FREIDRICH VON SPEE

by William H. Benson

October 25, 2001

     In 1631 Freidrich von Spee (pronounced Shpay) published his book Cautio Criminalis which means Precautions for Prosecutors.  In it he exposed the Church/State’s brand of terrorism against, what he believed, were those innocent men and women accused of practicing witchcraft.  For years he had the misfortunate job as the priest in the German city of Wurzburg of hearing the confessions from those being tortured.  He listened as they wrenched and writhed in agony while strapped to a rack or the thumb screws were set or boiling water was poured into their boots.

    Von Spee saw through the elaborate machinery designed to ferret out the witch, and so he objected to the torture, the forced confessions, and the demand for the names of other witches.  And so at great personal risk he wrote his book, and in it he wrote, “The judges must either suspend these trials (and so impute their invalidity) or else burn their own folk, themselves, and everybody else; for all sooner or later are falsely accused and, if tortured, all are proved guilty.”

    He saw it for what it was–a rolling, lumbering, heavily-loaded, out-of-control train pulling cars loaded with accusations, torture, conviction, confession, and just before death more accusations.  It was a vicious turning wheel geared to grab and then crush anyone nearby and eventually everybody in their proper turn.

     The authorites wanted to arrest and punish von Spee for his honesty; however he died of the plague before they had their chance, and so he found his escape.

     Much has been written of the Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts, but that was the tip of the iceberg when compared with what was happening in Europe, where the situation deteriorated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a vicious witch hunt.  Indeed, the last execution for witchcraft in America was in 1692; but in France, 1745; in Germany, 1775; in Poland, 1793.  And the Church did not abolish inquisitorial torture until 1816.

     Why did it all end then?  Fortunately, what happened was that Western Civilization grew up.  Science expanded, and reason and skepticism struck at the very heart of superstition.

     Carl Sagan in his book The Demon-Haunted World — Science as a Candle in the Dark wrote, “The witch mania is shameful.  How could we do it? . . . If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey — then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man.”

     Halloween approaches.  It is a once-a-year moment when the trick-or-treaters come out, when the ghosts and goblins and witches make their appearance, when Orson Welles on the radio declares that Martians have landed, and when UFO’s abduct people and bring them back alive to tell about it.  It is a scary time, yes, but a harmless one–only a replica or a vestige of an ugly historical event in humanity’s history, at its moment of adolescence.

     When Shakespeare’s Hamlet sees the ghost of his murdered father, he cried out, “Angels and Ministers of Grace, defend us!”  A worthy request.  Truly, for humanity to survive and flourish, it needs more of the angels, especially the kind with two legs who walk upon the ground who think before lashing out, and less of the witches.  Plus, it needs more ministers of grace, of the variety such as Freidrich von Spee who can see through the inhumane behavior for whatever the reason, and less of the crazed and superstitious and powerful who are so determined to pounce upon the accused and the innocent. 

ROGER WILLIAMS – SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

by William H. Benson

October 11, 2001

     Almost immediately upon his arrival in 1631 at Massachusetts Bay, Roger Williams argued with the colony’s governing church officials.  At first he pointed out that the church had not completely separated from the Church of England, and therefore he could not worship with them since he had converted to Separatism.  Then, later he argued that they had misappropriated illegally the land in Massachusetts from the various Indian tribes, which he believed were the rightful owners.  Finally, he disagreed with the way the church leaders punished the colonists for breaches of religious observances and for enforcing church attendance.

     Roger Williams went on to think deeper about the proper relationship between the church and the state and between theology and the law than did any other early American.  He believed they should be completely separated.  He spoke his ideas from the pulpit, and he wrote his ideas down on paper.  For the crime of heresy the Massachusetts Bay’s theocratic leaders brought him to trial on October 6, 1635, and on the 9th the fifty-man jury brought in a unanimous verdict of guilty.

     He was “enlarged out of Massachusetts” the next January into a blinding winter blizzard and only stayed alive by finding refuge with the Indians.

