“WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE?”

by William H. Benson

May 8, 2003

     Recently I read the new bestseller, What Should I Do With My Life?, by the young author Po Bronson.  He let the word out that he wanted to meet people who had redirected their lives; he wanted to listen to their stories.  He criss-crossed the nation, heard some nine hundred stories, came to know some seventy people closely, and included about fifty stories in his book, including his own story of how he decided to become a writer.

     There was the story of Kurt, the great-great-grandson of a founder of a major American manufacturing company, who, following his divorce, gave up being groomed for the top position in the company and decided to pursue his dream of becoming, of all things, a policeman.

     In so doing he admitted that he had violated the Monkey Law, something he had learned at Harvard Business School.  The monkey swinging through the jungle must never let go of an old vine until he has a firm grip on the new one.  It took him two years of struggle and of working as a volunteer without pay before he landed a job as a policeman on the night shift in El Monte, California, east of East Los Angeles.  Kurt had discovered that he needed to serve people directly.

     There was the story of Katt who had to give up her dream of competing in the 1988 Seoul Olympics in the shotput and discus when she discovered she was pregnant.  Years later she returned to college and to track and was pushing herself toward the 2004 Olympic trials when her daughter began to complain that she needed help with her homework.  A second time Katt gave up the dream of going to the Olympics.

     There was Rick, a corporate lawyer, who was playing ice hockey and ended up breaking his ankle in eleven places, as well as his leg, and sheering off his heel.  And yet he laughed because he was finally free to quit his job, for now he had an excuse.  When healed he found a job as a long haul truck driver and loves it.

     He said, “I have autonomy.  I have a window seat, with a view that changes every mile.  Nobody ever comes into my office without asking.  I enjoy this job. . . . I’m doing this because it doesn’t eat me alive.”

     There was the story of Sidney, a chemistry professor at a college in England who late in life decided that what he really wanted to do was return to law school.  He detested his work in the college, a life he considered not fit for a human being.  “I hit the point where I knew I ought to do something while my faculties were still reasonably intact, and not waste the rest of my life.” 

     He went to law school and found a position as a solicitor.  “He loves the law.  He has a mind that loves puzzles, and cases are puzzles–timelines, cross-references, stories with motives.”

     There was the story of an arbitrage executive who decided to become a psychiatrist, the story of a ferocious criminal attorney who chose to become a minister in the Unity Church, the Asian-American who chose to become a high school teacher rather than pursue his father’s dream of becoming a doctor or lawyer or businessman, and the doctor’s daughter who became a doctor herself and then discovered that she could not put in the long hours any longer.

     And then there is the story of Po Bronson himself, and how he tried numerous career paths before plunging ahead and writing his first book.

     Why did these people change directions?  Po decided that it required more than just a vague sense of dissatisfaction.  Something personal had to surface: children’s needs, the need for intellectual stimulation, the need to be away from people, the need to be around people, the need to help people.  He decided that often people will catch only a glimmer of what they truly want to do, and then they either act or they don’t.

     Po ends his book.  “I used to think life presented a five-page menu of choices.  Now I think the choice is in whether to be honest, to ourselves and others, and the rest is more of an uncovering, a peeling away of layers, discovering talents we assumed we didn’t have.”

EAST VS. WEST

by William H. Benson

April 24, 2003

     “As far as the east is from the west,” so the Scripture reads, and Rudyard Kipling wrote, “The East is the East, and the West is the West.”  Even though there exists much antagonism between the West and the East, on occasion the West has taken what the East has had to offer, such as the religion Christianity, and rejected that which it found offensive.

     April 23 is the feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England, and yet George was not British.  He was born in the Middle East and was tortured and put to death in Palestine on April 23, 303 A.D.  Hundreds of years later, he gained status as a saint whose name was invoked in England before the Norman conquest.  Later mythologies claimed that he slew dragons.

     The historical St. George flag, a red cross on a white background, is still part of the British Union flag, and so England, a Western country, adopted St. George, a Middle Eastern martyr.

