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9af8923
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"Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there's a supreme being? There's no proof of it. There's no harm in saying you're an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated. I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don't believe necessarily that there's a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of . said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I'm in good company ... ,
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carlin
george-carlin
twain
mark-twain
einstein
supreme-being
charles-darwin
golden-rule
belief
company
darwin
atheism
atheist
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Jesse Ventura |
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4d7d917
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Consider the great . is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like or the Chicago-based , who object to Twain's use--in or out of 'context'--of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, . He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of . He composed a caustic and brilliant . With he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose and pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of and for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti-Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced--in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what had missed and far anticipated --to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist.
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racism
history
huckleberry-finn
mark-twain
imperialism
united-states
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7bebf0a
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I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes.
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humor
as-i-lay-dying
great-gatsby
tom-sawyer
mark-twain
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Sarah Vowell |
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fb23b63
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"This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America's "art." Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it."
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reality
the-mississippi
mark-twain
art
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John Kennedy Toole |