Some of the Secrets the Ghost of Mark Twain Spoke to Me
As much as things change, the more they insist on staying the same.
When you start talking with a man who's been dead for more than a century then you never know what surprising insights he'll offer.
Of late, I have provided lodging for the specter of Mark Twain, who I will note is certainly not a traditional ghost haunting me or anyone -- he quite enjoys his estate in heaven -- but will eagerly offer his wisdom to those foolish enough and innocent enough to seek it.
I have now acquired all three volumes of Twain’s uncensored autobiography in a relaxed red like clay, green like a pine's branches, and blue like a Union soldier's uniform. They are not a foot in height but nearly there. The public library will suffice for now, but I'll certainly need to acquire my own copies soon enough, and most definitely at a discount through Abebooks.
However, this morning, for whatever reason, I instead thought I'd start Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, a 1962 collection of his more "controversial" essays, which appear to largely be drawn from the same time period as when Twain dictated the autobiography, from 1900-1910, when he was at his most honest in his viewpoints, abandoning the cloaks of fiction and his "wise fool" persona.
The first in the collection is titled "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" and Twain published it in 1901 in the North American Review, which the editor describes as a "liberal" publication.
Twain opens his article through juxtaposing excerpts of articles from the New York Sun, the first describing child sex prostitution in New York, the second describing— right in time for Christmas Eve—the mass slaughter of Chinese by European colonialists, supposedly in God’s name.
They're both stunning. I'll excerpt the same chunks that Twain does to start his article and you tell me how you feel after consuming it, and remember this was the media standards from 125 years ago:
"Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and aspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment and happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what is the matter with him and pass on." — New York Tribune, on Christmas Eve.
Prom The Sun, of New York: "The purpose of this article is not to describe the terrible offences against humanity committed in the name of Politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts. They could not be described, even verbally. But it is the intention to let the great mass of more or less careless citizens of this beautiful metropolis of the New World get some conception of the havoc and ruin wrought to man, woman and child in the most densely populated and least known section of the city. Name, date and place can be supplied to those of little faith— or to any man who feels himself aggrieved. It is a plain statement of record and observation, written without license and without garnish.
Imagine, if you can, a section of the city territory completely dominated by one man, without whose permission neither legitimate nor illegitimate business can be conducted; where illegitimate business is encouraged and legitimate business discouraged; where the respectable residents have to fasten their doors and windows summer nights and sit in their rooms with asphyxiating air and 100-degree temperature, rather than try to catch the faint whiff of breeze in their natural breathing places, the stoops of their homes; where naked women dance by night in the streets, and unsexed men prowl like vultures through the darkness on “business,” not only permitted but encouraged by the police; where the education of infants begins with the knowledge of prostitution and the training of little girls is training in the arts of Phryne; where American girls brought up with the refinements of American homes are imported from small towns up-State, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey, and kept as virtually prisoners as if they were locked up behind jail bars until they have lost all semblance of womanhood; where small boys are taught to solicit for the women of disorderly houses; where there is an organized society of young men whose sole business in life is to corrupt young girls and turn them over to bawdy houses; where men walking with their wives along the street are openly insulted; where children that have adult diseases are the chief patrons of the hospitals and dispensaries; where it is the rule, rather than the exception, that murder, rape, robbery and theft go unpunished — in short where the Premium of the most awful forms of vice is the Profit of the politicians.
The following news from China appeared in the Sun, of New York, on Christmas Eve. The italics are mine:
"The Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions, has returned from a trip which he made for the purpose of collecting indemnities for damages done by Boxers. Everywhere he went he compelled the Chinese to pay. He says that all his native Christians are now provided for. He had 700 of them under his charge, and 300 were killed. He has collected 300 taels for each of these murders, and has compelled full payment for all the property belonging to Christians that was destroyed. He also assessed fines amounting to thirteen times the amount of the indemnity. This money will be used for the propagation of the Gospel.
Mr. Ament declares that the compensation he has collected is moderate, when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who demand, in addition to money, head for head. They collect 500 taels for each murder of a Catholic. In the Wenchiu country, 680 Catholics were killed, and for this the European Catholics here demand 750,000 strings of cash and 680 heads.
In the course of a conversation, Mr. Ament referred to the attitude of the missionaries toward the Chinese. He said:
"I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive, that they generally looted, or that they have done anything since the siege that the circumstances did not demand. I criticise the Americans. The soft hand of the Americans is not as good as the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand they will take advantage of it.'
"The statement that the French Government will return the loot taken by the French soldiers, is the source of the greatest amusement here. The French soldiers were more systematic looters than the Germans, and it is a fact that today Catholic Christians, carrying French flags and armed with modern guns, are looting villages in the Province of Chili."
Twain then responds to these excerpts:
By happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve — just in time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar, and we find we can even make jokes: Taels I win, Heads you lose.
Does this sound at all familiar to you? I was stunned by it and the degree to which the same themes animate us today.
There is this absolute obsession in America with exploits about prostitution. Epstein? Diddy? Why are these “new stories" as big they are? Particularly when none of this has any practical bearing on almost any of our lives?
Because it gives people a titillating thrill to think about it. And so too with the national obsession with real crime and murder stories. This stuff gives us an emotional kick and allows us to feel intensely moral, we aren't like those people.
And yet, as worked up as people get about the concept of sex crimes (never the plight of the actual victims of it) in America, we ignore atrocities in foreign lands, including those where our own hands are bloody.
This moral hypocrisy which Twain pointed out in just a juxtaposition of texts -- we'll save diving further into the essay for another day -- we see continued today.
How can this be? Have we as a people not meaningfully advanced in the last 125 years? Surely we have made progress?
I'm not so sure that we really have as much as a lot of people want to think. We still need to consume our daily diet of fantasizing about other people's deviant sexuality in order to distract us from the war crimes happening on the other side of the world.
A whole political movement has been built on that principle. Ten years ago, the Right seemed to care about opposing terrorist groups and authoritarian states. It seemed to dismiss these sorts of obsessions and speculations about sex crimes as “fringe.” But no more.
Today's Trump movement does not care about the threats posed by Russia, China, and Iran. No, what has animated them all this time has been exposing the "Epstein files" which they believed would be a nuclear bomb detonating on top of their political and cultural opponents.
The "base" is roiled by this "issue."
But they are indifferent or even supportive of sending brown people to CECOT, Alligator Auschwitz, or to war zones in Africa. As I've written about previously and will keep writing about, a huge chunk of Americans wants to see people they dislike tortured, whether that be in the old fashioned sense of confining someone and maliciously inflicted pain to traumatize them, or less overtly by simply forcing them to live in inhumane conditions. Both clearly contradict the words of the Constitution.
This simply has not changed.
Stephen Miller wants to inflict as much pain as possible and even death on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, now threatening deportation to Uganda for his refusal to accept a guilty plea on the trumped-up charges against him which would ultimately send him to Costa Rica instead.
In doing this Miller’s following a long American tradition and has about a third of the electorate backing him.
There is more money to be made and greater political success to be had by inflaming ignorant people's emotions about domestic sex crimes, than to try and tell people the truth about far worse things happening in war zones and authoritarian states across the ocean.
And the truth is, at this point, I'm not sure this "problem" of ignorant people choosing to spend their time wallowing in violent sex fantasies and how they're better than the phantoms they imagine engaged in it can really be fixed.
Maybe this is just how human beings are by default, and those who will transcend these primal obsessions toward domination and exploitation of others will always be in the minority.
Maybe Twain had it figured out then, in his words: we are the DAMNED human race.