Mark Twain is back in the news as the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine, and I think there couldn’t be a more relevant time in America to revisit the work and wit of this turn of the century American prophet. I for one have a fascination with characters from America’s history. From studying Lincoln and Whitman and Emerson and Mark Twain, there’s one thing that stands out among them: These men knew of democracy and freedom in their purest form. In their day, America was still striving towards the realization of those ideas. For them, Democracy was always something yet to be realized–it was an ideal that only their imaginations could grasp. Today, what’s most dangerous is that we think we have no further to go to become a greater democracy. But the way most Americans (including those in power) define it couldn’t be more off-target.
I think Mark Twain would say something like that about George W. Bush. “Why, we have got into a mess,” Twain told the Chicago Tribune about the Spanish-American War of 1898, “a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.” A hauntingly relevant insight into foreign policy.
Twain also has something to tell us about our current torture debacle. Waterboarding was used in his time too, and of it he responds, “To make them confess–what?” Twain asked. “Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless.”
If Twain knew about the new faith-based initiatives, he would have so much to say, it would be hard to get him to stop. Mark Twain was very skeptical of organized religion, namely Christendom, because it was (and still is) aligned with many of our nation’s worst social ills. Twain was much more a moralist than a subscriber to any sort of religious dogma.
Consider Bill Maher a contemporary echo of Twain’s ideas about religion in America. Speaking about the motto put on our money, “In God We Trust”, Twain said that was a great motto, “simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well–In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.”
Prophets throughout time have been people who come from us but refuse to let us live our lives comfortably. They are people who emerge with strong voices and know nothing more than how to speak the truth, whether or not the truth is what we want to hear. Since biblical times, prophets, often reluctantly, have shocked their people into noticing the way they had been led astray by their own ideas and their own institutions. Mark Twain, through his biting wit, his intense sarcasm, and his love of speaking the truth, no matter who it offended, was and still is one of America’s greatest and most outspoken prophets.
