Lies and, well, more lies: A modern day scourge

Rumor mongering has long been a treasured practice among human beings.  It has long been a hallowed practice in justifying wars (remember Gulf of Tonkin or Hitler's rationale for invading Czechoslovakia or for that matter the rationale for the Iraq invasion). 

Every day most of us will receive at least one email that is forwarded by a friend or loved one that suggests one thing or another is true, so beware.  Remember Sarah Palin's "death panels."  Or, that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in 9-11, and thus a rationale for invasion.  [I will say that though I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan you could make a logical rationale for it, as the Taliban were harboring Al Qaeda].  Now we've got huge numbers of people believing that President Obama is both a Muslim (18% of Americans and 41% of Republicans) and that he is foreign born (birther movement).  Instead of sharing a bit of biblical wisdom this morning, I'd like to share a few proverbs from that great American humorist Mark Twain:

The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!

- Mark Twain in Eruption

Yes, that is the danger of building a premise upon a lie -- it's hard to undo.

And then there's this one, though apparently it's never been verified and may be the product of the Baptist preacher of yore, Charles Spurgeon.  Either way, its's a great line for the modern day, as blogs, emails, facebook, and twitter can pass along the lies faster than the truth can get in a word edgewise!

A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Let's help the truth catch up a bit, shall we!

Publishing Mark Twain's Long-Awaited Autobiography

Randall Stephens

W. D. Howells wrote his long-time friend Mark Twain: "I wonder why we hate the past so?" Twain snapped back "It's so damned humiliating." Mark Twain had a few choice things to say about history.

"I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored."*

Elsewhere he paraphrased Herdotus: "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."


Twain was a cynic. A very funny one at that. His views on religion were so volatile in his day--and he feared enough for his own reputation and for that of his immediate family--that he chose not to air them. Though a skeptic, he made observations like this: "All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ." The bloody theology of Christianity along with its particularity, in his view, was repulsive. He confided to his notebook in 1896: "If Christ was God, He is in the attitude of One whose anger against Adam has grown so uncontrollable in the course of . . . If Christ was God, then the crucifixion is without dignity. It is merely ridiculous, for to endure several hours."

In the autobiography he worked on, Twain meditated on religion, writing, the West, his acquaintances, and more. (See the PBS Newshour segment on the autobio embedded here.)

The editors of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley have their hands full. The projects website explains:

Housed in the midst of the archive is the Mark Twain Project, a major editorial and publishing program of The Bancroft Library. Its six resident editors are at work on a comprehensive scholarly edition of all of Mark Twain's private papers and published works. More than thirty of an estimated seventy volumes in The Works and Papers of Mark Twain are currently available, all published by the University of California Press.

Twain stipulated that the autobiography could be published one-hundred years after his death. "He used the autobiography as a chance to disburden himself of a lot of feeling," says Benjamin Griffin in the Newshour piece. "He left this out of the final version of the autobiography." For example, as a staunch anti-imperialist, Twain took aim at Teddy Roosevelt for his role in the massacre of Filipino guerrillas during the Spanish-American War.

"[Roosevelt] knew perfectly well that to pen 600 helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day-and-a-half from a safe position on the heights above was no brilliant feat of arms. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag."

I look forward to reading the completed version. (Or at least thumbing through it.) Not a light read, I'm sure.