With the start of 2000 less than two months away, I've been thinking about
a beloved American writer who stuck his neck out the last time people went
through a change of centuries.
We revere Mark Twain as a superb storyteller who generates waves of
laughter with powerful undertows of biting satire. One generation after
another has grown up with the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn. Some of Twain's essays were less palatable; his most scathing words
about organized religion seemed so blasphemous that they remained
unpublished for half a century after he died in 1910.
The renowned author's fiery political statements are a very different
matter. They reached many people in his lifetime -- but not in ours.
Today, few Americans are aware of Twain's outspoken views on social
justice and foreign policy. As his fame grew, so did his willingness to
challenge the high and mighty.
Samuel Clemens adopted the pseudonym "Mark Twain" in 1863, when he
launched his writing career as a newspaper reporter in the wild Nevada
territory. During the next five decades, many of his most incendiary
paragraphs first appeared in newsprint.
Twain was painfully aware of people's inclinations to go along with
prevailing evils. When slavery was lawful, he recalled, abolitionists were
"despised and ostracized, and insulted" -- by "patriots."
As far as Twain was concerned, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet
broke a chain or freed a human soul." With chiseled precision, he wielded
language as a hard-edged tool. "The difference between the right word and
the almost right word," he once commented, "is the difference between
lightning and the lightning bug."
Here are a few volts of Twain's lightning that you probably never saw before:
"Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist and a
handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The
many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they
that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat."
"Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all
around? Because laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it
follows that laws and constitutions should change around and say there
shall be a more nearly equal division."
"I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its
talons on any other land."
At the turn of the century, as the Philippines came under the wing of the
U.S. government, Mark Twain suggested a new flag for the Philippine
province -- "just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and
the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."
While the United States followed up on its victory in the Spanish-American
War by slaughtering thousands of Filipino people, Twain spoke at anti-war
rallies. He also flooded newspapers with letters and wrote brilliant,
unrelenting articles.
On Dec. 30, 1900, the New York Herald published Mark Twain's commentary --
"A Greeting from the 19th Century to the 20th Century" -- denouncing the
blood-drenched colonial forays of England, France, Germany, Russia and the
United States. "I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning
bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chou,
Manchuria, South Africa and the Philippines, with her soul full of
meanness, her pocket full of boodle and her mouth full of pious
hypocrisies. Give her the soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."
Twain followed up in early 1901 with an eloquent essay titled "To the
Person Sitting in Darkness." Each of the world's strongest nations, he
wrote, was proceeding "with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand
and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other." Many readers and
some newspapers praised Twain's polemic. But his essay angered others,
including the American Missionary Board and The New York Times.
"Particularly in his later years," scholar Tom Quirk has noted, "the
fierceness of Twain's anti-imperialist convictions disturbed and dismayed
those who regarded him as the archetypal American citizen who had somehow
turned upon Americanism itself."
We can imagine what Mark Twain would have to say these days. But
policymakers in Washington can rest easy. Twain's most inflammatory
writings are smoldering in his grave -- while few opportunities exist for
the general public to hear similar views expounded today.
Perhaps time has verified Mark Twain's caustic remark: "None but the dead
are permitted to speak truth."
Even then, evidently, their voices tend to be muffled.
Norman Solomon's latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News.
