind of activity, he is speaking, reading, writing, traveling, and paying off his legal bills.  What he will do in the near future and how he will focus his itelligence, drive, and energy all remains wide open.  However, looking back he admitted that he like being President, “I’m very glad I did it.  I loved it.  I loved it.”

     On April 11, 1951 then President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from command during the Korean War.  A career U.S. military man, MacArthur was suddenly without a job, and staring him in the face was retirement.  On April 19th he addressed a joint session of Congress and recalled the song about old soldiers that never die, saying, “like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away.”

     For most people who exit the workforce, retirement does not need to be such a dreary proposition.  A comment I hear frequently is “It’s great!”  And if we do not like the thought of retirement, we can continue to work or we can go back to work or we can change jobs.  After all, in America we are free to choose our employer.

ARIEL SHARON & YASSIR ARAFAT

by William H. Benson

March 28, 2002

     The daily news repells and disgusts us.  Israeli soldiers stomp into people’s homes and arrest whomever.  Suicide bombers blow themselves to bits on a crowded bus, killing innocent people.  Shattered and bloody bodies are drug through the streets.  All of this has become the end game for Ariel Sharon, the Israeli warrior, and Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian freedom fighter.

     The fight is about differences in religion, race, culture, and economic advantages, but above all else, it is a land fight over who will ultimately own and control the territory.  Both Jew and Palestinian want to own and live on what has been called the Holy Land, but I think a better term might be a Thirsty Land, thirsty for the blood of its martyrs who are willing to die to posess it.

     Ernest Renan once wrote, “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of its neighbors.”

     The Israelis point to the Bible and to God’s promise to Abraham as their right and justification to own the land.  And the Israelis believe that in 1947 they did not push the Palestinians out of their homes.  Those people just simply left on their own, without any undo force.  However, Benny Morris, the Israeli journalist, argues otherwise, that they were driven out deliberately.

     On the other hand, the Palestinians still hold on to their dream “to return to their homeland” and establish their nation from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and in the process drive the Israelis into the Sea.  Neither side wishes to give up their myth and their dream of total ownership and face life in the normal world.

     In September 2000 then President Clinton was working hard with both sides at Camp David to hammer out a peace accord, and he was close to getting an agreement.  But then it fell apart, and Round 2 of the Intifada erupted.  Clinton afterwords privately blamed Arafat, and yet last Sunday’s New York Times suggested that it was actually Sharon who deliberately scuttled the peace talks when he visited a site considered holy by both sides accompanied by 200 police officers, knowing full well that chaos would result from his antagonistic act.

     What does Sharon want?  In his book Warrior, Sharon wrote, “We must say very clearly that our concern for our own survival does not permit the establishment of a second Palestinian state on the West Bank.”  It appears that the idea of two peaceful nations is at this moment a fiction.

     Politicians rave; soldiers learn the truth.  Soldiers die quickly; war dies hard.  But other wars have died, and peace has broken out in hate-filled places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Korea, in the Pacific, in Europe, and even in our own country 140 years ago.  We dare not forget places like Shiloh, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg.

     Consider Sherman’s March to the Sea.  Historians see that his purpose was to destroy and annihilate the South’s very will to fight any further.  In this he was larger than both Grant or Lincoln.  The South’s capacity and will to make war posed a legitimate threat and a target; the sooner he smashed them, the sooner peace would come.  Thinking of his own children he devoted himself to that ideal–peace.  He attacked the very mind of the South, crippling the Confederacy’s will to fight.  He did his nastiest work, the South boiled in helpless rage, and they quit fighting.

     Ariel Sharon has been quoted saying, “The aim is to increase the number of losses on the other side.  Only after they’ve been battered, will we be able to conduct talks.”  Strangely, Arafat and the other Palestinian freedom fighters carry a similar thought.  And so the violence escalates.

     Peace will happen, and it will happen when one side overpowers the other, or when one side gives up, or when new and more responsive leaders agree to stop fighting, give up their mistaken myths, and choose peace.  They must see other options, rather than the path of violence.

     Palm Sunday is behind us.  Easter approaches.  It was a Passion Play then (as it is today) with the betrayal of friends, accusations, arrests, speedy trials, and government-ordered executions–a frightening and bewildering and chaotic existence.  Both the Palestinian and the Jew deserve better, much better.  They deserve their own land.  They deserve peace.  It will happen.    