     In the last centuries the West incorporated into its very fiber the idea that religion and politics must be separated, that much human suffering arises when the two are co-joined.  Consider Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini, a case where a holy man ruled the country and drove the people into a brutal and suppressive war-torn society.  And then there was the Taliban in Afghanistan, where men grew beards and women were not seen.

     The West does not fully understand that the East has absolutely rejected the idea of separating its religion from its civil law.  The Koran is not only religious scripture for a faith in an afterlife; it is meant to be also the law of the land.  Its scholars are expected to rule and pass judgement.

     Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), a chief ideologist of the Islamist movement, was convinced that the modern West suffered from a “hideous schizophrenia” brought on by the separation of civil and religious authority.  Qutb’s solution was Jihad by an Islamic “vanguard” to restore what he believes should never have been surrendered.

     Peter Berman in his new book Terror and Liberalism argues that we should look upon Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and even the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas for what they truly are–totalitarians, heirs to an ideology handed down by the Bolsheviks, the fascists, and the Nazis.  They believe the same–in “submission”, in “the one, instead of the many”, and in “the total state, the total doctrine, the total movement”.  The result is always bloody, a cult of death.

     Berman wrote that Bush’s actual and justifiable reason for going to war against Saddam Hussein’s regime was not the fear of weapons of mass destruction but rather “to begin a rollback of the several tendencies and political movements that add up to Muslim totalitarianism. . . . Hussein’s rule in Iraq has been irrational, paranoid, murderous, grandiose, and demagogic, replete with serial atrocities and aggressions.”

     Certain religious and political ideologies are like biological viruses, such as this new one, SARS, which should be identified, quarantined, and then eliminated for no other reason than that they are so destructive to the people.  Totalitarianism is one such ideology, and another is the uniting of religious beliefs and practices with the civil law.

     Today in downtown Baghdad Saddam Hussein’s vicious regime of totalitarian and despotic rule is history, and the civil law of the land is now the U.S./English military armed forces.  The Stars and Stripes, along with a British flag, sporting a St. George cross, are both waving in the breeze above Iraqi sand.  A dragon slain lies under the rubble.

     And what is most promising is that the various factions and sects within the Muslim religion have hesitantly begun to emerge after being driven years ago deep into hiding by Saddam’s brutal regime.  Separation of church and state in Iraq is today a reality.

     Centuries ago the East gave the world a new religion–Christianity, and the West swallowed it totally and never looked elsewhere nor considered another.  By George W. Bush’s modern-day crusade the West this month has given to the East freedom, a chance at religious diversity, and promises for self-rule, and the East now has a choice–to either take them or reject them.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

by William H. Benson

April 10, 2003

     Teddy Roosevelt had six kids–Alice by his first wife, and then five more–Teddy Jr., Kermit, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, by his second wife, Edith.  Four boys and two girls.  A year after the birth of Quentin, Teddy resigned his position as assistant Secretary of the Navy, and joined the army, earger to join in the war against Spain and anxious for action.

     His regiment soon was called Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.  The first battle of the war was in Tampa Bay, Florida, but not with the Spanish, but with each other over which regiment would first board the ship bound for Cuba.  Teddy and his Rough Riders won that confrontation.

     On July 1, 1898, Teddy Roosevelt lived what he later called “the greatest day of my life.”  Exposing himself recklessly on a horse he led his troops up Kettle Hill in the San Juan Highlands overlooking Santiago, Cuba.  A journalist Richard Harding Davis wrote of  that day, “No man who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected he would finish it alive.”  And yet he did.  He bent low only once–to collect spent cartridges to give later to his four sons.

     The events that day made TR a celebrity and set him off on a political career that put him in the White House when he was only forty-two years old.  For eight years, from 1901 until 1909, his six kids enjoyed the privileged life, children of the President of the United States living in the White House in the first years of the twentieth-century.

     Each of his four sons were infused with their father’s passion for righteous battle, and they understood that he had made a political fortune in his dashing charge up Kettle Hill.

