Steering ourselves to calmer waters
It’s election season, and if you’re like me, you need some comic relief. For relief, I turn to Mark Twain, the great satirist of his time. He’d sure enough be popular today, even though I reckon most folks just wouldn’t get his satire and humor. But lighten up! Twain’s words should be able to make you smile a little, even if his humor’s pointed your way.
In his great American novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain takes us through an America as divided as today’s. Using the Mississippi River as a backdrop for a journey through America pre-Civil War, Twain captures the contradictions of our country through the eyes of the greatest character in American literature and one of my heroes, Huckleberry Finn.
Strangely, things haven’t much changed. The characters in this book are our neighbors, the themes are today’s news.
Let’s start with Huck’s dad “Pap” and his views on government, race and voting rights — all relevant subjects from today’s headlines. Says Pap, “Thinks I, what is this country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go out and vote, myself, if I warn’t too drunk to get there, but when they told me there was a State in this country where they let that ... vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.” About Pap, Huck says, “Whenever his liquor begun to work, he most always went for the govment.” A small part of Pap’s rant, “They call that govment! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all.”
If he were alive today, Pap would likely be hosting an evening “talk” slot on 24/7 cable news. He sounds like the ranters many of us listen to. At least Pap’s excuse was he was crazy and drunk. And today’s ranters? Are they drunk too? Well, we must be drunk to listen.
My favorite Twain election season quote is “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” Politicians were making a fool of folks then, and still are. And we voters haven’t gotten much smarter through the years. With all our sophistication, technology and supposed education, we are still so gullible, so willing to believe the politicians on our side and so eager to demonize the people on the other side. Find yourself an honest politician, if you can (I did).
As race relations are part of this election season, know that “Huckleberry Finn” is much more than a kid’s adventure novel. Huck’s preconceived views on race relations, pre-Civil War, are shattered by his traveling companion, the runaway slave Jim. Time and time again, Jim’s humanity and good soul force Huck to revisit his prejudices and to realize he had it all wrong. As many of us still do today. For me, I’d rather be on that raft with Jim and his kin than in that civilized world of the Widow Douglas and her ilk.
If Twain wrote today, would he be tarred and feathered then run out of town like the rapscallions in his novel, or would we be able to laugh with him and see the world innocently, like Jim and Huck do? Could he show us that we ourselves are participants in our modern day version of Twain’s “The Royal Nonesuch,” where the audience is played and the scoundrels Duke and King make out at our expense, at least for a while.
Rafting the Mississippi is much like navigating our country’s current political turmoil. We should learn from Huck, Jim and the pilot of that story of life on the Mississippi, Twain. “It would have been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft, for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind towards the others.”
We may not be able to right the ship alone as America steers through these perilous troubled waters, but we can steer ourselves to calmer waters, and I reckon that’s a start.