     Today the idea of separting the church from the state is an intricate and accepted part of American life.  It is the law.  But four centuries ago, it was heresy.  It was easy then to whip Colonial juries into a frenzy over a lack of religious piety or for heresy.  Roger Williams saw that and understood the danger inherent in linking theology and the law.

     What he perceived was that so many religions are steeped in an absolutist frame of mind–each convinced that it alone has a monopoly on truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.  Practitioners of absolutist religions cannot see any middle ground or that truth can be drawn from seemingly contradictory doctrines.

     Roger Williams did not live to see the anactment of the Bill of Rights, which decoupled the church from the state.  James Madison, the writer of the Bill of Rights, recognized that a close relation between the government and any of the quarrelsome religions would be fatal to freedom and injurious to religion.  It would tend to destroy government and degrade religion.

     For the past month Americans have focused on Islam, what James Michener called the “misunderstood religion”.  He wrote that the one point that Americans frequently miss is that “Islam is not only a religion, it is also a body of law.  This law, known as the Shariat, has developed from the Koran and the traditions.  This system makes a Muslim’s religion somewhat more important to him that it would be in a western community.”  In other words in Islam the distinction between theology and law is muted, and often a Muslim does not separate the two.

     However, in his column last week, Dan Rather argued that the terrorist attacks of September 11th went way beyond adherence to the Islam religion.  “It seems apparent that the perpetrators’ true religion is fascism, that grim creed the earth never seems able to banish completely.  Their acts ‘can only be understood’ within the context of Islam only because Islam is the framework they have chosen for expressing their will to power.”

     The columnist Thomas Sowell asked the question, “What have we done wrong to arouse such hatred?”  He answers, “We have achievements that dwarf theirs.  We have succeeded.  The fanatics most often come from wealth, rather than poverty, and so they have time on their hands to brood and produce their brand of fanaticism.” 

     Why has Western Civilization, in America and Europe, succeeded and achieved so much?  There are a lot of immediate and obvious answers, however, I  would argue that the West has succeeded because of characters like Roger Williams who forgot about their own personal comforts, took a contrary position regardless of the threat of imprisonment or banishment, and argued that only the state should be the institution that creates and executes laws and not the church.

“It Ain’t Necessarily So”

by William H. Benson

September 27, 2001

     George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898, and thirty-seven years later, almost to the day, his musical Porgy & Bess premiered in Boston.  One of the big hits from that musical was a song, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.  The lyrics suggested that some of the things that we are told are true early on constitute a core assumption that we then later discover is faulty or even mistaken.

     It has been said, that the easiest was to avoid becoming a bore is to startle people by challenging some of their cherished assumptions.  (It is also an excellent way to make an enemy.)  However, there are certain things that human beings assume are true actually fall into the category of “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

     For example, certain institutions tell us that we have to or we must or it is imperitive that we  believe a particular political or philosophical or religious belief as a path to personal happiness, a better life, or a future salvation.  But “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”  As a corollary, those same institutions tell us that if we do not totally commit ourselves–heart, soul, mind, and body, to their particular package of beliefs, we will experience life-long misery or, worse yet, an eternal hell.  But “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

     When we take that set of beliefs–a hand-me-down version, without questioning all of its implications and far-reaching results, we perhaps bypass virtue and the moral good.  We have to believe that human beings possess enough intelligence to question passed-on and -down assumptions, and that humanity will not doom itself with a worn-out, torn up, washed out, and full-of-holes box of crazed beliefs that damages and kills human beings.

     To believe privately one way or one thing or another way or another thing is our own business, but when we as humans “act” upon those beliefs, those actions can then be either good or bad, benevolent or malevolent.  To translate belief into criminal actions misses the important thing–grace, the magnanimous action that benefits others.  To crush others, to inflict pain upon others, to enmesh others, and to trap others simply because they do not believe as we do is morally evil.  It necessarily is so.