     And then the boys grew up, and the Great War in Europe came.  Every one of Teddy Roosevelt’s requests to serve in the military Woodrow Wilson turned down, but each of the four boys joined, knowing that it was their duty and that their father expected them to do so.  This great European war wrecked Teddy Roosevelt’s family.

     By the time of the armistice on November 18, 1918 Theodore Jr. and Archie were both gravely wounded.  Archie soon thereafter began to exhibit signs of the mental depression that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.  Kermit saw action in France and in Mesopotamia and survived intact, but Quentin, the youngest son, at age twenty perished in an aerial combat over Chateau-Thiery in July of 1918, exactly twenty years after Teddy’s charge up Kettle Hill. 

     Theodore Jr. wrote his sister Ethel, “Quentin’s death is always going to be the greatest thing in any of our lives.”  And Ethel wrote, “I sometimes just cannot believe that all this has come to us and that never again will we be happy and young as we were, and that always there will be the pain beneath the laughter.”  Alice, the oldest, wrote, “All our lives before and after have just been bookends for the heroic, tragic volume of the Great War.”

     And yet none of them felt any tinge of regret, except TR himself, who said, “To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death, has a pretty serious side for a father.”

     He and his wife received a letter from Great Britain’s King George V and his wife Mary commisserating on their loss of Quentin, and Teddy wrote them back,  “From the moment the war began we understood that this was our war.  My son Archie volunteered to serve with the British forces in Mesopotamia.  I expected, as I found in Quentin, that my sons would go to war, and we expected something, that this might happen to us.”

     His heart breaking, Theodore Roosevelt passed away on January 5, 1919 at age sixty.

     “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” is a motto about power and its display, about male domination and aggressiveness, and about daring and adventure, of taking huge risks and watching them pay off.  But it has an ugly underside–a scene where parents bury their sons.

     In the March 17th issue of Time magazine the President is compared to TR.  “George W. Bush seems destined to be a spectacular President of some sort.  He combines the idealism of Woodrow Wilson with the bravado of Theodore Roosevelt, but these were not always their best qualities.  And he lacks the rigor, the love of learning, of either man.  There is no ballast to this administration, and we are going to war.” 

     And fathers will bury their children.

ROBERT FROST

by William H. Benson

March 27, 2003

     “When April with his showers hath pierced the drought

      Of March with sweetness to the very root,

      And flooded every vein with liquid power

      That of its strength engendereth the flower.”

With those four lines of English words Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century began his Canterbury Tales of thirty pilgrims travelling together and telling the stories of their lives.

     From Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to Emerson to Thoreau to Dickinson to Twain and to Robert Frost.  Dramatists, novelists, essayists, humorists, and poets–they each loved words.  They loved the English lanuguage, its syntax, its vocabulary, and its grammar, and each used it and then left it in a better condition than when they had found it.

     English is “the treasure of our tongue” and has been transported around the globe.  It has become the most widely spoken language in the history of humankind, the linguistic wonder of the modern world.  Stephen Baker, an immigrant to America from Hungary, said, “No doubt English was invented in heaven.  It may be the lingua franca of the angels.  No other language is like it.”

     So often in classrooms across the nation, about when March turns to April, the English instructors put aside their units on composition and short stories and novels and dust off their lessons on poetry.  It is the season for poetry.  Especially in the midsts of war, we do need a poet.

     If Shakespeare is England’s national bard, then America’s is Robert Frost, born on March 26, 1875.  He reached national prominence on a cool day in January of 1961 when he stood on the Capitol steps at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and read his poem, The Gift Outright:

     “The land was ours before we were the lands. . . .

      (The deed of gift was many deeds of war).”

And it was Robert Frost who wrote Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:

     “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.”

     On September 14, 2001 seated in the National Cathedral in Washington D. C. were our nation’s governing officials–President Bush and his family, his father and mother, and former President Clinton.  On that day prayers were spoken, songs were sung, candles were lit, tears were shed, and decisions were made–promises to keep.

