GRADUATION

by William H. Benson

May 24, 2001

     On May 26, 1954 archaeologists digging in the sand next to Cheops’s Great Pyramid at Giza discovered a pit carved into the bedrock and covered with blocks of stone.  Once inside, the Egyptianologists found a boat made of cedars from Lebanon that was broken down into pieces.  Reconstructed it measured 150 feet long and probably conveyed Cheops’s body from the east to the west bank of the Nile for burial–only some four thousand years ago.

     Stay with me while we now switch gears.  Graduation season is upon us, and with it the national columnists are voicing their opinions on the state of education in America.  Thomas Sowell last week commented that everybody eventually drops out of the educational system at some point, some sooner than others.  He points out that even the Ph.D.’s drop out–either before or after completing their work, and many who do drop out often return to school later.  In the U.S. education is always available and is achievable. 

     Charley Reese, on the other hand is very much down on what he calls the “government-funded and government-controlled” secular system which produces what he sees is a flawed product.  He suggests that parents should pull their children out of public schools and place them in private schools.  It is his opinion–right or wrong.

     But what else can today’s high school graduate take with them to the university?

     I recently read a quote about Irving Berlin and his philosophy of life.  He saw life as composed of a few basic elements: life and death, loneliness and love, hope and defeat–not many more.  With those as givens, he realized that approval is better than complaint, hope more viable than despair, and kindness nobler than cruelty.

     Applying that to the high school graduate, I would suggest that college is not a place where the complainers, the despairing, and the cruel belong, but it is a place for the thoughtful, the approving, the hopeful, and the kind-hearted.  With just a medium measure of brain-power and gigantic doses of determination and hustle, a person can achieve remarkable success at the university, if one learns to quickly put aside the loneliness and defeated attitudes that can cripple even the smartest.

     Above all, a measure of enthusiasm is required.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”  Beware.  In this dumbing down America we live in, a four-year degree is still something we must label “great”.  Emerson would have agreed.

     Now what does education have to do with a buried boat in the Sahara?  I think it addresses the other big problem that college students endure and that is “envy”.  Not everyone goes to college.  Instead, they get jobs, make money, get married, start a family, buy a house with furniture to fill it, perhaps a farm, a business, a car, a pickup, and a boat, and none of those things are wrong.  They want to build a pyramid–gigantic, colossal, grand, rock-solid, powerful, stretching into the sky.

     Now how can the college student compete with that?  He or she is buried in a bedrock of books, term-papers, reports, lectures, and class notes, usually poor without much income and a lot of expenses.  He or she faces a tough slog.  Locked in a self-imposed tomb, stuck in the sand, while beside them stands a pyramid.  But eventually graduation day arrives, (and it may feel like four thousand years instead of four), and the college graduate sails away.

     The difficulty with the pyramid is that no one can move it.  It faces a lot of weather, a blistering hot sun, and pirates gut it of its internal treasures.  Above all else, it cannot float.  There it  stands–forever.  The fancy economic phrase for this is “delayed gratification”.

     Another thing not to be slighted.  A college student has a chance to meet the wild and crazy, the witty, the intelligent, the determined, the grand, and the truly outstanding.  They are all there.  Why would anyone pass up the chance to meet them?

     A farmer entered his mule in the Kentucky Derby.  When asked if he thought his mule had much of a chance of winning, he replied, “No, but I feel the association will do him good.”

     Despite a recent scandalous admission, Jessie Jackson used to say something of importance to his audiences, “If you’re in school, stay there.  If you’re not in school, go back.”

IMPEACHMENT

by William H. Benson

May 10, 2001

     Just weeks after gaining the Vice-Presidency, Andrew Johnson moved into the White House and the Oval Office after John Wilkes Booth had done his damage in Ford’s Theatre.  The new President sought to carry out Lincoln’s generous policy toward the Southern states but without Lincoln’s political skill.  The Radical Republicans in Congress wanted revenge and treated the Southern states as conquered territories, rather than as fellow states in the Union.

     A hopeless conflict ensued.  Congress would pass vindictive legislation.  President Johnson would then veto it, and Congress would then try to override his vetoes.

     John F. Kennedy told the story of the showdown in his book, Profiles in Courage.  Johnson fired Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War and a fierce Radical Republican bent on punishing the defeated South.  In firing Stanton, Johnson openly defied and, in fact, broke the Tenure of Office Act.  The House refused to accept Stanton’s firing and voted for impeachment.

     Out of the total 54 votes in the Senate, 36 were needed for the 2/3’s vote to remove Johnson from the Oval Office.  On May 16, 1868 the final vote came in at 35 for impeachment, one vote short of the necessary.  Seven Republicans, including Edmund G. Ross from Kansas, voted their conscience and refused to allow partisan politics to determine their vote.  Ross later said that he voted as he did because he feared a Congressional autocracy. 

