Dana Blankenhorn

Mark Twain, Tech Writer

2013-05-17T08:53:48-04:00

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

Mark Twain's been gone for over a century now, but his work still leaves a mark.

He was considered America's premier writer for much of his life, and remains our most famous. He worked from the unusual position of humor, but produced some of the most profound classics of the American page.

It's well-known that he liked technology. He wrote “Huckleberry Finn” on a typewriter, which was technology in the 1870s. He lost a fortune on a typesetting machine, which was the minicomputer of the 1880s. He ran his own publishing house and pioneered the selling of books by subscription. And he wasn't shy about any of it, which is a lesson more writers should take to heart.

But what I didn't realize until reading his autobiography recently was just how much of a technophile he really was.

Because Twain didn't write the way I do, or the way most people do. He wasn't really a writer at all. He was a speaker. He was an entertainer. He was closer to Bill Cosby than to William Faulkner. The most efficient way for him to write, he found, was just to say it out loud.

Imagine that.

In Jerry Seinfeld's film “Comedian” we get a good view of what Cosby is like, and what Twain himself was. Seinfeld and his crew go out to visit the man, who is working in New Jersey, and come back to their own set to talk about it.

At the time Seinfeld was trying to build a new 90 minute act following the end of his TV show. It's a struggle. We see it. It's all written down, it's all well-rehearsed, and it's typical of how a modern comedian works. Then he sees Cosby. “He's doing two shows a day, 90 minutes each set, and each one is completely different,” Jerry says, and the awe is real.

Bill Cosby can just sit on a chair, on a stage, start talking, and somehow it comes out clean, polished, complete. There are no long pauses, he doesn't have to reach into his memory for the next line. He just tells stories, about his life, about what interests him, and it's gold. All of it.

Twain was like that. From the 1860s he went on stages around the world and basically riffed for an hour or two, to tremendous applause. His writing was a cramped, low-tech way of making his work permanent. I wonder if, had he grown up in our time, he would have written anything at all.

He wrote by speaking. What came out of his mouth was amazingly fluent, complete, and graceful. He knew it. He had an ego, and praise just inflated it. He tried to capture that in his autobiography by dictating it. Imagine what he could have done with some tools, like a tape recorder. Imagine what he could have done on YouTube.

What separates Twain from Cosby, of course, and the great Groucho Marx, is that he also brought his pain to everything he did. It all had heart, like Billy Crystal's best stuff. In his "Midnight Train to Moscow" Crystal makes a Russian audience laugh for a full hour, then tells a story about how his great-grandmother supposedly came to America by telling her family she was going to Kiev by train. He ends it by getting on a train and seeing that scene, with his daughter playing the ancestor. Tears your heart out.

Twain, of course, had a lot to be torn up about. His wife and daughters pre-deceased him. He lost the fortune on the typesetter. He wasn't nearly as a good a businessman as he thought – he had this nasty streak of honesty in him.

He felt this pain – all of it – and it comes out in the autobiography. He knew he wasn't reliable witness to his own life, and knows no man really is, although most pretend to be. He struggled with the project for decades, and what finally emerged from the transcriptions is a man struggling to turn reality into art.

But the point is that Twain was alive to all the technology trends of his time. He wasn't cloistered in some office or library. He was in the world, a participant, and was constantly pushing the technology envelope to help him deliver more of himself to his fans.

We all need to be more like that. Especially our writers.

Gun Owners Anonymous

2013-05-10T05:07:00-04:00

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

The people who attended last week's NRA convention, and the people who support them politically, engender a wide range of emotions in those of us who don't share their ideology.

Fear. Loathing. Anger. In my case, rage and ridicule come quickly to mind.

But the most important, most effective emotion is not being deployed. It's the emotion that led Gandhi and Dr. King and even Jesus Christ to change humanity. It's almost never deployed against the greatest threat to life in our time.

Love.

Today's gun nuts are victims, and have been their entire lives. Ever since Pearl Harbor, it has been the political mission of the United States to keep us afraid of the “other,” and keep us fighting it. Nazis. Japs. Vietcong. Blacks. Russkies. Arabs. Mexicans. The names and faces change. Fear is the constant.

Along with this has come an increasing isolation of Americans, one from another. The suburbs became the exurbs, and the countryside filled with people who found the exurbs too scary. What they brought with them was fear, and a desire to be left alone. Guns became their drug of choice.

The census shows that victims of fear are, increasingly, a minority within this country. Since the last recession cities have been growing in prosperity and growing more dense, while it's distant suburbs that are suffering the price of their own isolation.

