I debated as to what to call this one. Among candidate titles were “The Face of Evil” and others but I settled on one that includes appropriate attribution to the American icon without whom what follows could not have been written.Late in his life Mark Twain wrote 3 stories, each unfinished, which constitute attempts to put a face on “evil”. Each manuscript is a variation of the same theme – The Chronicle of Young Satan being set in Austria during the early 1700’s, Schoolhouse Hill including Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as characters and No. 44 The Mysterious Stranger set in 1490 Austria. Common themes and devices among the stories are protracted death by water and mobs, cowardice and cruelty.
These manuscripts were originally published in 1969, long after Twain’s death. Given that Twain is one of the most widely-quoted and well-known Americans in history I was eager to tap into his thoughts on the matter. His keen observations on human nature and his skill at communicating them in fiction suggest some reward for efforts made to read these stories which can now be found in The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts.
A discussion of this book with a friend led to a recommendation of another book Evil : An Investigation by Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow.
Morrow observes that depictions of evil are a staple of Twain’s writing. There is Huck Finn’s n’er do well father who attempts to take Huck’s life. Most memorable is one casually interjected vignette of earlier American life when Tom Sawyer gets off a steamboat downriver and reports that there had been an accident in the form of a boiler explosion. A woman asks, “Anyone hurt?” Tom answers “No Ma’am. A couple of niggers killed.” The woman replied “Oh thank heavens, because you know, sometimes people do get hurt.”
According to Morrow, this particular excerpt highlights an evil kind of innocence which typical of the rich and powerful and which “runs through the American story” and reasserts itself from time to time in “a certain obliviousness in, for example, the area of foreign policy”. This is a foreign policy in which it becomes all too easy to objectify others and regard them as deserving of a fate that would shake us to the core were we to witness the same among the 100 people with whom we are most familiar.
Morrow observes that Twain addresses a variety of topics relating to race and racism including the evils of slavecatchers and the cruelty of overseers. However there is always a consensus that supports such evils. Morrow asserts this “…far worse, the vast, smug, unknowingness, the evil obliviousness of seeming innocent people.”
Tacit acceptance of the supposedly necessary horrors visited on others, deemed deserving recipients of acts committed by us or in our name, leads to a host of rationalizations in an effort to reduce our cognitive dissonance and to demonstrate a righteousness that excepts us from their fate. Offering a voluptuous cushion of assurance, words like “justice” are interjected. To further absolve ourselves of our acts, we point to a third party, one who certainly cannot be questioned, so as to seal the topic off from any further questioning -- God. We draw ostensibly arbitrary lines that stop at the boundary of family, mega-church, race or political affiliation to define the limits and terms of a picayunish good-will-towards-others…all followed by a good night’s sleep on account of nothing more than having consumed the same bucket of hogwash en masse.
This permeates our politics and passes for righteousness. The religiosity of many upholds it even when carving the references to charity out of the bible would leave a hollow tome with ample space for Rush Limbaugh to stash his drugs. Biblical reference to charity is, more often than not, qualified with “to whom” and “not to whom” in ways that would have Jesus turning over in his catacomb.
We are so fearful in our regard for an unworthy, lazy “generalized other”, who seeks something for nothing and is largely an invention of our own imagination, that we vest nothing in community or government because it includes others unlike us and with whom we’re unfamiliar. In the end we shortchange only ourselves…getting no decent healthcare or basic security because of a stinginess that will not tolerate the chance of someone “less deserving” also getting the same. We are susceptible to fearful, unrealistic narrative promulgated by politicians, owned by corporations without conscience, seeking to maximize profit in a supposedly free market of products with infinite costs willing to be paid, for our lives depend upon it. We remain without bargaining power and elect representatives beholding to those who would own us like slaves for their own incommensurate enrichment on mind-boggling scales that are beyond comprehension.
Yes, there are many evils and though not quite so humorous as Twain, Morrow touches on the banality of evil, utter lack of compassion and the benign neglect that increasingly typify our society as we are awash in fear and lack the courage to speak for what we know is right.
