SOLITUDE

by William H. Benson

January 30, 2003

     In the book Dances with Wolves Lieutenant Dunbar finds himself alone at Fort Sedgewick, abandoned and forgotten by his superior officers and fellow cavalrymen.  He had his horse Cisco, and occasionally he saw a solitary wolf he named Two Socks.  However, the point of the story is that Dunbar did not choose to remain alone but gradually fell in with the Comanches to the point that he abandoned his own society and fully accepted the Native American’s.

     Men and women are social creatures.  It is indeed a rare human being who will choose absolute isolation from others, separate and outside of society.  The anxiety and terror of permanent separation is bred deep into our thoughts, for supposedly “No man is an island.”

     On January 31, 1709 an English ship stopped at the Juan Fernandez Islands, some three hundred miles west of Valparaiso, Chile in the Pacific and discovered Alexander Selkirk, a Scotch sailor who had lived alone on the island for four years and four months.

     Shoeless and dressed in goatskins, Selkirk reacted with the greatest indifference to his rescuers, for he said that after the first eight months he had conquered his loneliness and had learned to enjoy his days marooned on an island.  Surrounded by cats and goats, he had adapted.

     Selkirk was the exception, for most people are not psychologically suited for absolute solitude.

     Although Sigmond Freud devoted most of his thoughts toward discovering how individuals think and then behave, he also examined the tension between the individual and society.  He understood that individuals have universal desires and that society expects people to curb those desires for the benefit of the society.

     The psychologist studies the individual, and the sociologist studies the society and its methods of limiting individual desires.  Societies set up rules and create laws, defining what is acceptable and what is not, what is criminal and what is legal, and what is proper and what is inappropriate.

     The sociologist even digs deeper and discovers what it is that each society accepts as the arbiter of public truth.  In many societies over the centuries that arbiter was religion.  But in recent decades in America and Europe, science has superseded religion as the dominant way that society sets its limits on what is acceptable and what is deviant.

     Perhaps what is needed today is a new arbiter of public truth that rises above both religion and science, and steps us away from confrontational discussions of right and wrong.

     Roe v. Wade just celebrated its thirtieth birthday, and that court decision, right or wrong, is an example of science overwhelming religion as the arbiter that led to the decision.  Whether to legalize drugs or not is another of our society’s perplexing questions, and America now is searching for the arbiter which will point to the truth.

     An excellent way to solve the problem of crime and to empty our prisons is to make everything legal.  Nobody and nothing is then deviant.  All things are permissable.  And we all will be looking to live alone on a deserted island.  

     Each society at any point in time is constantly negotiating the meaning of truth, for everyone is a moral entrepreneur trying to determine what is wrong and what is right.

     There is much good to be said about solitude, slipping at odd moments away from society’s pull.  Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.  To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.  I love to be alone.  I never found the companion that was so companiable as solitude.”

REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE

by William H. Benson

January 16, 2003

     George Washington never delivered his Farewell Address.  Instead, he had it printed on September 19, 1796, and in it he said, “Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.”  In other words, if an American, love America.

     He warned future generations against entangling themselves in Europe’s alliances and foreign  intrigues, for he saw empire with its wars and responsibilities as the very enemy of the republic. 

     In ancient Rome the elected Senators commanded the real power.  But once Julius Caesar had conquered Gaul, central Europe, and a major part of the British Isles, Rome possessed an empire and an ended up with an emperor, Caesar Augustus, who retained all power and made all decisions.  In this transition from republic to empire, the Roman citizens lost their right to self-government, but in exchange they received peace, security, bread, and games.

     Throughout the four centuries of the Pax Romana, all citizens of the Roman Empire were left alone as long as they kept the peace and paid their taxes.

     A historian once wrote that Britain acquired her empire in “a fit of absence of mind,” and so she became Great Britain.  However, King George III was no match for the capabilities and intellect of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.  In another fit of absence of mind King George III and Britain lost America to Americans who declared their independence from Britain.

     Both Rome and Britain are examples of how through sheer will power and force ambitious leaders can carve out empires across foreign territories, but always at a cost.  The Romans lost self-government, and the British lost America.

     Today the citizens of the United States of America are poised at a crossroads.  Will they choose empire or retain their republic?  Will they embrace an imperial Presidency and an acquiescing Congress and United Nations, or will they insist upon self-government?

     Last June George Bush spoke to the graduating cadets at West Point and said, “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish.”  Then, last November at the White House he spoke to a group of veterans and said that America has “no territorial ambitions.  We don’t seek an empire.  Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others.”

     On August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 250,000 protesters and said, “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.”

