Twain Still Explodes Petrified Opinion

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 25, 2001 | by Ralph De Toledano

Mark Twain is in the liberal doghouse again because in his great book Huckleberry Finn some of the characters use the N-word. Well, what's new? Most have forgotten that the Anti-Defamation League years ago mounted a campaign to have Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice thrown out of the New York City school curriculum as anti-Semitic. If this sounds crazy, bear in mind that even now we are observing Democrats in the Senate arguing that those who hold strong religious views -- wild radicals such as the prayerful John Ashcroft -- are, ipso facto, unfit for appointive office.

Sam'l, for that was Mark Twain's true first name, also has been in the doghouse for remarking once that if there is a native American criminal class it is the Congress. And his writings are full of other pithy remarks that have not endeared him to the politically correct in any generation since he came in with Halley's comet. As he said of the political correctness in his day, "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." That was his idea of speaking truth to power, and he did so all his life with the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

But there is one passage in Sam'l Clemens' writings that forever will win him the disdain of the boys and girls on Capitol Hill, from Teddy Kennedy to Hillary, R.C. It deals with the loss of liberty -- or, worse still, the loss of human dignity. I quote it, as I have in a small book of his observations, Mark Twain on Practically Anything, which some daring publisher may yet give the American people. Consider:

"Rome's loss of liberty," Sam'l wrote, "were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sell -- exactly our own history.... It is corn and oil all over again, and promises to do its full share in the eventual subversion of the Republic.... We have the two Roman conditions: stupendous wealth with its inevitable corruptions and moral blight, and the corn and oil pensions -- that is to say, vote bribes, which have taken away the pride of thousands of tempted men and turned them into willing alms receivers and unashamed."

Recall that Mark Twain was writing about a century ago before women had the vote. But he had an eye and a nose for history. He knew what had brought down the Roman empire. I do not suggest that he foresaw what would happen in the latter years of the 20th century or even that he had Bill Clinton on his radar scope. But he could extrapolate the future from the past -- and the past from the present. He could view what Otto von Bismarck was after in the First Reich, the creation of the modern world's first welfare state, which inevitably became Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Disasters invite disasters. I doubt, that we ever will have an honest assessment and description of America's 1929 economic collapse, for instance. Too many idols would be smashed, too many reputations demolished. But after Frank Roosevelt and his personal destroyer, Charley Michaelson, had frightened away a return to a normal economy, corn and oil were necessary for those in the middle and middle-lower classes who were in desperate situations. When it was discovered that this brought in votes, who in the new bureaucracy could stop singing "Praise the Lord and pass the corn and oil"?

The National Industrial Recovery Act, FDR's Great Depression placebo, was aimed not at the poor but at the middle class -- and what it preached was the "right" to corn and oil -- and included a host of other "rights" never dreamed of by the Founding Fathers. And with each "right" goes a little corn and oil -- a chicken in every pot and a chick in every nest. Every helping of corn and oil grew bigger -- and how many Americans know that the richer you are the bigger your Social Security check?

In its early days, welfare was a helping hand to those in need. It then became a "right" -- like abortion and freedom of speech. And it has taken a small revolution to demonstrate that it is an abuse of human dignity and a creator of a permanent beggar class. When those hard-hearted conservatives pointed this out, they were consigned to the lowest circle of hell -- a land of ice and damnation. But mirabile dictu, conservatives have begun to put an end to the permanent handout. And try as it does, the corn-and-oil media have yet to ferret out any authentic hardships that have arisen as a result. What person is ready to admit, even to himself, that he is nothing without charity?

Yep, Old Sam'l had it right, as he had so many other things right. He realized that "the same gust of wind that blows a lady's dress aside fills your eyes so full of sand that you can't see it." But what he had to say about Congress ought to be put on a bumper sticker: America's only native criminal class. Indeed.