The other day, I was thinking about what Twain might write if he got the
chance to rework his famous Salutation from the Nineteenth Century to the
Twentieth. Looking back on what has happened since his death, he would have
been keenly  interested in the good and bad things we have lived through,
and he would have written about the bad.

   Unfortunately, I have to follow such thoughts with an actual attempt to
write it, so with apologies to Twain and all of you, here is what I came up
with:

A Salutation Speech from the Twentieth Century to
the wenty-First

Taken down in ascii by friends of Mark Twain

    "I bring you the stately anomaly called HUMANKIND -- returning
 bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from mass murders in Auschwitz,
 Siberia, South Africa and Cambodia; with his soul full of meanness, his
arsenals of  nuclear missiles and his mouth full of pious hypocrisies, he
stands on the brink of annihilating this planet or plundering somebody
else+s. Drink deeply to forget where he has been, and you won+t have to
think about where he is  going."

Dec., 1998.


   If this inspires any of you to try the same thing, I hope you will share
it.

Terry Ballard