THE POTATO FAMINE

by William H. Benson

March 14, 2002

     Infectious disease is one of the great tragedies of living things.  It is a pitiless war–one species against another in a life-and-death struggle for existence.  Nature seems to have intended that her creatures feed one upon another.  A cow eats a plant, a man eats both of them, and a bacteria eats the man.  It is ironic that the human, the highest and most advanced of the biological forms, suffers from the relentless onslaught of the lowest and simplest forms–bacteria and viruses.

     Malaria, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, small pox, syphillis, and countless other horrendous germs have determined the fates of nations, the outcomes of wars, the movements of armies, and the progression of civilizations.

     For example, in the fourteenth century Yersennia pestis jumped on the backs of fleas that had already hitched rides on rats, and that single bacteria killed off a fourth or more of Europe’s human population.  The bubonic plague, or the black death, swelled the lymph glands and brought on fever and chills and open sores, and then swiftly its victims expired.

     In the very early years of the seventeenth century, European fishing vessels stopped for water and supplies on the North American coastline and dropped off small pox and measles, for which the Native Americans had little resistance.  So decimated were the Natives that by 1620 when the Pilgrims landed, the vast majority of those Native Americans lay in their graves.

     We are now some twenty years after the first appearance of HIV/AIDS.  And today more than 8000 people will die from AIDS, and another 13,000 more will take out a contract with the virus.  Health officials estimate that some 40 million people are today infected worldwide.  This is an epidemic of global proportions.

     However, even an indirect attack can turn just as fatal.  Consider Ireland.  By 1841 the population there had reached 8.2 million, far too many people who were far too dependent upon one crop, the potato.  And the rural Irish peasantry was considered the poorest in Western Europe, “the very extreme of human wretchedness.”

     Then, in the second week of September of 1945 someone noted a fungus on the potatoes in a garden near Cork.  That fungus, Phylophthora infestans, choked out the potato crop six years in a row.  Farm incomes collapsed.  Laborers, farmers, and landlords blamed each other, and all three turned for relief to the British government which was ill-prepared to offer help. Starvation and famine and massive numbers of deaths, once only an eventuality, overwhelmed the poor Irish peole and became an unfortunate reality.

     Charles Greville, the English secretary to the Privy Council, summed up the prevailing English view:  “The state of Ireland is to the last degree deplorable, and enough to induce despair: such general disorganisation and demoralisation, a people with rare exceptions besotted with obstinacy and indolence, reckless and savage–all from high to low intent on doing as little and getting as much as they can, unwilling to rouse and exert themselves, looking to this country for succour, and snarling at the succour which they get; the masses brutal, deceitful and idle, the whole state of things contradictory and paradoxical.”

     And so the people packed their meager belongings and moved in a mass migration to America.  The population of Ireland during those years fell by 2 million–half by excess deaths and half by migration.  It was said at the time that “the only place in Ireland where a man can make a fortune is in America.”  And some, such as Joseph Kennedy, the son of an Irish immigrant, did just that.

     The population continued to drop until by the turn of the century it was at 4 million, a more reasonable number.  Commentators have noted that Ireland after the Great Famine was probably a more sober, prudent, and less festive place.  The few who could speak Gaelic, the Irish language, chose not to, regarding it as bad luck, and the young people have wisely deferred marriage until middle age for fear of ever overpopulating the land again.

     A simple life form, a fungus, attacked a plant, the potato, and a million Irish died too early.

     “Ah, it’s the luck of the Irish,” which is to say that it is only the bad kind.  Do we dare try to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

FRANCO–AMERICAN RELATIONS

 by William H. Benson

March, 6, 2002

     In his best-seller John Adams, David McCullough told of Adams’s experiences in the French court during and after the American Revolutionary War.  Adams the perpetual realist held no illusions of what directed France’s actions.  “It is interest alone which does it,” he told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.”

     Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, disliked Adams’s stubborn manner, and Adams in turn had a vivid image of what Vergennes intended.  “He means to keep his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”  Vergennes’s main purpose in helping the Americans was to weaken and humble Britain, and expand trade in America.

     Indeed, Vergennes told the French Finance Minister, “Always keep in mind that in separating the United States from Great Britain, it was above all else their commerce that we wanted.”

     Adams wrote to Congress of his impressions.  “Yet I have many reasons to think that not one of them, not even Spain or France, wishes to see America rise very fast to power.  Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their wars and politics.  America has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.”