The present political war was driven by a deliberate campaign of fear and hatred aimed at these very victims, by a political class which needed their crazy in order to drive us toward a war of choice, to drive people to fight in it, vote for it, stand behind it. Just as the War in Vietnam was a Cold War Activity, the Iraq War was a War on Terror activity. It was only one act in a larger fabric.

Buf how do you fight against a verb? Terror is a state of mind. Terror isn't a person, it isn't a country, it isn't really an organization or ethnicity. Terror is a feeling. Terror is a sense of being surrounded, of being under threat, of being in danger. You can't fight a verb. You can't win a war against a verb.

Thus these victims – and there are millions of them – can easily be manipulated to hate, despise, and (most of all) fear just about anyone. They can be made to fear lawful authority. They can be made to fear the President. They can be made to fear me, and made to fear you.

This President has done all he could to lessen the existential threat. He has gotten out of Iraq and we haven't been attacked. He is getting us out of Afghanistan. He killed Bin Laden, and brought most of the rest of his henchmen to justice. He has engaged, constantly, in a rhetorical stance of calm and reason, both with the world and his political enemies here at home.

He has, gradually, drawn the country toward him. The midterm election of 2010, like that of 1994, showed America the alternative and we rejected it in 2012. Every survey shows that a large, and growing majority of Americans agree with this President, and that the political divide among those who deal in reality is between those who excuse him and those who are pushing him further to the left.

When the knees are made to jerk, now, they will jerk left. This is the great achievement of the Obama Presidency. But that does nothing for the fear – it actually increases the fear.

Do not go gently into this good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. This is the stance of conservativism today. Their fear of the future is palpable, because they see the tide going out and, no long restrained by a desire to gain majorities, they push instead only for the raw exercise of power, against the rising tide they hate and fear.

This kind of energy is hard to fight. It was hard for Nixon to engage his “silent majority” against the New Left of the 1970s, which is why William Safire and Pat Buchanan were engaged to “stick it” to liberals and so stir up Nixon's supporters. But it got easier from then on. It was easy for Lee Atwater, with Willie Horton, and it was still easier for George W. Bush. The disease may infect a smaller percentage of us, but it's increasingly virulent in those it does infect.

A different emotion is called for. Love is that emotion. Love and pity.

Let's face it, these are sad, scared, and small people. More-and-more guns are being bought by fewer-and-fewer people. And with fewer-and-fewer sound reasons. Self-protection? You're killing each other. A revolt against the government? That's crazy talk. If the government wants to come into your home and take your arsenal, they're going to take it, and the best you can hope for is that some in your family survive the carnage.

What's going on in the gun world is simple hoarding behavior. They're no longer collecting, and they're no longer rational. They're hoarding, spinning tighter-and-tighter within themselves. They can never use what they're buying. They're like music downloaders who could never live long enough to hear all the files they've stolen. They're like crazy cat ladies who you eventually find dead in their beds, surrounded by urine and feces.

E.L. Doctorow, as he often does, described it best. In his book “Homer & Langley,” he tells the story of two brothers who start life with great wealth but end it in a boarded-up mansion, surrounded by things that don't matter. Disengagement from life, from other people, is what kills them. It's Homer, the blind one, who narrates and offers what scraps of sanity the two men possess. Langley, damaged by World War I, slowly descends into madness. The tragedy is that the wealth they inherit insulates them from the consequences of their actions. They go on, crazy eccentrics, until Langley falls and dies, leaving Homer to starve and wonder where his brother has gone. There is nothing left at the end, of either man or the world they imagined.

That's what today's NRA members are heading towards. That's where modern conservatism is taking these people. They have descended into madness, the whole lot of them, and what else can you feel for such people, save pity?

It's true that pity is the last thing these people want. What they want is for others to feel the same fear they feel, even if that fear is only in reaction to their paranoia. They invite the loathing, they invite the contempt. Their sponsors encourage it because it keeps sales going. The gun makers have become like street drug dealers squeezing their customers out of every dime they possess. Gun owners need an intervention, but it's not something their perceived enemies can deliver to them. It's something only their friends can do for them.

So our job, as liberals, should be to pity the hoarders and encourage their friends to see the consequences of their friends' actions. Our hatred for them only gives them what they want. Our fear of them only gives them what they need.

It's pity that they really need. Pity and love. We need to be willing to walk away from them until their friends can be encouraged to stage the interventions needed to bring American politics back to life, and get rational debate started again.

What might drive those interventions is the same thing that drove away the “New Left” of the 1970s. They have to be isolated, they have to hit bottom. They're addicts.

We need a Gun Owners Anonymous.