     An example from Shakespeare.  Othello loves and then marries Desdemona.  In the wings waits Iago who despises the newly-weds’ happiness, and so he promises to “enmesh” them all.  Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful, and acting upon that deception, the jealous Othello smothers his innocent bride, who, realizing what is happening, cries out “Lord! Lord! Lord!” and then dies.  When others inform Othello that Desdemona has not been unfaithful, but that Iago had lied, Othello can only cry out, “O! O! O!”, and then falls back onto his bed.

     This scene from Othello lets loose an intense pain that has stunned every audience each time it has been performed for the past four centuries.  There are perhaps some 600,000 words in the English language, and all Othello could say was “O!” three times.  At moments of excruciating pain and sorrow we hear or we offer up platitudes: “words fail us” or “words cannot express”;  Othello understood that, for speechless he was.

     Before his final act–suicide, he wanted to know “Why?”  Why had Iago deceived him?  Why had he lied?  Iago turned cold and said “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know:  From this time forth I never will speak word.”  And he never says another line throughout the play.

     On September 11, 2001 President Bush called “these folks . . . faceless cowards.”  They were Iago’s come to life to terrify our very existence.  Staring at the television screen that day all I and every other American could mutter was “O! O! O!”, while smoke billowed across lower Manhattan, and two skyscrapers collapsed, and knowing that thousands of Americans were trapped and doomed inside.

     Promiscuous hatred and envy does exist in human nature, and we want to know why, and we probe, wanting to know why this Iago is so hateful toward us.  Samuel Coleridge explained it best, “Iago is motiveless malignity hunting for the motive.”  In other words, Iago possesses no motive, no reason.  In his acts of rage and calculated deception, he is hunting for the reason, for the motive.  Iago’s hatred surpasses all possible explanations.  He simply does “dirt on life”.

     Because the characters on the stage of real life were so trapped and the ending was so very painful and so intense for them, we watched dumbfounded, speechless, and haulted in our affairs.

     Tuesday a.m., September 11, 2001.  Belief — actions — trapped — doomed — “Lord! Lord! Lord!” — dirt thrown into the very eyes of life — WHY? — “O! O! O!”.

     It need not necessarily have been.

MYSTERY WRITERS

by William H. Benson

September 13, 2001

     Last Saturday evening on television John Travolta played the starring character in the movie, “Get Shorty”, adapted from a book written by the mystery writer, Elmore Leonard.  To read any of his books or to watch the movie is like peeling back the covers of decency and peeking into a vicious underworld loaded with ignorant oddballs, thugs, psychopaths, and savage criminals.  Few of Leonard’s characters can be considered normal, and the plots revolve around revenge or small-time nobodies about to commit horrific crimes.  Tasteful literature it is not.

     My first exposure to mysteries began with a birthday gift while still in grade school of the first two volumes of the Hardy Boys–The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff.  Over the next couple of years I then worked my way through the rest of the Franklin Dixon books that featured the boys: Joe and Frank Hardy and their father, Fenton Hardy, a private investigator.  The stories include simple plots, such as a ring of car thieves that Joe and Frank happen upon.  If given a chance, the stories can hold a boy’s interest.

     In junior high I then discovered Earle Stanley Gardner and the Perry Mason series.  Into about the fourth book though, I realized that they were all virtually the same book, or I should say the same format.  (John Grisham is accused of the same cookie-cutter pattern.)

     Perry Mason defends someone, who it turns out later, is innocent of murder.  His secretary, Della Street, and his private investigator, Paul Drake, are there to help, but it is Perry who does the thinking.  In a final dramatic scene in the courtroom, he turns and accuses somebody else of the crime, who then breaks down and confesses.  The old black and white television series from the 1960’s starring Raymond Burr, I think, provide better entertainment than do the books.

     Neither Agatha Christie nor P. D. James, the two prominent British women mystery writers, could hold my interest to the final pages.  Numerous times I have started both and failed to finish.  Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot nor Adam Dagleish captivated my attention, and I would invariably get lost on about the fifth page in one of P. D. James’s convoluted sentences.