     How far can we as Americans extend King’s dream of equality and opportunity and freedom?  Shall we extend it to citizens of foreign countries?  Is our faith in representative democracy, in a republic, so determined that we would force it upon other lands, and in so doing create an empire and lose our own republic?  America would then give up its own soul to save others.

     George Bush sees his actions in Iraq primarily as self-defensive for America and secondarily as giving the Iraqis a chance for self-government, once Saddam Hussein is ousted.  But in a country without a history of self-government, the choice is often not between dictator and republic, but rather between dictator and anarchy.

     Given those two choices, many would rather groan under the whims of a dictator rather than suffer the devastation of a civil war and the uncertainity of the unknown.  And America will be asked to sort this all out, the very thing that George Washington warned against.

     A quote from The New York Times: “The impending operation in Iraq is thus a defining moment in America’s long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic.”

ISAAC ASIMOV

by William H. Benson

January 2, 2003

     Isaac Asimov often told the story about the day he met with one of his professors, Joseph Mayer, to discuss the low grade that the professor had given him on a lab report.  Dr. Mayer looked at the intense young graduate student and bluntly said,  “The trouble with you, Asimov, is that you can’t write.”  The professor was quite unaware of what Isaac had already achieved in writing science fiction, ever since he was a teenager.

     Isaac sat there stunned for a moment, gathered up his papers, and said, “I’ll thank you, Professor Mayer, not to repeat that slander to my publishers.”

     Wearing dark-framed glasses and sporting mutton-chop sideburns and wild hair, Isaac enjoyed life best sitting in front of a typewriter and pouring his ideas on to paper, something he did for almost 60 years, producing an incredible amount of material.  Besides science fiction, he wrote on mathematics, astronomy, geology chemistry, biochemistry, physics, biology, history, literature, and even humor.  Book after book after book rolled off his typewriter.

    Unfortunately, the typewriting ceased on April 6, 1992 when Isaac Asmiov died due to complications from AIDS, something that the general public was not told.  Two days later Arthur Ashe, the tennis star, announced that he also had AIDS, and he died the following February.

     Both Asimov and Ashe had become HIV infected with tainted blood during heart surgery in the mid-eighties, in the days before blood was screened.  It is ironic that Isaac Asimov, a scientist and a science-fiction writer, would be overcome by a scientific phenomenon–a virus that had invaded his body, quietly replicated itself, and then suddenly attacked, shutting down his auto-immune system.

       AIDS is now 21 years old and is a viral terror.  Today somewhere between 40 and 60 million people worldwide are HIV infected.  The worst of this human catastrophe is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the virus has killed more than 12 million people.  By 2010 experts believe that the disease will orphan roughly 20 million African children.

     The global crisis is spreading into India, China, southeast Asia, and Russia.  Because the numbers keep exploding, the news in those places is bad, and the word Holocaust is cropping up.

     The good news is that in the U.S. deaths from AIDS has dropped from nearly 50,000 per year to less than 17,000, mainly due to the AIDS “triple cocktail” drug therapy, called HAART.  Unlike Asimov and Arthur, Magic Johnson is still alive, some 11 years after he was diagnosed.

     January 2 is Isaac Asimov’s birthday, and he would have been 83 years old today.  Much like the ancient Roman god Janus who was blessed with two faces, one to look back into the past and another to look forward into the future, Isaac Asimov thought and wrote equally well in both mental hemispheres.

     His best known science-fiction work was the Foundation series in which his fictional character Hari Seldon devised a new science called psychohistory and wrote complicated mathematical formulas, all designed to predict the future based upon past events.

     We begin a new year this week, and looking into 2003 we see biological terrors that could cripple the very psyche of humanity–HIV and AIDS, the West Nile Virus, and the threat of a resumption of smallpox, eradicated from the planet in 1979.  I would like to think that perhaps in 2003, scientists will discover a cure for HIV, that national leaders will seek and find a solution for the AIDS orphans, that a biological war with Iraq will be prevented, that smallpox will remain locked in laboratory freezers, and that humanity will retain its hope for a better future. 

     Shortly before dying, Isaac Asimov said, “I don’t feel self-pity because I won’t be around to see any of the possible futures.  Like Hari Seldon, I can look at my work all around me and I’m comforted.  I know that I’ve studied about, imagined, and written down many possible futures–it’s as if I’ve been there.”

PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

by William H. Benson

December 19, 2002

     Late on the evening of January 19, 2001, Bill Clinton threw caution and counsel aside and signed his name to a document that granted a presidential pardon to Marc Rich, a fugitive living in Switzerland since 1983 and wanted here in the U.S. for tax fraud amounting to $48 million and racketeering charges.  Prosecutors had desperately wanted to get their hands on him for seventeen years, and then Clinton in the last hours of the last day of his Presidency had pardoned him.

