Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lewis and Benjamin Jones are identical twins born in a farmhouse just on the border of England and Wales. The year of their coming is 1900. They are children of this century; yet their childhood could easily have transpired 300 years earlier. They measure their growth against the ageless progress of the seasons. Their father, a bad-tempered Welshman, rents a farm of 120 acres from the local squire. He expects his sons to pitch in when they are big enough. Their mother, a missionary's daughter, wants them to go to school and better themselves...
...infuriate their father by conversing in a private language. Lewis explains: "It's the language of the angels. We were born with it." Their adoring mother tries to discourage their odd sense of joint identity: "She bought them Sunday suits-gray tweed for Lewis and blue serge for Benjamin. They wore them for half an hour, then sneaked off and came back wearing each other's jacket. They persisted in sharing everything. They even split their sandwiches in two, and swapped the halves...
...Benjamin begins his piece with the timely realization that American Journalism is not "objective"; what he does not clarify, however, is when non-objective came to equal anti-Semitic. Most American journalists suffer from the plight of being American, thus viewing the world from a particular social and cultural bias. This may be a debility when it comes to omniscience, but I think the media's overkill on the Israel-Lebanon issue this summer stemmed more from the American public's fascination with Israel, and to the relatively uncontroversial nature of coverage of Lebanon as compared to the more politically...
...ethical behavior to any society in which he lives. Mr. Timer man did not move to America, the Land of Milk and Honey and Harvard University when he was released by Argentina; he went to live in Israel and be with his people, for better or worse. Daniel Benjamin's charge that Timer man is somehow not a true Israeli is so nauseating as to defy response; I can only wonder how Benjamin reconciles his own--I suppose it is painful?--residency outside of Israel with his journalistic treatment of that country...
...Benjamin's implicit assessment of the situation in the Middle East...