Obituary for Harold Bloom

by William H. Benson

October 31, 2019

     Harold Bloom passed away on Monday, October 14, at the age of eighty-nine, leaving behind his wife Jeanne, and his two sons, David and Daniel.

     Bloom also leaves behind thousands of awe-inspired students, for Bloom taught at Yale University, in its English department, for sixty plus years, ever since the year that he received his doctorate in English there, in 1955. He taught his last class on Thursday, October 10. 

     One colleague observed, “There’s always a pack of people sitting around him to see if any bread or fishes are going to be handed out.” Another said, “Beautiful, brilliant students surrounded him. He was a vortex of power and intellectual charisma.”

     He also leaves behind a number of impressed readers who bought his forty odd books, but few could understand the heavy ideas contained therein. His books though brought him fame as the country’s leading literary critic, and substantial wealth.

     Harold’s parents, William and Paula, migrated to America after World War I. The Holocaust consumed the unfortunate relatives who remained behind in Odessa, Russia.

     Harold was the youngest of five children, three older sisters and an older brother. When five years old, one of Harold’s older sisters took him to the East Bronx library, and there he discovered Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot. Bloom’s ability to memorize lines of poetry amazed his family.

     Soon, he discovered the classics, Homer and Plutarch and Ovid, as well as the English Romantic poets. He idolized Chaucer, Cervantes, Emerson, Freud, and Shakespeare for the rest of his life, and memorized sizable portions of their works, that he would recite to his awe-struck students.

     Harold and Jeanne lived in “the same rambling nineteenth-century brown-shingled house in New Haven, Connecticut,” for sixty plus years, a house that was “loaded with thousands of books.”

     Bloom displayed an intriguing writing style, bombastic, arrogant, filled with exaggerations, but most wise and perceptive. An observer said, “It is impossible to read deeply in Bloom without him flooring you with feeling.” Indeed!

     Certain works of literature captivated him. He said, “Walt Whitman overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others—Dante, Shakespeare, Milton—consistently flooding my entire being.”

     He did not write fiction. Instead, he wrote about the fiction that others had written.

     He wrote, “A literary work is not a social document to be read for its political or historical content, but is to be enjoyed above all for the aesthetic pleasure it brings. Not to worship the great books, but to prize the astonishing mystery of creative genius.”

     His books’ titles explained what he intended to explore within. For example, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds; Where Wisdom Shall Be Found; How to Read and Why; and The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

     Bloom’s most profound book he published in 1992, and entitled it, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. In it, he announced that for now he was a religious critic, and that he would apply rules of literary criticism to each of several Protestant Christian denominations.

     Bloom wrote, “A nation obsessed with religion rather desperately needs a religious criticism.” He then dared to critique, each in turn, the Pentecostals, the Southern Baptists, the Mormons, and others.

     He said, “I write both to blame and to praise the American Religion,” and “Religious criticism needs to enter that area, which lies between theology and spiritual experience.”

     Bloom agreed that the world needs literary critics to keep alive the works of writers from the distant past, and then to pass their thoughts and their words on to other eager young students.

     Of all Bloom’s bold statements, one that I find most intriguing is, “Like Shakespeare, Chekhov cannot be called either a believer or a skeptic; they are too large for such a categorization.”    

     Yet, Bloom enjoyed quoting others. For example, centuries ago, Rabbi Tarphon would say, “It is not necessary for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

     And from Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” Bloom quoted, “It is a good thing for a man to bear himself with equanimity, for one is constantly keeping appointments one never made.”

     One writer who mentioned Bloom’s passing said, “For Bloom, the worst part about death was surely that he could not take a book with him.”

Ian Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean”

by William H. Benson

October 17, 2019

     A month ago, I read a new book, fascinating and eye-opening, entitled, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.

     It’s author, Ian Urbina, first explains in his “Introduction,” that he quit writing his dissertation in history at the University of Chicago in 2003, to take a job as a journalist at the New York Times.

     There, at the Times he said, he “learned how to be a reporter.” Often, his supervisors cautioned him, “Tell stories, don’t write articles.”

     In 2014, he pitched an idea for a series of articles to his editor then, Rebecca Corbett, about the rampant lawlessness that exists on the high seas. She “nudged him toward a focus more on the people than on the fish, delving more into human rights and labor concerns,” than on environmental issues.

     Urbina’s first article appeared in the Times in July of 2015, and “another dozen or so pieces” followed. In January of 2017, he departed the Times to expand his articles into a book.