     The same cannot be said of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.  Who possibly could not like either of them?  Doyle could write, and Holmes could think.  With superhuman reasoning powers, a violin, a magnifying glass, and wearing a hunting cap and a tweed cape, Sherlock Holmes strode the streets of London and solved the most insolvable crimes, astonishing the police and his friend Dr. Watson, who told the stories.       

     John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee lives on a boat, The Busted Flush, along the Atlantic coast of Florida and lives the solitary life of a beachcomber.  Problems appear, and he sets them right.  The titles include a color, such as  Darker than Amber or A Deadly Shade of Gold.

     However, my two favorite mystery writers are Sue Grafton and Dick Francis.

     Sue Grafton writes the alphabet series: A is for Alibi, B is for Burglary, and so on.  Her most recent is P is for Peril, which means she has 10 more to go.  Kinsey Milhone lives in Santa Teresa, California, is 32-years-old, twice divorced, and is a private investigator.  She lives in a converted garage next door to the 80-year-old Henry Pitts who bakes bread and writes crossword puzzles.  Kinsey tells the stories.  Each book is unique, the characters are all believable, the plots are all intricate, and you never know who the crook is until it is over.

     Dick Francis is truly the best of the best.  His sparse sentence structure and believable stories always make sense, and when reading him, you know you are listening to a superior intellect.  (Why is it that the British write such great English?)  After a successful career as a steeplechase jockey in England, he turned to writing mysteries.  Getting close to 80 now, for the past 35 years he has published a book a year.  The teller of the story is the hero, who is a single guy in his late twenties or early thirties who finds himself swept up in events–not of his making, but usually based in England and revolving around some aspect of horse racing.

     The enemy is a particularly vicious and powerful brute who is identified early on, and for the remainder of the book, the hero calmly works it out and in the end defeats the enemy.  However, plenty of physical pain is faced along the way.  If you like learning about the British aristocracy and race horses, check out a Dick Francis novel– any of them.  They are all a delight. 

LABOR DAY

by William H. Benson

August 30, 2001

     The Labor Day weekend approaches–a welcome relief.  It means that summer is about over, and school has begun.  Labor Day honors the nation’s working people, sometimes called the laborforce or the workforce.

     In the U.S. in 2001 there are about 140 million workers–some 75 million men and 65 million women.  Just over half of those 140 million people have white-collar jobs and the remainder is divided between blue-collar, service, or farm workers.  At any given point in time, a generous percentage of those 140 million derive much satisfaction and happiness from their work, a smaller percentage are miserable, and the remainder (probably the majority) just consider their work a job that gives them a paycheck that pays their bills. 

     Bill O’Reilly, an opinionated television commentator, recently wrote a best-selling book entitled, The O’Reilly Factor.  In his chapter “The Job Factor”, he writes, “But since work is a fact of life and can also be rewarding, we’re better off when we find the job that’s best for us.  It’s too big a chunk of your lifetime to let it go to waste.  If we’re unfulfilled at work, it’s harder to be a happy, generous person.”

     He further says that a worker must identify his or her true talents and then find out how to use them to convert their time and energy and work into a paycheck.  He writes, “I don’t care how old you are.  It is never too late to use the gifts God gave you.  Not many things are sadder–or more darned annoying–than someone who says, ‘I wish I had started my own woodworking business’ (written a book, moved to a farm, gone back to nursing school, etc., etc.)  Do it now!”

     In the September edition of “National Geographic”, I noticed a sobering statistic.  “One-fifth of the full-time jobs in the U.S. pay eight dollars an hour or less.  Filling most of these jobs are the 40 percent of the workforce who have no education beyond high school.”

     Forty percent!  In other words, 40 percent of that 140 million are stuck where they are, unless through sheer will power and determination and a measure of luck they crawl up the payscale.  Returning to school is the better option, for it is there workers can improve their reading, writing, math, and technology skills.  It is a jolting fact of life in America in the 21st century that those who refuse to further their education (due to choice or circumstances) are forced into work that pays little.

