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MARK TWAIN KNEW "A TIME'S COMING...." [1]
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Date: 2025-04-04
As countless Americans watch their dreams of retirement suddenly vanish, and countless others suddenly face losing their jobs - And even their Fundamental Rights as Americans - I think back to what I wrote in this same space on May 19, 2020 - Less than Five Years Ago - and what feels even more true today. Here is that entry....
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” [Ernest Hemingway] On days like today, I am reminded of the passage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the end of On days like today, I am reminded of the passage inat the end of chapter 25, when the King and the Duke are impersonating the English relatives of three orphan girls in order to swindle them out of their inheritance. They have hoodwinked the crowd of ignorant townsfolk when the town doctor arrives on the scene and sees through their scheme:
..." 'keep your hands off me! says the doctor. 'You talk like and Englishman, don't you!? It's the worst imitation I ever heard. You, Peter Wilks' brother!? You're a Fraud, that's what you are'! Well now [the townsfolk] all took on... and tried to quiet him down..... But it warn't no use; he...said any man that pretended to be an Englishman and couldn't imitate the lingo no bette than what he did was a Fraud and a Liar.
All of a sudden he ups and turns on [the poor girls] and says: 'I was your father's friend, and I am your friend; and I warn you as a friend, and an honest one that wants to protect you and keep you from harm and trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have nothing to do with him, the Ignorant tramp.... He is the thinnest kind of an Imposter'.
But the doctor's plea fails. Twain describes how the naive orphan girls reject the doctor's warning: [The girls put their arms around the King] and.... "Everybody clapped their hands and stomped on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the King held up his head and smiled proud. The doctor say: 'All right; I wash my hands of the matter. But I warn you all that A TIME'S COMING WHEN YOU'RE GOING TO FEEL SICK WHENEVER YOU THINK OF THIS DAY'."
Twain got it. So did Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Camus. They all understood the root Causes of EVIL and warned us, in the most compelling prose, how we must RESIST IT.
... Five years after I wrote those words, I repeat them:
If we are not "going to feel sick whenever [we] think of this day - and the seventy days that have preceded it - we must RESIST the EVIL inflicted on us by "a FRAUD AND A LIAR....The Thinnest Kind of IMPOSTER."
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