> There sure has, and a depressing amount of it has been fairly precious
and,
>> to my ear at least, pompous as hell.
>>
>> "Desecrate" Mark Twain's name??  Give me a break; the man himself leased
out
>> his name to sell shaving soap and stove polish, for god's sake!


I knew this thread would be highly amusing, and I was right.  As Terry said,
deja vu all over again!!  ; )

I noted in my original post the obvious breakdown of the "issue" at stake in
all of this.  Again, I went back and looked at the way the award is
described on the website, and the list of honorees, and lo and behold, I
love every one of those guys and gals!  And the award is clearly for humor
and comedy --not writing novels, or being the "conscience of the nation" (a
title that Bob Dylan famously mocks and vilifies, btw).  Yes, the could have
called it the Will Rogers Award, or the Bob Hope Award, or for that matter
the Josh Billings or Petroleum Nasby Award --but they didn't!  Twain is
being invoked as a great humorist--which he surely was!!  Why not just
celebrate that tribute?

The stakes are very very high, when it comes to the public memory of our
dead heroes.  How dare those silly folks besmirch the name of our beloved
Mark Twain by comparing him to the lowly Billy Crystal!

Yes, much of the consternation also strikes me as "fairly precious"--a
delightful phrase--if not entirely pompous and (dare I say it??) verging on
the idolatrous!

There, I said it -- Yes, now the fur will fly!!

Harold K. Bush
Saint Louis University