     In that same “National Geographic” article, a school counselor named Mel Riddile said, “Computers are important, but not as important as literacy.  The kids have to be able to read or they can’t even use computers.  Here we spell “hope” r-e-a-d.  It’s no guarantee, but it’s essential.”

     Also, Bill O’Reilly suggests that getting along with others in the workplace is a necessary skill.  In a don’t-do-as-I-do-but-do-as-I-say sermon, he argues for an agreeable and conciliatory and non-combative attitude in the workplace.  Throughout his career, he dealt very poorly with what he calls “the toxic people” he met along the way–a big mistake.  He fought them with a passion.

     He says, “Do not do what I did in the workplace.  It’s not worth it.  I’ve survived and even prospered in the world of TV news, but that’s a miracle, believe me.  I made my life a thousand times harder than it had to me.” 

     However, he noticed that the truly brutal and toxic people in the workplace do make life so miserable for those around them, but that they do not last long.  Their supervisors either fired or demoted them.  “Hitler had a run of about fifteen years; the junior Hitlers of the world usually get much less.  Even though the occasional animal does sustain material success, ruthless is not the way to go.”

     School plus skills plus a job equals a paycheck–the formula for success and happiness in America.  Enjoy a well-deserved day off on Monday.   

CHANCE

by William H. Benson

August 16, 2001

     There is a word that has inspired more hope and opened more new lands than any other, and that word is gold.  On August 17, 1896 three guys (whom no one today remembers) — George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charlie — discovered gold on Bonanza Creek in the Canadian Klondike.  Of all the thousands of golddiggers across the western United States who patiently panned for gold in hot weather and cold day after day, it was those three guys who found it.  It makes a person stop and wonder.  Why were they the lucky ones?

     At the rodeo last week I watched calf-ropers and saddle bronc riders and barrell racers and bull riders.  I had to ask myself:  why does one cowboy stay on a bull for the required eight seconds and another is immediately tossed aside when barely out of the chute?  Is it skill of the rider or is it how the bull moves and bucks and jumps?  Or is it the luck of the draw, of chance, of which cowboy sits on which bull?

     Football season is rapidly approaching, and in five months it will be over.  We wonder now: which teams will earn the championships?  Those with the best players?  Or those with the most determined players?  Or will a variety of other factors (some unknown even now) taken together dictate who will win?  Do we even dare predict? 

     The wildly improbable happens everyday.  The remarkable brings us up short, and the miraculous takes our breath away.

     For example, fifty years ago Life magazine published a picture of a group of deer that included three albinos.  The photographer Staber Reese took the photo in northern Wisconsin where there lived an estimated 850,000 white-tailed deer, of which no more than twenty were albinos.  Reese calculated the odds of him taking that picture with those three albinos at 79 billion to 1.  Perhaps.

     We are mistaken when we under-rate the influence of “chance” in our lives, for anything can happen to anybody–both the good and the bad.  There is no complete defense against the sea of improbabilities that surrounds us, but there are weapons–probability theory and statistics.

     It is possible to face calmly this world of coincidences and seemingly miraculous events.  The statistical approach is helpful because it teaches that a person cannot always expect the average one hundred percent of the time.  After all, the average is just one single point on a curve.  The bell-shaped normal curve shows that ordinarily there are more medium cases than either those from the extremes–the far left or the far right.  But the extremes exist nevertheless.

     Clear thinking means that in this world there are multiple causes for why things happen, that there are imperfect correlations between events and people’s behaviors, and that sheer unpredictable chance is what we live with everyday.  That type of clear thinking pushes aside the simpler idea that everything and everyone can be categorized into two camps–the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers.  It also shoves aside the idea that everyone-knows-that-this-is-due-to-only-that kind of thinking.

     After three meetings Goldfinger finally recognized James Bond for what he was–a spy and an enemy bent on his destruction.  Immediately Goldfinger had him apprehended and then he said to him,  “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago:  ‘Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  But the third time is enemy action.'”