     Each of his fifteen chapters stands alone. He said, “I organized the chapters as a series of essays, confident that readers would connect the dots.”

     In the “Introduction,” he reveals the numbers of workers required to meet the world’s growing appetite for ocean fish, and also to move freight. “Over 56 million people globally work at sea on fishing boats, and another 1.6 million work on freighters, tankers, and other types of merchant vessels.”

     Yet, once those workers sail away from the shore, they leave the security of land’s rules and laws. “For all its breathtaking beauty, the ocean is also a dystopian place, home to dark inhumanities. The rule of law, so solid on land, is fluid at sea, if it’s to be found at all.”

     He says, “There is no shortage of laws governing the seas. The real problem is lax enforcement.” As a result, “one of every five fish that ends up on a dinner plate is caught illegally.”

     In Chapter 1, Urbina describes how a single ship, the Bob Barker, that belonged to “Sea Shepard,” an organization founded to halt illegal fishing, pursued a single Nigerian fishing vessel, the Thunder, “across more than 11,550 nautical miles, three oceans, and two seas,” for 110 days in early 2015, until the Thunder‘s captain scuttled the ship and caused it to sink.

     What was the crew’s crime? Poaching tooth-fish in the cold waters south of Chile. A marketing expert renamed the fish, once caught, “Chilean Sea Bass,” and people loved to eat it.    

     In Chapter 5, Urbina tells of Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor, who “sails the world in a sloop,” offering safe abortions near countries where laws make them illegal. She will position her ship more than twelve miles offshore, safe in international waters. 

     Gomperts’s sloop flies Austria’s flag, where abortions are legal, but the women who seek her help live in Guatemala, Ireland, Poland, and Morocco, places where lawmakers have criminalized abortions.

Urbina writes, “Few people are as adept at capitalizing on such loopholes in maritime law as Rebecca.”

     In Chapter 6, Urbina describes the methods that Thailand’s fishing captains resort to in order to entice sufficient numbers of laborers to work on their vessels. They offer loans to Cambodian men to pay for their transport to Thailand, by promising them “work in construction in Thailand.”

     But the captains fail to tell the Cambodians that they will work at sea, that the job lasts for months at a time, and that they will not ever earn enough to pay off their loan. Soon, the Cambodians realize they are stuck in bondage, imprisoned at sea, and “trapped in a cycle of debt slavery.”

     Urbina writes, “Slavery is a harsh reality, but this sort of bondage is a global blindspot, because governments, companies, and consumers either do not know it occurs, or, when they do, prefer to look the other way.”

     Urbina describes the brutality on board a Thai fishing vessel. “Crew members are routinely threatened and beaten, or even executed.” The fishing captains “lock workers behind chained doors for weeks or months, with little freshwater or food, or work them eighteen hours a day hauling in fish.”

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, wrote in his poem, Leviathan, that life outside of society would become “solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish.” On a ship, far from shore, “our darkest impulses emerge,” despite “our most noble intentions, to establish a fair and just rule of law. Neither has any chance against the power of the outlaw ocean.”

The Duodecimal System

by William H. Benson

October 3, 2019

     For centuries, the ancient Romans calculated sums with their clunky numerals: I, V, X, L, C, D, and M; or one, five, ten, fifty, one hundred, five hundred, and one thousand. They knew nothing better.

     Then, Western Europe’s Crusades to the Holy Land introduced Arabic-Hindu numbers to the Europeans. “The medieval world required nearly five hundred years to make the change from the archaic Roman numerals to the Arabic notation, with its miraculous 0.”

     Still, the Romans, like other civilizations, relied upon the Base 10 system for counting because of a biological accident. People stared at their hands and counted ten fingers. It made sense to attach a name to each of the ten digits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

     But for measuring things, people tend to gravitate to a Base 12 system.

     For example, a foot has twelve inches, bakers sell donuts in lots of twelve’s, and a day has two twelve-hour segments, one for a day, another for a night.

     “A carpenter uses a ruler divided into twelve subdivisions, a grocer deals in a dozen eggs and a gross of cans, and apothecaries and jewelers divide a pound into twelve ounces.”

     The ancient Babylonians preferred a Base 60 system, or five twelve’s, a system that we still retain for time-keeping. An hour has sixty minutes, a minute sixty seconds. Mariners and geographers prefer the number 360, or thirty twelve’s, or six sixty’s, for their compass and for pinpointing locations.

