The publication of the moment has got to be Mark Twain’s autobiography. I confess that I missed the reviews when the first volume came out last fall, but recently both Harper’s and the London Review of Books http://bit.ly/i1YEja have done due diligence: in Harper’s the ever-readable Lewis Lapham weighs in. Check them out. Or if you are to buy one book this summer make it Twain: no one says it better and Lapham nails his quotes like a champion skeet shooter, especially the bit about the writer and the Mississippi River boat captain and his take on patriotism, as apt as any comments I’ve ever read on the American life – and what it means to be an American. (And not, primarily, because we persevered in the execution of an arch-enemy of the American way.) Ponder what Twain would say. On patriotism:
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”