However, there are no more straightforward and detailed examinations from Twain than in these three incomplete manuscripts in which various aspects of evil are squarely addressed through fiction.
The topic is timeless and one cannot help but draw some parallels between the sense of evil evoked by his writing and the reflection of American political and cultural life brought to us by corporate media. The common thread that runs through both past and present is that evil always has a justification, never admits what it is, and can at times be the consensus rather than the minority opinion. Given a capacity for self-delusion the recognition of evil might sometimes boil down to whether or not you are on the giving or the receiving end -- with degree of absence or presence of human compassion being the determining factor. A compassionate people will have a compassionate society and a governmental system deserving of and reflecting those values. Instead we have a fanatical, irrational fear of “income distribution” that chokes off any and all forms of common advancement.
Instead of compassionate ideals what we get today is lies from the extreme right and apparently the ignorance to consume them without question as Sarah Palin speaks of National Health Service (NHS) death panels in the UK when the reality is that to the person the NHS is regarded as the revered beating heart of a nation and a matter of national pride in the UK. To add insult to injury, for this kind of willful mischaracterization our once-great nation becomes an object of international derision –- all because we let our politicians get away with it and lack a media that will take the corporate-funded liars to task.
After all, what is one to make of the flatulent, self-righteous punditry of one claiming a closer connection to God as they suggest that natural disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti represent divine justice and well-deserved affliction on the victims? Would such a man, as instrument of his god actually pull the lever himself so to speak, if there were such a thing, to ensure that justice was served? Wasn’t that what Hitler did? Is there really plausible deniability for the one who didn’t flick the switch or pull the lever? Apparently, according to Pat Robertson, we are to believe that the God of us all did. Can one help but wonder which does more damage, the commission of evil by an individual or a proactive declaration or broadcast of the virtue of benign neglect?
In the “Chronicle of Young Satan” manuscript evil assumes the form of a compassionless yet alluring individual, followed and admired in spite of senseless acts of cruelty inflicted at random and accompanied by explanations such as “It is of no consequence” and cynical derision of humankind, associated foibles and characteristic weakness. But Satan is not so overtly evil as much as he helps evil along in human affairs as a source of personal amusement, giving it a nudge when the opportunity arises. It is mankind itself that readily does the heavy-lifting with hardly any encouragement from Satan, to whom the contrast between human evil and noble stated intent offers an endless source of amusement. No sooner than he inflicts some form of misery on men does the story’s main character Theodor quickly forget, then choosing to bask in the light of young Satan’s attention and remain the good favor of such a unique and interesting person.
Young Satan first appears to Seppi, Nikolaus and Theodor explaining that he is an angel and impressing them with his brilliance, wit and powers. They are captivated and powerless to speak their minds lest the emerging friendship with Young Satan be jeopardized. Acts of extraordinary cruelty towards others are overlooked as the story progresses and in its first-person telling by Theodor we come to understand his conscious reservations as he is swept along in his ongoing friendship and its benefits, of which there are many.
Satan frequently whisks Theodor away to some faraway place in the past to serve as passive audience to historical acts of unspeakable human-on-human cruelty either solitary of en masse. They serve as the basis for moral relativism and excuse for various insensitive acts committed by Young Satan, but never to Theodor who is treated as a comrade by Young Satan. Young Satan and Theodor then return to the original place and time with hardly more than a few seconds lost.
The story progresses with the boys entranced by Satan and his magic despite their reservations regarding his unabashed acts of unrepentant cruelty including the prediction of Nikolaus’ drowning and disinclination to prevent it.
Theodor relates:
More than once Seppi and I had tried in a humble and diffident way to convert him; and as he had remained silent we had taken his silence as a sort of encouragement; necessarily, then, this talk of his was a disappointment to us, for it showed that we had made no deep impression upon him. The thought made us sad, and we knew, then, how the missionary must feel when he has been cherishing a glad hope and has seen it blighted. We kept our grief to ourselves, knowing that this was not the time to continue our work.Then in characteristic style Satan would counter with something like:
It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have arisen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest, ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best, to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history, but only the Christian civilization has score a triumph to be proud of. Two centuries from now it will be recognised that all the competent killers are Christian, then the pagan world will go to school the Christian, not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those, to kill missionaries and converts with.
