The Chris Moeller Archives

Mark Twain's dying wish

Time, combined with commercialism, has a way of sanitizing many of our great historical figures. Take your Martin Luther King, Jr. Here was a subversive rabble-rouser and an unpopular champion of civil disobedience against the law of the land. The concept of "civil rights for all" may have appealed to many in his day, but the real-life implications of civil rights, such as open housing, caused great strife at the local, neighborhood-to-neighborhood level. King was reviled by many whites, of course, in Birmingham, but he also had bricks hurled at him in Chicago. He loudly opposed the Vietnam War when opinion polls still solidly backed Presidents Johnson and Nixon in their efforts to keep foreign governments from falling to the Communists like "domino(es)." King courageously called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," and that's an unpopular idea today, let alone in 1965.

Forty-two years after his death as martyr, King is nearly universally-lauded in America as a man. There's a federal holiday in his honor, monuments and museums devoted to him and the struggle he helped lead, and as he richly deserves, but his still-more-controversial ideas rarely get mentioned, and his descendants in the struggle still come up against the same opposition. It's as if King gets to be a cereal box hero, but for the benefit of others' agendas, while many of the leader's vitally-important, but less popular ideas get ignored. He's considered a more palatable "brand' of icon than a Malcolm X because he was less militant, and because he was a Christian. He's been stripped of many of the attributes that made him great-- specifically, his determination and courage in unsettling what was considered settled in American life. In death, where the establishment has greater control over the power of his message, he's no longer a threat to the comfort level of the American majority-- as he most certainly was when he lived.


Take another guy-- your Mark Twain. And this is where it gets good. America's greatest author, equally-sanitized on death, has been gone now right at 100 years, yet he's about to revisit us, and this is cause for a global-sized celebration. No, it's not a resurrection of the body, but Twain, you see, dictated a lengthy autobiography, and he had it filed away with orders that it not be published until he had been dead for a full century. UC-Berkeley plans to release the first of three volumes, "The Autobiography of Mark Twain," this November! When the entire trilogy has been released, the new text will run to half a million words.

Needless to say, this is a literary-- and cultural-- moment to impact a lifetime. Several lifetimes. It should make a Harry Potter release look like that time "Goober" wrote a book. Twain reportedly demanded the long duration between his death and the public viewing of his memoirs because he wanted to write as frankly and revelatory as possible. He's not holding back here, and history is so alive, I wonder if there won't even be some of his bloodstains on the page.

Historians tell us that during his lifetime Twain privately concealed many of his more radical and unpopular opinions on subjects such as politics, sexuality, and religion. Excerpts released thus far seem to bare out that they will now become widely known.

* For example, he refers to United States soldiers as "our uniformed assassins," and of their attack on a tribal group in the Philippines during colonization efforts, he describes their killing of "six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

* Of America's dominant religion, "There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grubbing and predatory as it is-- in our country, particularly... it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime-- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."

* Of that era's Wall Street big shots, "The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars. He pays taxes on two million and a half."

Holy shit! What year is this? Samuel Clemens, the founding author of the American vernacular, our greatest storyteller, an astute social commentator, the Crown Prince of Hannibal (I made that one up), and our most iconic national humorist, also turns out to be an angry, brilliant prophet-- although he did also, it seems, and with lesser ascendancy in Volume 2, predict continued success on the diamond for the Cubs.

This is too much to bear.

posted by CM @ 10:03 PM