     He later wrote, “I almost literally looked down into my open grave.”  As it turned out, he did commit political suicide.  His career in Washington ended, and back in Kansas he and his family suffered social ostracism, physical attack, and poverty.

     Of Congress’s 35 attempts at impeachment, only 16 have actually happened, and of those, only 9 have gone to trial.  Two of those were for Presidents–Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.  Another President, Richard Nixon, chose to resign on August 9, 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee issued 3 Articles of Impeachment.  Nixon well understood that the Senate had the necessary 2/3’s votes to give him the boot.

     Two years have passed since the last impeachment trial–that for Bill Clinton, indicted on two charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.  When pressed for a resignation, Clinton responded curtly, “Never.”  Because the Senate did not have the 2/3’s vote, the acquittal came on February 12, 1999.

     Recently, I read Bill O’Reilly’s book, The O’Reilly factor.  Outspoken, abrasive, opinionated, and blunt, he wrote of Clinton, “What a ridiculous waste!  Full of promise, intelligence, and charisma, this man will go down in history alongside Warren Harding and Richard Nixon as the most corrupt presidents of the twentieth century.

     “The much-publicized affair with Monica Lewinsky was trivial (except to Hillary and Chelsea).  What was not trivial was his lying about the whole thing, which paralyzed the nation’s executive and legislative branches for more than a year.  This man did tremendous damage to our country.

     “We Americans have the right to expect honest, disciplined leadership.  And we also deserve a leader who adheres to a decent standard of behavior within the walls of the White House.”

     Now some would conclude that O’Reilly overstated his disgust of Clinton’s sorry behavior, but others would not.  Loved by his friends and hated by his enemies, he remains today what he always has been–an enigma. 

     Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton–different times, different reasons, different facts, and different cases, and yet, the law is there.  Its gears turn slowly, but the machinery works.  The Constitution spells it out, defining impeachable offenses as those considered “high crimes and misdemeanors”.  The faces change, but the law remains steadfast, clearly what the Founding Fathers wanted and created.

CHERNOBYL

by William H. Benson

April 26, 2001

     Mount Vesuvius covered Pompei.  An earthquake struck San Francisco.  The Titanic bumped an ice berg and sank, and the Hindenburg was destroyed by fire at a tower mooring.  But the world’s biggest and worst accident to date happened at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986 in the Ukraine near the town of Chernobyl.

     While technicians shut down the fourth unit of the V. I. Lenin nuclear reactor for routine maintenance and testing, the steam pressure increased until the graphite core exploded.  Hundreds of tons of fuel, concrete, steel, and other debris rocketed into the night sky and then rained down over the surrounding area.

     Even more deadly were the several tons of radiation that rose ever upwards into the atmosphere creating a nuclear wind that swept across the Soviet Union and Europe poisoning millions.  Immediately, pilots began performing death-defying and heroic acts flying choppers into the smoke and fire and radioactive cloud to dump sand, boron, and lead onto the burning reactor.

     The Chernobyl accident rendered an area the size of New York State unsafe for human habitation.  A city of 42,000 was abandoned for at least the next 500 years.  It killed, according to the official account, 31 people almost immediately, and 224 others in the next few weeks, but actually the death toll was probably in the several hundreds and may even reach tens of thousands once all that radioactive waste has completed its course.

     People began to die.  First it was the firefighters and the cleanup crews who had been inside the reactor.  Then, men, women, and children across the Soviet Union began to develop radiation-linked diseases.  Since the explosion, cancer rates in the former Soviet Union have risen 300 percent, respiratory diseases 2,000 percent, and the number of babies born with birth defects has soared to record numbers.

     As is true of all accidents, everyone points a finger at another.  Government officials accuse the workers of being inept.  The workers accuse the power plant’s builders of shoddy construction.  Mothers with sick and dying children accuse the government.  Scientists and engineers contradict one another. 

     Actually, the Chernobyl fiasco was a combination of things that came to a focal point on that spring night fifteen years ago.  From the start the power plant was doomed to disaster, for it was poorly designed, poorly constructed, and poorly managed by poorly trained engineers.

     What was remarkable was that the Soviet Union admitted to a failure–the first time ever.  The Soviet Union’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, confessed that mistakes had been made.

     Today a sarcophagus of steel-and-concrete walls and ceiling encloses the fourth unit reactor.  It must stand and remain intact for the next several tens of thousand years.  At the bottom in the basement lies a pool of deadly radioactive material that no one has actually seen, but a photograph suggests it resembles a giant elephant’s foot standing on the floor.

     The sarcophagus was built very quickly by untrained workers more interested in surviving than doing a good job.  Rain leaks through cracks in the roof and then leaks out through cracks in the floor.  It is a continual disaster. 