In the voice of Theodor the narrative continues:
By the time his theatre was at work again: and before our eyes nation after nation drifted by, during two centuries a mighty procession, an endless procession, raging, struggling, wallowing through seas of blood, smothered in battle-smoke through which the flags glinted and the red jets from the cannon darted; and always we heard the thunder of the guns and the cries of the dying.
Then from Satan:
“And what does it amount to?” said Satan, which his evil chuckle. “Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense – to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you would feel defiled it you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for; fight for, die for and are not shamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your hearts – if you have one – you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built. Drink to their perpetuation! drink to their augmentation! drink to—“From Theodor’s narrative:
Then he saw by our faces how much we were hurt, and he cut his sentence short and stopped chuckling, and his manner changed. He said gently--Thusly, the boys were strung along by Satan, seemingly powerless in the face of his seduction, unable to end their friendship as adulation tempered with wariness. This bore a similarity to a co-dependent relationship in which a stronger, more self-assured individual preyed upon the weaker ones. Satan messed with their heads and seemed to take delight in inflicting the pain of awareness when it came to subjects that remained hard for the boys to stomach.
Theodor gives further insights into Satan as not being entirely without empathy but with a selective, deep-seated loathing towards man and man alone:
You must never picture Satan as solitary, but always with a lot of vagrant animals tagging around after him. Animals could not let him alone, they were so fascinated with him; and this was mutual for he felt the same way toward them. He often said he would not give a penny for human company when he could get better. You see they were fond of each other because in a manner they were kin, through their mutual property in the absence of the Moral Sense. And kin in another particular too—to him, as to them there were no unpleasant smells. He said that unpleasant smalls were an invention of Civilization—like modesty, and indecency. He said that to the pure all smalls were sweet, to the decent all things were decent. He said that the natural man, the savage, had no prejudices about smells, and no shame for his God-made nakedness. Through intimacy with him we came to en joy the society of animals which had previously been repulsive to us, but we drew the line at the polecat.
Theodor goes on to explain that Satan recued animals in distress even to the point of turning the Prince’s trapper who threatened to flog him into a statue of stone.
If you so choose to read this fascinating yarn you will most likely find it interesting in itself without any deeper thought. It’s good fantasy. However a most interesting culmination occurs towards the end. Though one can only guess at what was being contemplated by Twain (and many have tried since the manuscripts included notes by Twain), as the story ends abruptly and without conclusion, the extended dialog between Young Satan and Theodor offers the opportunity for Twain to set forth his own ideas about humanity albeit in Satan’s voice. In a couple of such rants by Satan towards the manuscript’s end there is a glimmer of closure in the sense that you feel Young Satan has completely told his story.
The irony of the story is, that notwithstanding the lack of compassion on Satan’s part, the most effective exposition of evil occurs in the form of Satan’s observations of mankind – it’s weakness in succumbing to the influence of an evil few. Thusly, evil is characterized as being attributable to weakness, cowardice and self-delusion.
At one point Theodor encounters an angry mob chasing after a woman who dared to cure people by so-called “devilish arts” by bathing, washing and nourishing them, instead of bleeding them and purging them through the ministrations of a barber-surgeon in the “proper way.” Satan observed that cowards were stoning a dying lady.
As the woman was hanged Theodor threw his own stone, fearing that he would be identified as one in opposition to the angry mob and Satan found this amusing, revealing that he was indeed laughing at Theodor and that the mob consisted of those with precisely the same sentiments as Theodor. He holds up a mirror to Theodor, showing him an unsavory part of himself which turns out to be painful.
Well there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had.”Satan’s soliloquy continues and answers Theodor’s objection at humans being likened to lambs:
Oh, it’s true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feeling and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain; but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don’t dare to assert themselves. Think of it! one kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of one hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise—perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it—and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end. In fact this happened within these ten years, in a little country called New England.