     The number ten has only two factors, 2 and 5, but the number twelve has four factors: 2, 3, 4, and 6. Twelve is the smallest number with four factors. Twelve divides into exact thirds, but ten divided into thirds results in an unwieldy number, 0.33333…

     In the twentieth century, certain mathematicians, who argued for a Base 12 system, came together to form an organization that they named the Duodecimal Society of America, or the Dozenal Society. In the 1930’s, one of the society’s first presidents, F. Emerson Andrews, wrote a book, New Numbers: How Acceptance of a Duodecimal Base would Simplify Mathematics.

      In 1962, another mathematician, A. C. Aitken, wrote, “The duodecimal tables are easy to master, easier than the decimal ones. Anyone having these tables will do these calculations more than one-and-a-half times faster than in the decimal system.”

     How does Base 12 work? The society’s members assign a symbol to the numbers ten and eleven, such as X and E, for a total of twelve digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, and E. They pronounce the numbers ten, eleven, and twelve in Base 12 as “dek,” “el,” and “doh.”

     Instead of placing a decimal after the units, such as in “13.25” in the decimal system, society members distinguish their numbers with a semicolon, such as “13;25.”

     A member writes twelve as 10, because the second number to the left of the semicolon represents the number of twelve’s. For example, 20 represents twenty-four, 30 is thirty-six, and 40 is forty-eight.  

     The third number to the left of the semicolon represents 12², the number of grosses, or the number of 144’s. Thus, 723 in duodecimal = (7 x 144) + (2 x 12) + 3 units, or 1035. in the decimal system.

     The fourth number to the left of the semicolon represents 12³, or the number of 1728’s, the fifth digit represents 12 to the fourth power, or the number of 20,736’s, and so on.

     Because you and I are accustomed to thinking in terms of the decimal system, we feel a real need to convert duodecimal numbers back to decimal numbers. The good news is that mathematicians have created a conversion calculator that we can find on the internet.

     But how do you count on your fingers in Base 12? A very ingenious person noticed twelve segments on the four fingers: three on the index finger, three on the middle finger, three on the ring finger, and three on the pinkie. He or she then used the thumb to point to each segment when counting.

     One, two, three on the index finger; four, five, six on the middle finger; seven, eight, and nine on the ring finger; and ten, eleven, and twelve on the pinkie. A person can count on either hand up to twelve.

     Or a person can count on the left hand, and then use the thumb and finger segments on the right hand to indicate the number of twelve’s counted on the left hand. Thus, a person can count up to 144.

     Are people ready to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers in the duodecimal system? No. It is too complicated to convert. We are too ingrained in the way things are now. “Old habits die hard.”

      On November 23, 1793, during the French Revolution, clocks converted to ten hour days, one hundred minute hours, and one hundred second minutes. “The system though proved unpopular.”   

     The modern world will stick with the decimal system for counting and for mathematics, but retain certain portions of the duodecimal system for measurement and time-keeping.

The Low Road to Capitalism

by William H. Benson

August 29, 2019

     “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” writes Matthew Desmond, in his article “Capitalism,” that appeared in the August 18, 2019 issue of The New York Times Magazine, part of “The 1619 Project.”

     Desmond argues that America’s “low-road to capitalism” of today descends from the techniques that landowners perfected on the cotton plantation in the South prior to the Civil War. To support his argument, he points to two statistics that laborers across the United States understand.

     First, today “only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards,” and call themselves members of a labor union, “authorized to fight for a living wage and for fair working conditions.” This 10 percent ranking places the U.S. second to last among the worlds’ nations.

     “How easy is it to fire workers in the U.S.?” Unlike other countries that have strong rules about severance pay, reasons for dismissal, and safeguards to prevent arbitrary terminations, “they virtually disappear in the U.S., now ranked dead last out of 71 nations.”

     Desmond says, “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.” If he is correct, one wonders, “What happened on the plantation?”

     First, President Andrew Jackson stole the land across the Southern states from the people who lived there. Desmond says, “The U.S. solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida.”

     Second, landowners exploited the land. “Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. Whole forests were dragged out by the roots.” They planted cotton.

     Third, landowners exploited the laborers. “Planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker.” Overseers set a quota for cotton picked per individual, and if a slave failed to meet his or her quota, the overseer would bring out a whip.

     Food, clothing, books, education, recreation, and free time for a slave were negligible.