     Before he became President, Ronald Reagan wrote that communism is neither an economic nor a political system, but a form of insanity, an aberration.  “The Russians have told us over and over again their goal is to impose their incompetent and ridiculous system on the world. . . . How much more misery will it cause before it disappears. . . . It will not survive because it lays the groundwork for its own destruction by suppressing economic, political, and social freedom.  Given the opportunity, people will seek freedom.”

     Chernobyl was the largest nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union’s empire, which had become unmanageable, teetering on the verge of economic collapse, rife with corruption, incompetence, political paranoia, and an unbending bureaucracy.  Reagan was right.  Communism did collapse, and Chernobyl was symbolic of what was wrong with communism–poor quality, hazardous to the environment, shortened human lives, and an accident waiting to happen that unfortunately did.

BRUCE CATTON

by William H. Benson

April 12, 2001

     My favorite writer on the Civil War is Bruce Catton.  He wrote easy-to-read and popularized versions of the Civil War that still line the shelves of most libraries.

     At age 49 Bruce chucked aside his career as a newpaper reporter and did what he really wanted to do–write Civil War history.  He quickly published three books on the Army of the Potomoc–Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomatox, none of which sold very well.  However, the Pulitzer Prize committee noticed them, and he was awarded a prize.  Suddenly, his trilogy became an overnight success.

     Bruce grew up in Benzonia, Michigan, where his father was a Congregational minister.  As a boy Bruce remembered going to the services in the Town Hall on Decoration Day and seeing the Civil War veterans dressed in their blue uniforms, sporting white beards.  They would then walk out to the cemetary and put lilacs on the graves of the veterans who had already passed on.  Those old men gave a color to village life, and Bruce wanted to know what made them tick. 

     He later realized that those old men in 1910 were either teenagers or in their twenties in the 1860’s and that they had passed through a fire then unlike anything else that had ever happened to them since.  It was an induction into adulthood that surpassed all others.  Bruce began writing to seek out what it was that drove those young men of the 1860’s so relentlessly forward.

     Through the narrative, the attention to detail, and even the maps, Bruce brings the battles and the war to life.  Always Bruce Catton ended up astonished at the courage those farm boys and small town sons from both the South and the North displayed on a battlefield in places like Shiloh, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where the carnage was so ugly and emotionally overwhelming.

     Elbow to elbow in a line one and two miles long they marched forward with their muskets raised, their bayonets poised, their swords rattling while overhead the colorful flags waved and whipped in the wind.  And the enemy, just across a few hundred yards of open field, had lined up in a similar fashion and was coming at them.  They met in terrible clashes.  What strength of desire can propel a young man forward when the odds are so firmly stacked against him?

     After years of studying the Civil War, Bruce concluded that despite the ugly cost of lost men, the war was worthwhile, for it did accomplish something.  It gave to Americans a geographic and a political unity.  It kept the country from fragmenting into a number of separate and independent and uncooperative states.  The North American continent was not Balkanized.  And this single geographic and political unit made possible the prosperity and power of later days.

     Ulysses Simpson Grant was Bruce Catton’s favorite Civil War character.  Bruce admired Grant for his tencity.  No matter how ferocious the battle, no matter how slim the chances of victory, Grant never faltered.  He revealed the qualities of a great military commander in that he took the initiative, fought aggressively, and made quick decisions.

     On a Sunday, April 9, 1865, Grant met Lee in a farmhouse owned by Wilmer McLean at Appomatox Court House, Virginia.  Grant offered generous terms;  the soldiers of the defeated Southern Confederacy could keep their horses for spring plowing.  Lee dressed in full military dress uniform accepted the terms. 

     On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford’s theatre to see the play, Our American Cousin, and there John Wilkes Booth, an actor and a Southern sympathizer, shot President Abraham Lincoln.  He died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 15.  Those dramatic events in our nation’s history appear to us now like a tragedy of Shakespearean quality, all acted out on a national stage and replayed again and again in the history books.

     Bruce Catton captured in words and detail the battles, the surrender at Appomatox, Lincoln’s assassination, and the “great lost cause” which the Southern Confederacy had so relentlessly pursued for four bloody years.

     Once Bruce was asked how he knew about a certain detail of the war, and he wistfully replied, “I don’t know.  Maybe I was there.”

TIME

by William H. Benson

March 29, 2001

     Time travel has always fascinated.  The ancient Egyptian pharaohs’ wanted to preserve their bodies to travel forward into that future world;  hence, the need for pyramids and mummification.

     In H. G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine, the traveler ventured forwards as well as backwards, but according to Isaac Asimov such travel is impossible.  It is a law of physics that we can only move forward in time but not necessarily at a fixed unalterable rate.