     In May of 1940 Hitler’s army stomped across the map of France in a matter of weeks forcing the Allied troops to withdraw from French soil on a make-shift flotilla bound for England’s Dover cliffs.  Four years later on August 25, 1944 Allied troops, primarily British and American, liberated Paris amid great rejoicing.

     By the Marshall Plan war-torn France ended up receiving $9.5 billion in outright aid from the United States and another $1.8 billion in loans.  With such generous help France soon stood on her own legs, proud and capable of striking off on her own.

     In the 1960’s the French President Charles deGaulle said, “It is intolerable for a great state that her fate be left to the decisions and actions of another state, however friendly she may be.”

     DeGaulle struck hard at American leadership.  He refused to admit England into the Common Market.  He recognized Red China and then received a hero’s welcome on a visit to Russia.  He removed French forces from NATO and booted out of France NATO’s headquarters.  He and his fellow Frenchmen were so angered by America’s refusal to part with nuclear technology that they built their own nuclear capability.

     Paul Johnson, the British historian, writing in last week’s Forbes aruged that in light of recent events “France is not be trusted at any time, on any issue.  The British have learned this over 1,000 years of acrimonious history.”  In extreme terms he described the French as displaying  “shortsighted selfishness, long-term irresponsibility, impudent humbug, and sheer malice.”  And he declared that “French support always has to be bought.”

     Specifically, Johnson suggested that France should no longer remain a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council and that it is doubtful that France can be trusted as a nuclear power.  “The French have certainly sold nuclear technology to rogue states in the past, Iraq among them.” And now France is trying to derail America’s vigorous campaign to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction among the criminal-like dictators of the world, such as Saddam Hussein.

     George Will in his Newsweek column revealed that the Israeli pilot killed in the shuttle disaster some weeks ago had participated in Israel’s 1981 raid that destroyed Baghdad’s nuclear reactor.  “Were it not for that raid, Iraq would have been a nuclear power in 1990, and Kuwait would be the 19th province of Iraq.”

     Paul Johnson suggested that America must intensify her watch of French nuclear activities, for Americans are learning “that loyalty, gratitude, comradeship, and respect for treaty obligations are qualities never exhibited by French governments.”

MASH

by William H. Benson

February 28, 2002

     The television show outclassed all of its competition.  Of course, MASH had great actors playing great characters: Hawkeye, Trapper John, Col. Blake, Radar, Hot Lips Houlihan, Klinger, and Frank Burns, and then later B. J. Hunnicutt, Col. Potter, and Major Winchester.

      But it was the writers for the 4077th MASH Unit–Larry Gelbart, Burt Metcalfe, and on occasion even Alan Alda–who were the exceptional ones.  In an industry noted for its simplistic and trite formulas and cheapshots, those MASH writers strove for something exemplary and  classy, for content, for electric scripts that soared, and for the dramatic tension at those moments of human connections.  The writers produced comedy that mixed tenderness alongside the blood and carnage of an Army operating room.

     The background was the quintessence of absurdity–Korean war zone surgeons and nurses laboring dilligently and professionally to put bodies back together again so they could be thrust back into the combat thresher.  The comedy grew out of the characters’ screwball efforts to maintain their sanity while swept up in constant life and death decisions.

      It was unusual then, and still would be, for television to produce a dark comedy filled with gallows humor set in the midsts of tragedy.  Such a theatre form requires intelligence and the hard work of thoughtfulness, a rare commodity for television.

     Having lost the battle for content, the television executives then demanded that the writers begin to inject farcical elements that had worked for other shows, and the writers protested and won.  However, the executives did get their way on at least one issue–the use of the ubiquitous and silly laugh track, standard equipment for all comedies, but the show’s producer Gene Reynolds refused to run the laugh track while the actors stood in the operating room.

     MASH began on September 17, 1972 when the Vietnam War was winding down and the POW’s were about to return home.  Someone needed to say something to begin the process of healing a torn and wounded national spirit, and so television reached back to the prior war–Korea.  The show ended on February 28, 1983–250 episodes over eleven years.

     And the theme throughout was “the futility of war”.  Alan Alda’s Hawkeye seemed a true pacifist, something that the real Hawkeye Pierce, Dr. H. Richard Hornberger of Crabapple, Maine disliked.  He wrote the book MASH in the 1960’s, and he even liked the movie starring Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould.  But about the television show he said, “Nobody is in favor of war, but the series seems to make the North Koreans heroes and the Americans the bad guys.”