Monarchies, aristocracies and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race—the individual’s distrust of his neighbor and his desire, for safety’s sake, to stand well in his neighbor’s eyes. These institutions will always remain, always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to either of these institutions.
Still it is true lamb. Look at you in war—what mutton you are, and how ridiculous.Finally the plot arrives at a point at which, by a chain of events unleashed by Satan an innocent priest had been accused of stealing some money that he found. Further magic by Satan changed the dates on the gold pieces to the current year so that the priest was cleared but consequently plunged into a dementia by which he believed himself to be Emperor. He had lost his mind…
There has never been a just one, never an honorable one—on the part of the instigator of war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful—as usual—will should for the war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously—object—at first; the great big dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleep eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out-shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thin: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled, by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers—as earlier—but do not dare to say so! And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
“But Satan, as civilization advances—“
Two centuries from now the Christian civilization will reach it highest mark. Yet its kings will still be, then, what they are now, a close corporation of land-thieves. Is that an advance? England will be prodigious and strong; she will bear the most honorable name that ever a nation bore, and will lose it in a single little shameful war and carry the stench of it and the blot of it to the end of her days. To please a dozen rich adventurers her statesmen will pick a quarrel with a couple of wee little Christian farmer-communities, and send against that half dozen villages the mightiest army that ever invaded any country, and will crush those little nations and rob them of their independence and their land. She will make a noisy pretence of being proud of these things but deep down in her heart she will be ashamed of them and will grieve for her soiled flag—once the symbol of liberty and honor and justice, now the pirate’s emblem.
“Satan,” I said, “this would not happen if she could have the true religion.”
Ah, yes—the kind of treasure which you have here in Austria. My uncle is thinking of introducing it into his dominions.
“Satan",” I said, “it would defile it!”
He only pulled down the corner of his eye with his finger.
On my road home I came upon Satan, and reproached him for deceiving me with that lie. He was not embarrassed, but said, quite simply, and composedly—To an assertion by Theodor that men were in possession of a sense of humor the following dialog was triggered:
Ah, you mistake—it was the truth. I said he would be happy for the rest of his days, and he will. For he will always think he is the Emperor, and his pride in it will endure to the end. He is now, and will remain, the one utterly happy person in this empire.
But the method of it, Satan, the method! Couldn’t you have done it without depriving him of his reason?
It was difficult to irritate Satan but that accomplished it.
What an ass you are! Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy and the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man the trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaces his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result—and you criticise! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race—and you are not satisfied! It seems to me that this race is hard to please.
There spoke the race! always ready to claim what is hasn’t got and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold dust. You have a bastard perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things—broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision, they are unconscious of their presence. The ten thousand are hid from the entire race.This story demonstrates, yet again, vintage Twain and that for which his writing is cherished:
No religion exists which is not littered with engaging and delightful comicalities, but the race never perceives them. Nothing can be more deliciously comical than hereditary royalties and aristocracies, but none except royal families and aristocracies are aware of it.
Are they?
Oh, aren’t they? Often they cannot sleep for laughing at their dependents. It would surprise you to know the names they privately call them by.
But republics and democracies see, don’t they?
Oh, no—and they never will. While they scoff with their mouths they reverence them in their hearts. The democrat will never live who will marry a democrat into his family when he can get a duke. All forms of government—including republican and democratic—are rich in funny shams and absurdities, but their supporters do not see it.
It took him an hour to list a lot of the comicalities which the race is not capable of perceiving, then he left off. He said it would take him a month to name the rest.
Intercourse with him had colored my mind, of course, he being a strong personality and I a weak one; therefore I was inclined to think his position correct, but I did not say it. I only said our race was progressing, and that in time its sense of humor would develop to a point where it would enable us to perceive many things which we cannot see now.