     Third, landowners played the credit markets. They learned that it was easier to mortgage their laborers than their real estate. For example, Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his slaves to build his mansion at Monticello. To access the credit markets, a series of state banks expanded across the South.

     Fourth, landowners kept meticulous records, an early form of spreadsheets. They used Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” “a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity,” that even allowed for a slave’s depreciation.

     “People reduced to data points,” writes Desmond. 

     Desmond relies on research that Caitlin Rosenthal, a history professor at Berkeley, conducted for her first book, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, published a year ago. Her research into numerous plantations’ business records led her to a surprising conclusion.

     “Slavery in the United States was a business. A morally reprehensible, and very profitable business. Slaveholders in the South were using advanced management and accounting techniques long before their northern counterparts, techniques that are still used by business today.”

     In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Caitlin Rosenthal said, “all of this should make you cringe. This is not an easy topic to read. The plantation was the brutal extraction of labor from an oppressed people.”

     Desmond adds, “Slavery was a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. Cotton was the nation’s most valuable export.”

     One can understand why the Southern landowners were aghast when certain Northerners called for the abolition of slavery, because, “The combined value of four million enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation.”

     Desmond writes, “We can still feel the looming presence of this institution of slavery, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. Slavery can still be felt in our economic life.”

     Desmond makes a strong argument that a low-road form of capitalism developed on the Southern plantation, but capitalism since then has improved. The 13^th amendment abolished slavery, and if management terminates an employee today, he or she is free to find a better-paying job elsewhere.

     Although not perfect, the nation’s workforce of today faces a far more equitable and just business environment, than did the eighteenth-century slaves. Today, you and I reside well above the low road.

Studs Terkel’s “Working”

by William H. Benson

September 19, 2019

     I consider 1974 a great year, perhaps my best. In May, I graduated from Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colorado, spent the summer driving a tractor and a combine, and in September, I moved out of my parent’s house and into a basement apartment, owned by a retired North Dakota Methodist minister and his wife, Ray and Ella McClure, in Greeley, Colorado.

     On September 25, classes at the University of Northern Colorado commenced, and everyday that school year, I attended a sequence of History Department classes. There was Dr. Rowe’s Colonial History, Dr. Knott’s Diplomatic History, Dr. Boeck’s Early American History, among others.

     I sat at the feet of, what I believed then, were the best professors. Although poor, hungry, bookish, and overstudied, I was fascinated. The lectures stimulated my thinking. I felt as if the encyclopedias that I had read so often when a child had come alive and were teaching me.

     With a little reflection, I began to contrast my work on the farm with that of a university professor. Life seemed easier at the university, more mentally enlightening, more pleasant working conditions, more gratifying, whereas life in the field was monotonous, dirty, dusty, dangerous, smelled constant of oil and diesel fuel. It was more physical than mental, more blue than white collar work.

     Yet, with a little further reflection, I realized that the university professor owns no tractors or equipment, no wheat ground, no pastures, no sheds, no cattle. Save for boxes of books and a pension, she or he has little opportunity to accumulate capital, as does a farmer. 

     In 1974, the radio host Studs Terkel published his book, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day, and How They Feel About What They Do, a bestseller. Studs had traveled around Illinois, and interviewed over a hundred people, recording their stories about their work on reel-to-reel tapes.

     In the book’s “Forward,” Terkel said that he found that “work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”

     Once Terkel published his book, he packed his tapes into boxes, and there they remained until he passed away in 2008. People who enjoy archival work discovered his boxes and began to listen to the tapes, still in good condition. On a recent podcast on “Planet Earth,” I listened to him interview people. 

     For example, Terkel interviewed Sharon Griggins, a teenager who worked for the telephone company, as an operator, in Waukegan, Illinois. She agreed that it was “a lot of talk, but no human communication.” Her talk to callers included “seven to eight stock phrases” that she stated over and over, for eight hours, with nothing personal permitted. Sharon did not like her work, and soon quit.

     Terkel interviewed Gary Briner, an automotive worker at a plant in Illinois, who described his job, as “boring and monotonous.” He said, “we show up for work, but we are not robots. We sweat, we have emotions, we are hungover, but we want the company to treat us with some dignity and respect.”

      Briner said he did not set out to join the autoworkers union, but he soon learned “that every gain we made for better working conditions was because the labor union voted to strike, and because of those gains, the labor union forged a middle class.”

     Terkel interviewed Renault Robinson, an African-American police officer in Chicago, who said that the officer in charge would pair a different white officer with each black officer, and the two would ride around in a car for eight hours together, and never speak, with “very little or no communication.”

