A friend who surfs the union and progressive listserves forwarded this to
me,
but he cannot remember where he first found it.
Dennis Kelly
~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE TWAIN THAT MOST AMERICANS NEVER MEET

    By Norman Solomon

    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so blasphemous that they remained unpublished for half a century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.