SUNDAY, SEP 13, 2015 02:00 PM CDT
What Mark Twain would have made of Donald Trump
Samuel Langhorne Clemens anticipated The Donald's special brand of madness in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.
How I spent my summer vacation — part of it, at least. One weekend in August, my girlfriend Pat and I went upstate to visit my sister, also named Patricia, and while there took a field trip to Elmira, New York.
We were on bit of a pilgrimage. Mark Twain, real name Samuel L. Clemens, is buried in Elmira and the three of us decided to visit his grave. For many years, Twain spent his summers at the Elmira home of his in-laws, Quarry Farm, overlooking the Chemung River Valley. His sister-in-law even built him a small gazebo retreat in which he did much of his finest writing. It is, he wrote, “the quietest of all quiet places” in “an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.”
Twain stopped visiting Elmira after his daughter Suzy’s death in 1896, only to return in 1910, following his death in Redding, Connecticut. His remains were brought to Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery for burial. It’s a short drive from the center of town. Twain, his wife, children, son-in-law and only grandchild are all there. Each has a stone marker and in front of Twain’s, fellow writers and devotees have planted their pens in his memory.
There’s a larger monument, too, placed by his daughter Clara. It honors Twain and Clara’s husband, the Russian musician Ossip Gabrilowitsch, with large bronze medallions, each a bas-relief profile. But at the beginning of the year, the tomb was vandalized. Twain’s medallion was pried from the stone. Luckily, the thief was caught. Repairs and restoration of the plaque will take a few more weeks.
Vandals and Mark Twain. The two ideas tangoed in my head and naturally danced me over to Donald Trump. We were having a quiet weekend’s interlude in upstate New York but even there it was impossible to ignore the cacophony of Trump’s verbal vandalism and braying pitch to nativism and bigotry. Such jingoism was just the kind of ideological humbuggery Mark Twain loved to puncture. Yet he would agree with Trump’s – and our — disgust for the current, disheveled and inert state of our governance.
In fact, years ago, historian and author Garry Wills wrote, “To understand America, read Mark Twain…. No matter what new craziness pops up in America, I find it described beforehand by him…
“What made Twain so prescient?” Wills continued. “Our own persistence in folly, no doubt. But more than that he understood the peculiarly American brand of folly as no one before or after.”
So while it may be too easy to piggyback onto Twain’s prescience, in these disturbed and disturbing times, it’s irresistible, with the understanding that there’s a lot of spurious Twain material out there that never came from him and the knowledge that in some cases what he said and wrote can be as variously interpreted as the Bible or Koran.“What made Twain so prescient?” Wills continued. “Our own persistence in folly, no doubt. But more than that he understood the peculiarly American brand of folly as no one before or after.”
So while it may be too easy to piggyback onto Twain’s prescience, in these disturbed and disturbing times, it’s irresistible, with the understanding that there’s a lot of spurious Twain material out there that never came from him and the knowledge that in some cases what he said and wrote can be as variously interpreted as the Bible or Koran.
Twain was a contributor to the 19th century magazine The Galaxy, and in it, he claimed, “I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.” He lied about the meddling part. Lucky for us.
Twain would have sympathized with all who heap scorn on Congress and Washington. As he famously wrote, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” And, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” And, “… I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind, Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.”
He believed “public office is private graft,” and nowhere did Twain sink his teeth more deeply into the hypocrisy and greed of Washington and its politicians than in his first novel, The Gilded Age, written with Charles Dudley Warner. The very title gave its name to an era of wretched, wealthy excess by plutocrats who embraced economic inequality, an era we revisit today in our own Second Gilded Age.
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