How I learned to stop worrying and appreciate Mark Twain.

Mark Twain Part I Ken Burns from LYNN MADSEN'S VIDEOS on Vimeo.

Mark Twain Part II Ken Burns from LYNN MADSEN'S VIDEOS on Vimeo.

The only piece by Mark Twain that I can recall reading after completing high school graduation requirements is "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," evidently the last story published by Twain during his life (in 1909).

Just as far as your eye could reach, there was swarms of clerks, running and bustling around, tricking out thousands of Yanks and Mexicans and English and Arabs, and all sorts of people in their new outfits; and when they gave me my kit and I put on my halo and took a look in the glass, I could have jumped over a house for joy, I was so happy. “Now this is something like!” says I. “Now,” says I, “I’m all right—show me a cloud.”

The late Bob Youngblood may or may not have had an acerbic comment to make about this revelation, but I'll press on and further confide that my attitude toward Twain has tended to align with Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's novel, "A Confederacy of Dunces."

“It smells terrible in here.'

Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”

Likewise, until two weeks ago I hadn't viewed Ken Burns' documentary film about the life and work of Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens; having done so, I found myself deeply and surprisingly moved.

Samuel Clemens was a country boy who yearned to be a city slicker, and largely succeeded in becoming one, but couldn't completely evade his origins.

It's an apt metaphor for America, and maybe even me.

Clemens created a fictional mirror image of himself called Mark Twain, a name borrowed from steamboat jargon for a navigable depth of the river. Predictably, the man and his role eventually merged and became inseparable. We see it all the time now in this hyperbolic media age, but Clemens knew all along.

The creative process is endlessly fascinating, whether pertaining to a writer like Clemens or Burns as a filmmaker. Both display immediately recognizable stylistic templates, and both have been known to bend the truth a bit in pursuit of art. My guess is that Burns would be troubled by articles like this one, but Mark Twain the master storyteller far less so.

Mistakes and Misrepresentations in Ken Burns' film MARK TWAIN

PBS Broadcast - January 14 and 15, 2002

The following is a list of mistakes and misrepresentations in the documentary MARK TWAIN by Ken Burns. In many cases, accuracy has been sacrificed to artistic license. Other errors were made at a point in the production when corrections were impossible to make.

"Ideology as History": critiquing Burns and Novick’s The Vietnam War documentary.

I'm suddenly struck by the number of times we walked into a bar or restaurant in Belgium and Holland, only to find not even one functional television. Heavenly.

While we were gone, the documentary event of the season debuted.

Vietnam: 'The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick."

I'm struck by this observation in The Guardian's article: "Two thirds of Americans who served in Vietnam are no longer alive ... while the majority of Vietnamese people were born after the war."

It's why history matters.

Even before pre-truth became post-truth, the tricky part has always been getting the history right, and that's why people like Howard Zinn matter.

Learn about Howard Zinn and “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire.”

Howard Zinn died in 2010. A few years ago, when I tried listing the most influential books in my life, Zinn's A People's History of the United States was not among them, and this was an unfortunate omission, to be rectified in a future update.

Now more than ever, you need to know these things.

It's about sifting though the evidence and following it to a conclusion, not cherry-picking the parts that support pre-existing beliefs -- and in the case of the new series about the Vietnam War ...

Ideology as History: a Critical Commentary on Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War”, by Chuck O'Conell (CounterPunch)

After watching Episodes One and Two of the Burns and Novick Vietnam War series, I am reminded of the old adage asserting a valuable point for students of history: the class that controls the means of material production controls also the means of mental production. Listening to the narrator scroll through the list of financial sponsors cautioned me to lower my expectations that the series would break away from the predictable liberal narrative that has been dominant in discussions about the Vietnam War.

What is that liberal narrative? It is a bundle of intertwined claims: Vietnamese opposition to the French and then the Americans was motivated by a nationalist desire for independence, the Saigon government of the South was a legitimate government, the rebellion of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam against the U.S. supported Saigon regime was directed by the communist Hanoi government of the north, the military conflict in Vietnam was thus a civil war, and U.S. military involvement in support of the South was the result of a series of mistakes by American political leaders. It’s a narrative that has a certain plausibility not least because it has been repeated over and over for fifty years.

A more comprehensive scholarly reading of history produces a more accurate narrative: First, without discounting the significance of nationalism in Vietnamese society, a more important factor in the war was the goal of land reform offered by the communists to the peasants who comprised the majority of the population. The military struggle was in large part a social revolution against the landlord class and its foreign backers. Second, the Saigon regime that emerged after the failed French war of re-conquest was a U.S. creation financed and managed by the Americans who built its military and prodded it into fighting against the Vietnamese revolutionary forces. When an army such as the South Vietnamese Army is funded and trained by a foreign power to maintain the foreigner’s domination of that same country, that army is not fighting a civil war – it is fighting a war of counterinsurgency and is essentially an army of collaborators. Third, the National Liberation Front was an autonomous Southern political entity that emerged from the failure of the Hanoi government to press a fight against the southern regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dominated by communists it was in liaison with Hanoi as the North gradually gave greater assistance to the rebels’ efforts. Fourth, the U.S. involvement was not the result of a series of mistakes but was the result of a series of deceptions and provocations made by every U.S. administration running from Harry Truman all the way to Richard Nixon on the basis of the perceived political-economic imperatives of advanced capitalism in Southeast Asia. Let me amplify these points ...

Vietnam: 'The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick."

I've always been a documentary freak. I remember the impact of Vietnam: A Television History when the documentary series debuted in 1983. My VCR was set religiously, and friends of like mind interrupted the usual prowling and partying to join me for viewings.

TV: 13-PART HISTORY OF VIETNAM WAR ON PBS, by John Corry (NYT; 4 Oct 1983)

 ... In a curious way, the documentary also suggests that American hawks and doves were right and wrong in equal measure. The hawks were right in saying that only the most massive firepower, constantly applied, could win the war; even so, they underestimated Vietnamese tenacity, and they were wrong about monolithic Communism. In Southeast Asia, it was splintered.

The doves, meanwhile, were right about withdrawing from Vietnam. In the absence of an all-out war, there was no hope of victory, anyway. The doves, however, were wrong about Communist intentions and Communist morality.

I'm struck by this observation in The Guardian's article: "Two thirds of Americans who served in Vietnam are no longer alive ... while the majority of Vietnamese people were born after the war."

It's why history matters.

Ken Burns returns to take on Vietnam – 'a war we have consciously ignored', by David Smith (The Guardian)

Burns’s new 10-part, 18-hour epic film covers the conflict from all sides, and hopes to ‘shape more courageous conversations about what took place’

 ... The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Burns is America’s premier documentary film-maker, renowned for his 1990 masterpiece on the civil war as well as series on jazz, baseball, the Roosevelts and the second world war. Ten years and millions of dollars in the making, covering the conflict from all sides, The Vietnam War could be the closest thing yet to a definitive account of what Burns believes is the most important event in American history in the second half of the 20th century.

The time for a conversation “about a war we have consciously ignored” has come, Burns, 63, told the National Press Club in Washington earlier this month. “We have said: ‘We don’t want to talk about it. We’re not gonna teach it, we think it’s about this, or my own personal politics at this moment has actually determined what I should say about Vietnam regardless of what I felt when it was taking place.’ We have this dissonance going on.

“We hope that the film will contribute in some way, shape or form to more courageous conversations about what took place, because let us also be very clear that the divisions that we face today, the lack of civil discourse, the inability to talk with each other but only at each other, had their seeds planted in the Vietnam war, so if we understand it then we also understand our present moment.”

Prohibition: “Thank God the resistance triumphed in the end.”