JACK'S BLOG
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OpinionWE ARE WELL into another presidential election cycle and it's begun. The airways are full of campaign rhetoric. Neighbors are growing surly and minor encroachments on their property and their ideology are no longer being tolerated. The postman is groaning under the weight of mountains of campaign literature. Children are biting dogs. Really! I saw that last one at a picnic yesterday. The problem is that I'm a writer, and writers have opinions. How should we express them without hurting ourselves commercially? Mark Twain taught us to laugh at politicians, but we seem to have lost the skill. We need a more contemporaneous author to remind us. That man is Andrew Klavan. Andrew is the author of such popular selling thrillers as The Identity Man, The Truth of the Matter, The Long Way Home, The Last Thing I Remember, True Crime, and Empire of Lies. His most recent screenplay was 2008's A Shock to the System starring Michael Caine. He is the the recipient of multiple Edgar and Anthony Awards. Andrew appears regularly on PJTV Internet television espousing conservative causes. However, he does it with humor. His popular series, Klavan on the Culture, receives hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. It's interesting to compare his humor with that of comics who attempt to inject humor into political discourse. Bill Maher, for example, seems to prefer the Don Rickles approach of insulting his audience.
“The people are too stupid to be governed.” – Bill Maher “The people...” - that's you and me he's referring to. I don't find that particularly funny, do you? I'm sure that liberal politicians won't find Andrew funny or humorous. They'll probably take offense. Then again, Andrew is in good company. Many politicians were offended by Mark Twain when he spoke out against the Spanish-American War. I remember reading some of his comments in a Twain anthology, A Pen Warmed-up In Hell. “I left these shores, at Vancouver, a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. It seemed tiresome and tame for it to content itself with he Rockies. Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? And I thought it would be a real good thing to do. “I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which had addressed ourselves. “But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. . . “It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” – Mark Twain writing in the New York Herald, October 15, 1900 I often wonder how those words reflected on the sales of Twain's books. Remember, the Spanish-American War was mighty popular at the time. Twain was taking a chance speaking out so strongly against it, wasn't he? So here we go again. Another election, probably more heated than the last. It's going to get dirty. Feelings are going to be hurt. Keep an eye on Andrew and me. We'll try to keep you chuckling to the bitter end.
2 Comments
5/26/2012 10:03:38 pm
Great post, Jack, and an interesting conundrum for us writers. I would tend to agree with Mark Twain: go ahead and say what you think and don't worry about sales.
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5/27/2012 12:46:37 am
A politician's rhetoric bores us and we turn them off mentally if not with the remote. Humor, especially sardonic humor, drives the point home. I'm glad the comedians are making the election interesting whether I agree with them or not.
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