     The columnist Mona Charen put it this way in her column last week.  “The President declined to buckle to the conventional wisdom. . . . Bush stood his ground. . . . He understands the link between extending freedom and making the world safer for Americans. . . . He is pursuing a Pax Americana. . . . And then in the wake of victory, America will help to create the first democracy in the Arab world.”

     It appears to me that President Bush made up his mind to go to war against the “faceless cowards” that day while seated in the National Cathedral, mourning the tragic loss of lives, and nothing since has dissuaded him from that decision.  Promises to keep.

     “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–

      I took the one less traveled by,

      And that has made all the difference.”

     In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, Emily asked the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?–every, every minute?  And the Stage Manager replied, “The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.”

     And Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “When we become tired of our saints, we can still turn to Shakespeare.”  And we, as Americans, speakers of the English language, not only have Shakespeare and Chaucer to turn to, but we also have thinkers like Emerson and Robert Frost.  As March gives way to April, we can hope that war will give way to peace.

LABELS

by William H. Benson

February 27, 2003

     In Shakespeare’s King Richard II Henry of Bolingbroke tried out various labels to discribe his grab for England’s crown.  Was it a deposition, in that he was removing Richard from the throne?  Or was Richard resigning by abdication?  Or was it a peaceful transfer of power from Richard to Henry?  Or was it a coronation of a new king?  Henry wanted the proper label to justify his actions, for he was kicking out Richard and placing himself on the throne.

     Each science and each discipline has its own labels, terms fixed to a thing or a behavior or an event or an action.  Learn the terms, and you know the science.  Labelling is defined as trapping a living thing in the catch of a human phrase, and it is a powerful act.  For example, Adam was told to name the animals, and by that act he held dominion over them.  And the answer–“I am that I am”–to Moses’s question meant that He would not be trapped in the clutch of a human term.

     Right now George Bush is searching for the label whereby he might describe his end game with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.  Coming from the Oval Office are sentences such as, “Certainly we would welcome an administrative change in Iraq.”  But how will that change come about–through a deposition, a resignation, a capture, an internal revolution, or a gentle transfer?  The proper term is out there and remains to be played out.

     We can easily fix labels upon the Middle East–rich in oil but masses of poor people, a weak military, biased toward the masculine, a single focus upon religion, ruled by elites, and closed to new information.  And just as easily we can attach labels to the U.S.–rich, democratic, powerful, inclusive, a splintered religious focus, and open to new information.

     So by the labels we catch the apparant differences between the East and the West, and immediately we then judge which of the labels are good and which are bad.  But looking below those labels we can see what they truly mean to people, in terms of feelings and the human costs and the disrupted potentials.

     Women in America have fought their way into the office, the workplace, the schools, and the universities.  Ralph Peters, a military intellectual, said, “Rosie the Riveter is in the boardroom, she’s on campus, she’s flying jets off carriers.  Look at our tremendous openness to the utilitization of human capital, the opening of our society to women, to minorities, to old people.”

     And yet across the Pan-Islamic world, Ralph Peters argued, we can witness a neurosis, a primeval terror about female sexuality.  Only Sigmund Freud could perhaps decipher what there is in a culture or a religion or a people that would subject their women, half their population, to wearing black robes and veils and hiding terror-stricken in the shadows, as if less than human.

     Because a Martin Luther-style Protestant Reformation never happened in the Middle East, Islamic followers have only one path to final truth, and it has calcified.  But because of the Reformation, the West could then cultivate various forms of religions, different paths to the same ending, and even then embrace a secular religion, that of science.

     Being open to new information allows people to question their myths about themselves and their governments.  Carl Sagan entitled one of his essays, “Real patriots ask questions”, because ultimately in a democratic government it is the people who rule, not their elected representatives.  About closed societies, Ralph Peters said, “Listen to our enemies’ rhetoric.  They’re in love with their myths of themselves, both old and new, and they’re myths of self-justification.”