     His three legal counsels later testified that they had strenuously argued against the Rich pardon and thought that they had persuaded Clinton to reject it.  But then at 3:00 p.m. on the 19th Clinton had spoken to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and Clinton had tipped the other way.

     It was a “highly questionable pardon”, given the severity of the charges against Marc Rich, and the fact that Denise Rich, Marc’s ex-wife, had donated more than $1.3 million in political contributions to Bill and Hillary, including $450,000 to Clinton’s library in Arkansas.

     Indeed, Denise Rich had written a passionate application to Clinton begging for the pardon, playing on Clinton’s own resentment toward zealous prosecutors, and saying that she knew “what it feels like to see the press try and convict the accused without regard for the truth.”

    The fury and the outcry coming from the legal establishment deafened Clinton’s plea, that “once the facts are out there, people will understand what I did and why, even if they may not agree with it.”  Newsweek responded, “He couldn’t have been more wrong.”

    On August 9, 1974 Nixon resigned rather than face an impeachment and possibly a criminal trial in which he stood a reasonable chance of going to jail, as did Haldeman and Ehrlichman and the others who had participated in the Watergate burglary and coverup.  Then, on September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon.

     The outcry against this unexpected and unpopular decision colored badly the first days of the Ford Presidency.  A month later Ford defended himself before the House Judiciary Committee, saying that he wanted to end the national divisions created by Watergate.

     In his Second Inaugural Address Lincoln had pled for clemency for the South.  “With malice toward none, with charity for all, . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”  He proposed that when at least 10 percent of the voters in each of the Southern states had taken a loyalty oath to the Constitution, each state could then return to the Union.

     Following Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson wanted to continue Lincoln’s plan, but Congress, led by Senator Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens in the House, wanted revenge and retribution.  So they sent down the Northern troops and created military dictatorships in each of the Southern states to ensure that blacks were freed and given the right to vote.

     By 1868 Congressional Reconstruction had turned ugly.  The political hatred went beyond anything seen before or since.   The Southern whites boiled in helpless rage at Congress’s vindictive nature, and so they turned on the blacks with a ferocious hatred.  When Johnson tried to stand up to Congress, Congress impeached him on trumped-up charges.  Only one vote prevented Johnson from being ousted from the White House.

     The poisoned atmosphere in Washington gave rise to an ocean of hostility.  Suspicion, mistrust, denunciation, accusation, and bitterness broke down normal channels.  And then in the midsts of all that hatred, on Christmas Day, December, 25, 1868, in his last few days as President, Johnson issued a Presidential pardon, an unqualified amnesty to all who had participated in the insurrection or rebellion against the United States.  Congress was stunned at his temerity.

     Right or wrong and for their own reasons, with a signature, Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich, as Ford had pardoned Nixon, and as Johnson had pardoned the Southerners.  A pardon or a pound of flesh?  Clemency or vindictiveness?  The magnanimous gesture or retribution?  Mercy or justice?  Which is it this Christmas season?  The angels sang on the Judean hills that Christmas night “Peace on earth.  Goodwill toward men.”  May it be so.

WALTER DISNEY

by William H. Benson

December 5, 2002

     Time‘s critics say that the new Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, is even better than last year’s first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, a film that I did enjoy.  Although fantasy is not my favorite literary form, seeing the Hobbits, such as Bilbo Baggins and Frodo and the wizard Gondolf, on the screen held my attention for all of  the three plus hours the movie lasted.

     I did read The Hobbit some thirty-three years ago, when in high school, but I have never been able to finish John Ronald Reuel Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, despite numerous determined starts.  And the same is true of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and even now of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.  With fantasy it seems that some people prefer the movie version.

     Someone who knew the power of a fantastic story presented on the screen, rather than in printed form, was Walter Elias Disney, born December 5, 1901, 101 years ago today.  He believed in children’s fantasy and built his career around cartoon animals designed for kids.

     After losing the rights to Oswald the Rabbit, his first cartoon creation, to unscrupulous distributors, Walt Disney turned to others animals: Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Donald and Daisey Duck, Pluto, and Goofy–all as American now as apple pie.  Never would he consider giving up his rights to them.

     Ridiculed initially, Walt eventually won over the critics to his movie-length cartoons, such as Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, and even Fantasia.  He said it best, “I prefer animals to people.”  And he put them on the screen again and again.

     True, Disney created a fantastic and unreal world, a place of happiness and escape from the less colorful facts of human life, but the reality of his own personal life was everything but happy.  Relentlessly, he strove to create his fantasy dreams through sheer willpower alone.

