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Twain was born in Missouri, a slave state, and fought in the Civil War, however briefly, on the Confederate side. His father occasionally owned a slave, and some members of his family owned many more. But Twain emerged as a man whose racial attitudes were not what one might expect from someone of his background. Again and again, in the postwar years, he seemed compelled to tackle the challenge of race...
Twain himself, of course, joined up on the Southern side. In his justifiably famous 1885 essay The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, he describes how he knocked about from one position on the war to another, evidently following in the footsteps of his buddies. One striking aspect of his tale is the groping inability of any of the several members of his ragtag militia to assign a reason for their struggle. The essay is in that sense better understood as a part of Twain's significant antiwar oeuvre, a category in which, for example, his essay...
...Barack Obama hearts the Roberts Court. At the end of June, the Democratic candidate praised Justice Antonin Scalia's 5-4 decision striking down the Washington ban on handgun possession, a ruling that recognizes the right to bear arms as an individual right. Two weeks earlier, from the other side of the ideological spectrum, Obama praised Justice Anthony Kennedy's 5-4 decision allowing enemy combatants to challenge their detentions in federal courts, a rebuke to the Bush Administration's policies toward Guantánamo detainees. Obama's only major quarrel with the court was the 5-4 decision banning...
...single-minded polemic. It registers the horror of lynchings but also undertakes to empathize with people who attended them. Their motivation, Twain argued, is not inhuman viciousness but "man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make...
...Pyrrhic victory for gun-rights advocates. As these laws spread across the country, the public will want to know what effect they'll have in their communities. Will they make people more secure? Or will they create some kind of dystopic Deadwood, where the law lands on the side of those who shoot first? The laws are written so vaguely that the answer lies largely in the interpretation. It's up to juries to set appropriate boundaries - hopefully ones that favor precedent, instead of completely rewriting the rulebook on lethal confrontations...