     Today the MASH reruns seem oddly out-of-style in our country’s current pro-America and pro-war posture, but then again this current war in Afghanistan is a just war, a stature that both Korea and Vietnam failed to achieve.  Hawkeye’s flippant attitude about war runs counter to today’s current ideology.  But this demonstrates that the nation’s attitude about war moves in a twenty-five year cycle, much like fashions.

     However, what does not change is really superb humor.

     Wearing a brilliant red evening gown, Klinger asks Col. Potter, “How about it sir?  Any chance for a psycho discharge?”  Potter answers, “Klinger, there are seventeen other guys wearing dresses ahead of you.  And what they have on is better looking.”

     And Frank Burns wonders out loud, “What I don’t understand is why do people take an instant dislike to me?”  Trapper John replies, “Well Frank, it saves time.”

YOUNG CHARLES DICKENS IN LOVE

by William H. Benson

February 14, 2002

     Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, and at age eighteen in 1830 he fell in love with Maria Beadnell.  As his infatuation soared, he wrote her poetry and pages of love letters.  Often he visited her, and then alone at night he would walk past her home and dream of her.

     Maria was indeed pretty–petite with blonde curls.  And she captivated him with her smile and her giggle and her charming good looks.  That she could play music on her harp overwhelmed the intense young Charles.  But Maria was also flighty and willful and never really in love with Charles.  She laughed at his obsession and knew that she held almost a hypnotic power over him.

     Her father was a bank manager, whereas John Dickens was a never-do-well who had spent time in a debtors prison and who had sent young Charles at age twelve to work in a factory.  Maria’s parents were alarmed by Charles’s unabashed devotion to their daughter and steered her away.  They believed rightly that they were a cut above the Dickens clan, and besides Charles was just a guy who knew shorthand and took notes in court for lawyers. 

     After three years of pursuit, Charles realized that Maria would never love him.  In February of 1833 he wrote her a letter recounting all he had done to win her love.  “I have been too long used to inward wretchedness and real, real misery.”  She returned his letter without the formality of an envelope, and in total humiliation he wrote her a final letter and poured out his heart.  “I never have loved, and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself.”

     Cupid finally had tapped on Charles’s shoulder and pointed first to an empty quiver and then to Maria, and Charles understood that none of Cupid’s arrows had struck her heart.

     The game of love is never easy, for the outcomes are ill-defined.  Winners are often the losers, and the losers often are better off.  And life is rarely kind to the frivolous women, and it was not kind to Maria.  Scarcely two years after the breakup, Charles Dickens published Pickwick Papers and was instantly famous.  People referred to Maria and said, “Boy, did she make a mistake.”

     Still deeply wounded, the young Dickens gradually understood that he should never again allow a woman to hold the kind of erotic power over him that Maria had, and so he married a kind, compliant, and placid woman named Catherine.

     Twenty-two years speed by, and in February of 1855 he receives a letter from Maria.  Once again he flies into a state of wild exuberance, and there is a flurry of letters as he yearns to recapture his youthful love.  She admits that at age thirty-five she had married Henry Winter, a poor sawmill manager, and that they had two daughters.  He suggests a tryst, and she agrees.  But she warns him that she is now “toothless, fat, old, and ugly.”  Impossible, he thinks.

     They meet, and it is true that she is no longer the twenty-year-old pretty young thing.  She has a head cold, and Charles soon has caught it.  Her giggle annoys him.  Her constant chatter bothers him.  He is forty-three years old, trim, fit, vigorous, the father of ten children, and world famous.  And quickly he understands that this woman bores him.  Allusions to their shared past sicken him, and what once delighted him now repels him.  Again he is disappointed but for a different reason.

     She begs to see him again, but he writes three final letters–a string of evasions and excuses why he cannot.  She finally understands that it is his turn to reject her, and so he exacts a revenge for the painful humilations that she had made him suffer twenty-two years before.

     Today in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the cemetery at Kensal Green lies Maria Beadnell Winter, a footnote in the biographies of Charles Dickens.     

     The other great British writer wrote, “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.”, which is to say that the intensity of love is worth the crushing pain when it evaporates.  I am not convinced that Charles Dickens would have agreed.

     And for you, my reader, on this Valentine’s Day may you find your true love, and may Cupid’s arrows strike many a tender heart.