     In 1905 Albert Einstein advanced his Special Theory of Relativity.  He suggested that to  successfully measure distances what is crucial is the relative motion between the object being measured and the device doing the measuring.  Then, by his General Theory of Relativity he stated that motion through time becomes so closely related to motion through space that it is impossible to consider space and time separately.  This thinking reveals the notion that space-time is determined by four dimensions–height, length, width, and time.

     Stephen Hawking  wrote in his A Brief History of Time that “Space and time are now dynamic quantities: when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and time–and in turn the structure of space-time affects the way in which bodies move and forces act. . . . Space and time affect everything that happens in the universe.”

     Isaac Asimov said, “Space is what makes possible differences in position,” and Albert Einstein said “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

     It is within this parameter of space–time that life occurs.  For the thinker and philosopher time is life.  It is the crucial ingredient, for when it runs short, we grasp most desperately for it..

     Daylight savings time begins on Sunday, April Fool’s Day.  In a sense it is not time we are saving but only daylight, for time cannot be saved back into a depository institution to be withdrawn later for use.  It can only be either wasted or used constructively.

     The columnist Charley Reese wrote, “It’s said you can tell what people care about by what they buy, but I think a better indicator is how they spend their time.  Time is an unrecognized treasure.  Time, once spent, is forever gone.  Our store of time on Earth is limited.  We don’t know when it will run out, but we do know that it will.  The value of time is equivalent to life.”

     The child psychologists tell us that the amount of time a parent gives to a child equals that parent’s depth of affection for that child.  In other words for a child time is love.

     Not just on April 1st do fools waste their time on trifles.  The wise devote time to their families, to their jobs, to their careers, to their accomplishments, in other words, to constructing a quality life.  As usual, the ancient Greeks said it the best, “Life is a gift that comes to us from nature, but beautiful living is a gift that comes to us only from wisdom.”

     In a similar vein, Charles Darwin finished his Origin of the Species with this sentence.  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

     So we can wisely use or foolishly waste Sunday’s extra hour of daylight, a small slice of time.

FRANK McCOURT

by William H. Benson

March 15, 2001

     On St. Patrick’s Day we ordinarily think of green, an Emerald Island, shamrocks, four-leaf clovers, and leprechauns that dispense lucky charms.  We understand that, except for the green, this is all largely a myth designed to cover over the actual desperate circumstances and the raw existence that many Irish experienced growing up. 

     A good example is Frank McCourt who wrote Angela’s Ashes, the story of his growing-up years.  It not only won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for Biography, but was on the best-seller list for two years.  He tells a story of absolute deprivation and powerlessness as a child.

     Born in New York City to Irish parents–Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank was the oldest son of an ever-expanding family that soon included three brothers: Malachy Jr. and the twins–Eugene and Oliver, and also a sister–the baby Margaret.

     The major problem with the family is that Dad is an alcoholic who refuses to ever hold a steady job and provide for his children.  If he occasionally does get a paycheck, he spends it on his “pint” at the pub.  Neither he nor Mam are prepared for family responsibilities.

     One night the boys are awakened, and they soon realize that the baby Margaret has died during the night.  Mam suffers a complete breakdown, and relatives back in Ireland send them enough money to return to Limerick, Ireland on the Shannon River.

     Frank understands now that their return to Ireland was a big mistake.  He begins his book with these words, “My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.  Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.”

     In Ireland Dad continues his excessive drinking, singing foolish songs about the Irish patriots–Roddy McCorly and Kevin Barry, finding work and losing it days later, and going for long walks in the countryside.  The family is forced to live in a deplorable home where water floods the house every winter.  Sanitation is nonexistent, and typhoid and tuberculosis take a heavy toll.

     Oliver, one of the twins, dies.  The doctor explains to Dad and Mam that Oliver was sick and that he should have been in a hospital.  They plead innocence that they did not know.  And then weeks later the other twin, Eugene, also dies.  Mam is devastated.  Dad drinks himself into a stupor.  Frankie, six-years-old, endures.

     Two more boys are born into the family–Michael and Alphie.

     Dad finally goes to England to work in the munitions factories with the promise that he will send money home every weekend.  No money arrives, and the realization dawns that Dad has abandoned them.  They are desperately hungry.  Little Frankie understands that if he and Mam and his brothers are to avoid starving it is up to him, and this is the amazing point of the book.  Even though he had such a poor role model for a dad, Frank bravely assumes the responsibility.

      He drops out of school and gets a job delivering telegrams on a bike about the wet and slippery cobbled streets of Limerick.  He also writes dunning letters for a loan shark, and he delivers newspapers for the protestant newspaper.  Throughout his teen years he works and he saves, putting nickels and dimes into a savings account until at age nineteen, he has enough to buy a one-way ticket back to New York City.  And so the book ends.

      He puts those fifteen years growing up in Ireland into perspective.  “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.  It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while.  Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.  People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version.”