     Analysts now believe that Disney was probably manic-depressive who suffered from a death-wish mentality and who constantly lived on the edge of collapse.  He would live and work at the studio for months at a time on a project, exhausting himself to such a degree that weeks of rest were then required, only to be followed by more work.  And so the pattern was set; manic-like work followed by exhaustion and depression.

     Repeatedly he bet everything on his latest project, stringing himself out on the edge of financial collapse.  Twice he was bankrupt while still in his twenties.  Eight other times he faced personal insolvency.  Never was he able to estimate the costs, personal and otherwise, beforehand that a project would require.  And so he consistently moved from crisis to crisis, precarious at best.

     In 1931 his wife Lillian found Walt unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills, and the doctors saved his life by pumping his stomach.  That was the first of eight total nervous breakdowns he would suffer during his adult life.   

     Driving himself to perfection, the overwork plus the cigarettes (three packs a day) and the heavy drinking took its toll as it always does.  He dropped dead on December 15, 1966 at age 65 unable to ever enjoy the dreams he had dreamed and which he had so graciously given away to others but at a tremendous personal cost to himself.

     While fantasy is dream-like, light, fluffy, in technicolor, it is usually short-lived; reality is of a darker hue with shades of gray, uglier, often heartbreaking, and lasts much longer.  We walk into a darkened movie theater seeking moments of escape from everyday life, and the original imagination-makers like J.R.R. Tolkein and C. S. Lewis and J. K. Rowling and Walter Elias Disney are there to provide us those pleasurable minutes.

LEE HARVEY OSWALD

by William H. Benson

November 21, 2002

     In the thirty-nine years since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the American public has had a difficult time accepting the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  The public mind seems to enjoy the thrill and shudder of living in the aftermath of a mystery, that a conspiracy struck down the nation’s President, and that someday the truth will surface.  Some apparently simple events have magnified into something far more complex than first imagined.

     The facts present themselves.  On November 22, 1963, Friday, just after noon, a sniper shot at least three bullets at the President’s car.  Two struck the President: one in the upper back and the other in the back of the head, which killed him.  The third struck Texas Governor John Connelly.

     Within forty-five minutes, a Dallas policeman, J. D. Tippit, tried to detain a suspect for questioning and was shot and killed by same suspect with a revolver.  Minutes later Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in a nearby movie theater, and was found carrying a revolver.  The spent shell casings found at the Tippit killing were positively identified as those coming from the same revolver Oswald carried.

     Police found a rifle on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with Oswald’s palm print on the stock of that rifle.  It had been purchased by Oswald some months ago but under an assumed name.  A bullet (exhibit 399) was recovered, most likely from Governor Connelly’s stretcher, and identified as coming from that same rifle.  Oswald had access to the Depository because he worked there.

     A prosecutor looking at those facts would conclude that he had enough evidence to present a case to a jury and demand “guilty” verdicts for both the murder of the President and of J. D. Tippit.  A statement from Oswald would have cinched it.  However, when questioned by Dallas police, Oswald admitted nothing.  Then, on Sunday noon with the television cameras rolling, Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner, acting out of grief stepped forward and shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

     President Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetary on Monday, November 25, and  four days later President Johnson established the Warren Commission to sort out the evidence.

     Ten months later the Warren Commission Report and its associated twenty-six volumes of documentation stated that Oswald was a loner, a self-styled Marxist, and a Castro supporter.  He had lived for thirty-two months in Russia, where the authorities there had regarded him as unstable and had kept him under surveillance.  The commission found no evidence that he acted in concert with anybody or any organization, and all historians since have agreed.

     Since the release of the report a flood of books and speakers have countered with a conspiracy theory: that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and part of a scheme devised by either the CIA, the Russians, or the Mafia, and that there was a conspiracy after to suppress the truth.

     After all, there was evidence: the grassy knoll, a white cloud of smoke, Abraham Zapruder’s film, the single bullet theory, and a guy named Garrison in New Orleans, played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK.  It all added up to conspiracy.  But the facts add up otherwise.

     Some years later Professor John Kaplan, a professor of law at Stanford, said “that the full truth about the assassination will never be known.  This is partly due to the death of Oswald himself. . . . But in many of a nation’s affairs, as in many of an individual’s, truth can never be known, and even the important questions cannot be settled one way or another beyond a reasonable doubt.”

     Now that statement in many ways is a most upsetting statement, and the American people are upset by it, and rightfully so.  Americans want to know the whole truth.  And yet Kaplan said, “It is a sign of maturity to recognize that even the most important of issues often cannot be resolved to a point of absolute certainty.”  In other words, Americans have had to grow up over this issue and give up their dream of a vast conspiracy that killed their favored President and accept the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.