     Evidence exists that the governments in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine have at times supported the terrorist organizations: Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Al Qaeda, and for this they should be held accountable.  For it is the duty of the West to bring the rest of the nations of the world, including the Middle East, around to the point that they understand that the label terrorism is an ugly word, equal in ferocity to piracy or the slave trade or genocide, seen not as a legitimate means of addressing shortfalls, but as something condemned by all civilized peoples as well as the international community.

JACK BENNY

by William H. Benson

February 13, 2003

      “I was seventeen years old the first time I saw Jack,” Johnny Carson said.  “I hitchhiked to California, and went to see one of his radio show tapings at CBS.  I was fresh out of high school, and about to go into the service.  But first, I wanted to see Hollywood–and Jack Benny.”

     Born Benjamin Kubelsky on February 13, 1894 to recent Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Jack grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, just north of Chicago along Lake Michigan.  At age six his parents gave him a violin, and although he hated the long hours of practice, he had some talent.

     He dropped out of high school his sophmore year, and at age eighteen he took to the vaudeville circuit with his violin, never looking back.  Eventually he began to work jokes in with his violin playing, and his career steadily progressed through the years as a standup comic, then on to radio and  television, into the movies, and even performing in Las Vegas.  All of America loved Jack Benny for all of his thirty-nine years.

      Even President Kennedy said that when he wanted to relax he watched Jack Benny.

      For fifteen years Jack had his own television show, and a steady stream of guests showed up to enjoy Jack’s zany style of comedy.  Marilyn Monroe appeared only once as a special guest on a television show ever and that was in 1953 on Jack’s show.  Rod Serling from Twilight Zone, Ann-Margaret, Jimmy Stewart, Bobby Darrin, and even Billy Graham came on as Jack’s guests.

     And then there was the night that a young Carol Burnett played the part of Jane while Jack played an over-the-hill Tarzan.  Instead of swinging through the jungle on a grape vine, he was confined to a porch swing.  At one point Jane told Tarzan, the King of the Jungle, to yell, and out came a pathetic whimper.  So Carol Burnett playing the part of Jane cut loose with her famous Tarzan yell, startling Jack and the audience, and she has done that yell hundreds of times since. 

     Jack’s comedy was a combination of gags, jokes, and actions that blended together.  There was the violin, the stingy jokes, the idea that he was forever thirty-nine, and his petulant outcry–“Now cut that out!”.  Even his walk seemed funny.  Then there was the way he would hold up a hand and gently slap his face in a moment of astonishment.

     But what brought out the biggest laughs was the Look, that moment when the joke was on him and he realized it; he would then stare blank-faced into the camera and out into the audience.  Now on paper the Look does not sound funny, but the way he did it made it funny.

     In 1959 Jack called former President Truman and asked him to appear on his show, and Truman agreed.  Not even a former President could say “No” to Jack Benny.  Actually, Jack took his show and his cameramen to Kansas City where he toured Truman’s Presidential Library, and Harry was a most gracious host.  And Jack was most dignified.

     Then, just before the close of the show the two of them went back to Harry’s office, and Harry instructed his secretary not to disturb them.  Then, Jack and Harry closed the door behind them, but then the secretary walked over and opened it slightly so that the audience could hear off camera what they were doing–playing music.  Harry was on the piano, and Jack had his violin.  Together they were playing a  duet–Tea for Two.

     As a fund-raiser Jack enjoyed playing his violin with symphonies and orchestras across the nation.  He would begin the performance by walking out with his violin and tell a few jokes and get the audience on his side.  Then, when it was time to play the music he would look around and realize that he had forgotten his bow.  And then there was the dumbfounded Look, and the audience would roar.

     Jack Benny’s birthday is Thursday, February 13th, and he would have been thirty-nine plus seventy.  Valentine’s Day is Friday, and President’s Day is next Monday.  They all just seem to go together.  Jack Benny, the lighthearted loveable court jester, could get all of America laughing and then reach over, pick up his violin and bow, and play Tea for Two with a former President.