Over a year ago I wrote a post about the Qingdao Book Club. I am happy to say it is still going strong. The membership has turned over almost completely since we joined the group, an eventuality in a club made up of ex-patriots, but it shows no signs of fizzling out. I go every month. It gives me a chance to talk about something besides the baby.
Last month we read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It was the first time I had ever read it, and though it is embarrassing to admit it, the first time I read anything by Mark Twain since high school. It tells the story of a factory manager from the late nineteenth century (and from Connecticut, obviously) who travels through time and space to sixth century England. He builds a telephone system and a military academy. He also complains about the lack of pockets in his suit of armor:
The first ten or fifteen times I wanted my handkerchief I didn’t seem to care; I got along, and said never mind, it isn’t any matter, and dropped it out of my mind. But now it was different; I wanted it all the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and no rest; I couldn’t get it out of my mind; and so at last I lost my temper and said hang a man that would make a suit of armor without any pockets in it. You see I had my handkerchief in my helmet; and some other things; but it was that kind of a helmet that you can’t take off by yourself. That hadn’t occurred to me when I put it there; and in fact I didn’t know it. I supposed it would be particularly convenient there. And so now, the thought of its being there, so handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the worse and the harder to bear. Yes, the thing that you can’t get is the thing that you want, mainly; every one has noticed that. Well, it took my mind off from everything else; took it clear off, and centered it in my helmet; and mile after mile,there it stayed, imagining the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief; and it was bitter and aggravating to have the salt sweat keep trickling down into my eyes, and I couldn’t get at it. It seems like a little thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was the most real kind of misery. I would not say it if it was not so. I made up my mind that I would carry along a reticule next time, let it look how it might, and people say what they would. Of course these iron dudes of the Round Table would think it was scandalous, and maybe raise Sheol about it, but as for me, give me comfort first, and style afterwards.
The book is also a scathing, almost unrelenting tirade against social injustice in all forms. Twain was satirizing his own society and his own time. His criticisms are as relevant today as they were a hundred years ago. In one chapter, the Yankee explores the dungeon in Morgan Le Fay’s castle:
Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-seven men and women were shut up there! Indeed, some were there for no distinct offense at all, but only to gratify somebody’s spite; and not always the queen’s by any means, but a friend’s. The newest prisoner’s crime was a mere remark which he had made. He said he believed that men were about all alike, and one man as good as another, barring clothes. He said he believed that if you were to strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he couldn’t tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotel clerk. Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reduced to an ineffectual mush by idiotic training.
. . .Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there were five whose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longer known! One woman and four men—all bent, and wrinkled, and mind-extinguished patriarchs. They themselves had long ago forgotten these details; at any rate they had mere vague theories about them, nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in the same way. The succession of priests whose office it had been to pray daily with the captives and remind them that God had put them there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them that patience, humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to see in parties of a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poor old human ruins, but nothing more. These traditions went but little way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only, and not the names of the offenses.
The passage made me think about the penal system in America, and about the war on drugs. Hundreds of thousands of people are rotting in jail because they liked to get high. Or they liked to help other people get high. It’s more absurd than anything in Twain’s imagination. Even worse than justice meted out by Morgan Le Fay.
If you are interested in such things, and if you like holding your head in your hands and saying, “the horror, the horror…” you ought to read this great article in Rolling Stone, “How America Lost the War on Drugs.” It’s a long and thorough article that contains some real surprises from drug warriors. The ultra-conservative RAND Corporation, for example, funded a study that determined:
Overseas military efforts [like those in Panama, Colombia and Mexico] were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment.
Read this article. It’s long, but it’s shorter than Connecticut Yankee with almost as many absurdities per page.