     Robinson became quite disenchanted by the way the police expected him to stop cars for almost no cause in the African-American communities. Out of hundreds of stops, the policemen would find some violations, but the process upset the people stopped. They felt harassed and persecuted.

     Robinson was one of the founders of the African-American Patrolmen’s League, a labor union for black police officers. One of the things his league pushed for, and was successful, was the removal of sawed-off shotguns loaded with double 0 buckshot from the squad cars. He said, “Those guns could take a kid’s head off,” an unnecessary resort to violent force.

     The early 1970’s was a different era for America’s labor force. Unions were stronger then, and certain jobs, like telephone operator, have disappeared. Today, “computers have transformed the workplace. Productivity has soared, but job satisfaction has plummeted.”

     Also, the absence of strong labor unions means that the majority of workers cannot strike for increased wages and better working conditions, and this absence may have caused the gap between rich and poor to widen even further.

     What has stayed the same over the past forty-five years is that each worker has a predilection for certain work and a disgust for other types of work. America today has low unemployment, and if a worker does not like his or her job, he or she can quit and find other work.

The 1619 Project

by William H. Benson

August 22, 2019

     A staff writer for The New York Times named Nikole Hannah-Jones came up with an idea for a series of essays that appeared in last Sunday’s edition of The New York Times Magazine. She called it the 1619 Project. The year 1619 is not a date well known among Americans, and yet slavery in North America began 400 years ago this month, on an unknown day in August of 1619.

     In that month, between 20 and 30 African slaves stepped off an English pirate’s ship in chains and shuffled into Jamestown, in Virginia, where English land owners purchased them to work their tobacco fields. African slaves would toil for free on North American soil for the next 250 years.

     Jamestown was then only 12 years old. The Pilgrims would not land at Plymouth Rock for another year, and the first Puritans would not land at what became Boston for another 11 years, in 1630. At that moment, in 1619, America incorporated slavery into its history, into its very DNA. 

     A Portuguese slave trader had stolen these 20+ slaves from their homes in what is today Angola, in southwestern Africa, weeks before, but English pirates had attacked the Portuguese slave ship on the high seas, confiscated the Africans, and then brought them to Point Comfort, near Jamestown.

     The Spanish and Portuguese were the first Europeans to initiate the capture and transport of African slaves to the Americas. Because landowners needed laborers to work their sugar fields in South and Central America, in the Caribbean Islands, and in Florida, they kidnapped millions of Africans.

     Now the stage was set for the English to carry forward and expand the global slave trade, because Virginia tobacco farmers now needed laborers, hundreds and then thousands of laborers.

     In the first essay, The Idea of America, Nikole Hannah-Jones provides a sobering series of statistics, first that Europeans captured some 12.5 million Africans and transported them to America, “the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War,” that millions failed to survive the gruesome journey, and that of the millions who did survive, some 400,000 arrived in North America.

     She mentions that slavery, as it adapted in North America, was commercial, but in addition, it was “racial, heritable, and permanent, not temporary.” Children born to slaves did not belong to their parents, but to their parents’ masters, who could sell them to other masters, splitting up families.

     “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift, and disposed of violently.”   

     She points out that the British in England noted the hypocrisy among the British in the American colonies, at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War. Samuel Johnson in London, asked a question, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

     Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia in early December of 1775 from England and gaped in astonishment at the slave market going on just outside his door. He asked, “With what consistency, or decency, they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more?”  

     Nikole Hannah-Jones then jumps to the Civil War, to the year 1862, when Union forces were struggling to subdue the Southern Confederacy. On August 14, 1862, “President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting.”

     The men walked in with some hope, but Lincoln dashed that little hope when he informed them that “he had convinced Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.”

     The President’s next words chilled them. “You and we are different races. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

     Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, “You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said stole the breath of these five black men.” Edward Thomas, the delegation’s leaders, promised the president that “they would consult on his proposition.”

     Lincoln said, “Take your full time. No hurry at all.”

     After the Civil War ended, when “four million black Americans were suddenly free,” a group of black leaders submitted a resolution against black colonization to Africa or to Haiti or to Panama. They said, “This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. Here we were born, and here we will die.” They rejected Lincoln’s colonization proposal.

     Next time in these pages, we will consider the second essay in the 1619 Project, Matthew Desmond’s thoughts on Capitalism, and how King Cotton solidified slavery in the Southern states