An interview with Mark Twain

I had too much to dream last night. There I was with a group of reporters standing around famed author and man about town, Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Being a dream, it didn't occur to me that Mark Twain had been dead for 95 years or that I wasn't really a reporter, what was important at the time was a chance for that vaunted one-on-one interview with the "Man in White". And then it happened, we were sitting in his study at Stormfield, his beautiful home in Redding, Connecticut.

Q: Mr. Clemens, how does it feel being known as the anti-Johnny Cash?

A: First, If you really knew me, you'd know I have a much darker personality than the "Man in Black" and second, call me Sam . . . Mr. Clemens was my old man. He was a real SOB. Most people called him Judge Clemens, but I had to call him Mister until I was 12.

Q: What happened when you were 12?

A: The SOB died! Then I went to work as an apprentice printer.

Q: I have to talk to you about your two most famous works.

A: Ah, the Hannibal Chronicles. That's what most people want to talk about. I rather prefer some of my later works. I had the chance to write about Heaven and Hell, deeper and of darker substance.

Q: This is my dream.

A: But of course it is. Okay, I've been thinking of updating my characters to these more modern times.

Q: Updating?

A: Some of my characters need to be more PC. This is the twenty-first century, face it son, nineteenth century attitudes do not work in today's society.

Q: But your characters are timeless. Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer . . .

A: You think people will allow Injun Joe and Nigger Jim anymore?

Q: Point taken.

A: Today Aunt Polly would be charged by DFC for child neglect, Pap Finn would be in prison for child abuse, Huck would be in a juvenile detention hall and Tom would be conning other kids out of their I-Pods and PSPs. And you know those corn cob pipes wouldn't be filled with tobacco.

Q: You're very cynical.

A: Thank you for noticing.

Q: Can I ask your opinion on the state of the Union?

A: You can ask.

Q: Does that mean you won't answer?

A: It seems the government has a knack of questioning a man's patriotism if he speaks out agin' the government nowadays.

Q: Are you really afraid of the current administration?

A: No. Of course not. Fear is their game. They seem to want everyone else to be afraid of these terrorists as well we should, but not to the detriment of our civil rights. I say, be brave, have courage. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Q: Do you think the administration has been honest with the American people?

A: We hear every single day what George W. Bush has to say. After all, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Q: I take it then that you're not a fan of politicians.

A: I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

Q: Religion too?

A: In this country, if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.

Q: Let's get back to politics. What is your view of the war in Iraq?

A: Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Q: You mentioned God.

A: Well, God, or the worship of God is usually at the impetus of most wars. I once came up with a prayer for war. Would you like to hear it?

Q: Yes, please.

A: O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.

Q: Wow, that's pretty profane.

A: War is profane. Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel. ..And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man"--with his mouth.

Q: Amen. But Bush's cronies keep telling us, if we're not behind his little war, then we're not being patriotic.

A: To be a patriot, one has to say, and keep on saying, "Our country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation.

Q: Sir, you are indeed a wise man.

A: It's not wise to know truth. It is simply honesty. War has always been and will always be a wanton waste of projectiles. Do you not hear that infernal racket?

Unfortunately, that infernal racket was my alarm clock. Perhaps another helping of cold pizza and semi-chilled beer can induce a follow-up interview someday.