Mark Twain’s essay, “Privilege of the Grave”, a dark discussion on the nature of free speech, has been sitting in the The Mark Twain Papers & Project archive at the University of California, Berkeley, never before having been published in any magazine or newspaper since it was written in 1905. Enter this week the New Yorker magazine, which published the short two-page essay for its December 22nd/29th edition. Twain wrote the essay just five years before his death in 1910 and the essay contains the overtones of bitterness and dark humor that marked the last years of his life. The essay is not typical Twain fare, and does not rank with the best of his essays, but it is certainly an interesting peek into the thoughts that Twain had on politics at that time in his life.
Some passages of the essay show that some things never change in that many passages would appear to describe our current political situation today. Take for instance:
When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid and for a time they are mute, reserved, non-committal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.
Twain continues:
The average citizen is not a student of party doctrines, and quite right: neither he nor I would ever be able to understand them. If you should ask him to explain – in intelligible detail – why he preferred one of the coin-standards to the other, his attempt to do it would be disgraceful … And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fus and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.
I don’t think I need to go into any detail about how our current administration took advantage of the emotions of it’s nation’s citizenry after 9/11 in order to ram through a series of laws and policies that would otherwise not have passed judgement, thanks to the “startled, anxious, timid, mute, reserved and non-committal” politicians in power at that crucial time.
If you find this essay interesting, you will probably want to read his essay, ‘Corn-Pone Opinions‘, written four years earlier in 1901.
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