But he only made fun of that idea and said—
The race had as much humor perception when it was created as it has now, and it will never have any more. Look at the Pope’s infallibility. Does any one see the humor of that? Not a soul, except the Pope and the Conclave. Look at this loosing-and-binding authority—which is not confined to earth, but which even God on His throne is obliged to submit to—as per his claim. Does anyone see the humor of that? Not a soul outside the Vatican. Heretics rage about it, but no one laughs at it. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons: do you ever use that one? No, you leave it lying rusting. As a race do you ever use it at all? No—you lack sense and the courage. Once in an age a single hero lifts it, delivers his blow, and a hoary humbug goes to ruin. Before this century closes, Robert Burns, a peasant, will break the back of the Presbyterian Church with it, and set Scotland free. I ask you again: will a day come when the race will have so developed its humor-perception as to be able to detect the funniness of Papal Infallibility and God-subordinating Papal Authority?
Satan’s inclination for and delight in rubbing young Theodor’s nose in the foibles, weaknesses and self-deception of humanity knew no limits and it inflicted pain to the extent Theodor realized it to be true.
- Humorous exposure of human self deception
- Questioning authority, and
- Irreverence towards the sacred cows that are often beyond question to a significant portion of the population
- Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
- What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
- It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.
- In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
- Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
- Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.
- Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself. The Bible has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
- It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.
But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?One anecdote about Twain related in the book’s introduction was that his mother never had a bad word to say about anyone. To better understand the extent of this quality Twain and another boyhood friend staged a ruse by which they began to bad-mouth Satan in an extreme manner. Twain’s mother admonished them for speaking badly about someone who was not present.
Twain used Satan not so much as an example of evil but rather a vehicle or device for laying out aspects of human nature that lead to the commission of evil. Cowardice, self-deception, herd mentality, reluctance to question and pursue answers when in doubt…all of these things are no less evident today than they were during the time at which Twain lived at the turn of the century. The story itself could easily have been adapted to political and cultural events of the last decade with vignettes exploiting a rush to war with little proof or objection from those afraid to risk the stigma of being labeled a coward or traitor. There is both shame and denial in our complicity to what was, in retrospect, a farce.
Satan’s amusement at Theodor’s dissonance regarding the casting of the stone seemed a particularly skillful illumination of the darker side of human nature, the part seldom discussed or admitted except in a context of intimacy or at the most ephemerally conscious levels of thought. We are all products of the boundaries of acceptable social discourse but there is never really perfect, 100% overlap between ones inner thoughts and outward speech, is there? There is always a difference between what is said and what one really thinks, and this can be both a conscious and unconscious phenomenon.
This observation is reminiscent of one by Elias Canetti in his seminal book on crowd psychology for which he won the Nobel Prize, Crowds and Power, published in 1960. Canetti did not rely on the self-assessment of crowds for the basis of his conclusions. He studied patterns of accretion and dispersal of crowds of humans and had some insights into the formation of angry mobs, noting that:
War is an astonishing business. People decide that they are threatened with physical destruction and proclaim the fact to the whole world. They say "I can be killed" and secretly add "because I myself want to kill this or that man." The stress properly belongs on the second half of this sentence. It should run: "I want to kill this or that man, therefore I can be killed myself." But when it is a question of war starting, or its eruption and the awakening of a bellicose spirit within the nation, the first version will be the only one openly admitted. Even if in fact the aggressor, each side will always attempt to prove that it is threatened.
This is hardly different from Satan’s own misanthropic conclusions regarding a call to arms.
Perhaps it takes more courage to stand against the majority or even, as Twain put it, an aggressive and pitiless minority ready to shout anyone down who disagrees with it than it takes to go along and to unquestioningly follow the person in front down a risky path (to war?) for which one has serious reservations. Just think about it…they didn’t even have Fox News with Bill O’Really and Sean Insanity back then yet Twain seems to be describing those wingnuts to a “T”.
Luckily, a tradition of speaking truth to power using humor persists today with the likes of Jon Stewart, Bill Maher...writers such as Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi and others. Our culture badly needs this as the proverbial mirror into which we can gaze to see ourselves unadorned of self-delusion and our acts stripped naked and left in stark, consummately human terms…to better observe the utter insanity of actions perpetrated either by ourselves or in our names.
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