We need Twain, Holbrook, somebody

Actor's Hartford show 10 years ago warned us

I certainly don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful to one of my literary heroes. It might be asking too much to bring back Mark Twain from the grave. The great author passed away on April 21, 1910, some 115 years and a day or two ago in Redding, Connecticut and we ain’t had anyone worth that level of salt to take his place.

Actor Hal Holbrook, who spent a major part of his 95 years impersonating Mr. Clemens, slipped into the great beyond in January of 2021, just four years ago. And he knew Twain better than just about any modern soul, though we’ll have to see what Ron Chernow turns out next month. Could modern science, if they can bring back some extinct sort of wolf, bring back somebody who might actually help us?

If you don’t think our country is in a confounded, upside-down, who-in-the-name-of-St. Peter - is running things at 1600 Pennsylvania, well, you probably think climate change is a hoax, Cher’s never had plastic surgery and if you’re lucky, you might get included in a Pete Hegseth group chat, too. I feel left out and maybe you do, too.

On the one hand, I am a bit surprised that the excuse-makers in the Cabinet haven’t come up with the Larry Bird approach to national defense. You know, Bird would come out of the Celtics’ huddle and tell his opponent — “I’m going to get the ball, take two dribbles into the corner and shoot it over your head to win the game,” — then he’d go and do it. So what’s the big deal of giving away our military secrets? Let ‘em know what they’re in for, see if they can stop us.

Actor Hal Holbrook as Hartford’s own Mark Twain in a February 17, 2015 show.

The truth, though, is scary. The tariffs are on, the tariffs are off. We can’t give people due process because it’d take too much time. And who’s going to call them on this nonsense? Mark Twain would, that’s for sure. And Holbrook, digging through pages and pages and pages of Twain material, likely would, too.

I’m reminded of all this after re-watching Scott Teems’ 95-minute look at Holbrook’s late-in-life “Mark Twain Tonight” shows, particularly the one performed in Hartford. In “Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey,” we join Holbrook as he scans his careful notes from his previous Hartford shows in 2009, 2006 and 2000.

“I figure everybody’s dead by then, so it doesn’t matter,” he quips, examining the 2000 notes. “Election madness. That’s my new piece that I added this year. Once I started into patriotism tonight, the audience went as quiet as, frightened to death. (Trump was elected just a bit later) Once you start messing around with ideas, like patriotism, it scares the audience. They think ‘Oh, my. He might say something I don’t agree with. They get scared. But there’s one way to hold an audience’s attention is to scare them.”

Hmmm.

When Teems and Holbrook combined on this film, they had no idea what was going to happen at the ballot box. Or what lay ahead for our country. But the more Holbrook spoke Twain’s words to that Hartford audience, the more it sounded prophetic.

“I’m not lying to you,” Holbrook says, Twain-ish cigar in hand. “I differ from George Washington. I have a higher and grander standard of principle. George could not tell a lie. I can but I won’t.”

Well, I guess we don’t have to remind you readers of the 30,573 lies the Washington Post tabulated back in his first term when the Post was, you know, a real newspaper. There’s a record that’s bound to be broken in Term Two, don’t you think?

“If we want to know what the human race is really like,” Holbrook says on stage, beginning Twain’s “Election Madness,” “observe it at election time. That’s when the parade of half-truths goes marching by. It’s a monument to the Gospel that truth is stranger than fiction. The candidates rearrange the facts to suit themselves and keep the lies and half-truths spinning in the air while the gullible public cheers and stomps and shouts its approval the way they always do when a politician has just said something they don’t understand.

“We discount 90% of what the candidates say at election time and assign it to the softening of the brain because the contents of their skull could trade places with a pie and nobody’d be the worse off of it but the pie. There is not one brain among them superior to the rest and yet the sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance or diminish the know-it-all pronouncements (“I alone can fix it”) of a single ignoramus among them. They are the scions of an ancestral procession of ignoramuses, stretching back to the missing link. The one true fact that rises above this circus of mendacity and misrepresentation is that truth has no place in Washington.”

That was true when Twain first wrote it, somewhere before 1910 and it seems even more on the money now. For 63 consecutive years and 2,344 performances, Holbrook brought Twain’s magical words to us; a solid 90 minutes or so of the truth, of words we needed to hear, a voice from the grave echoing across stages all over the world, brought back to try to warn us, to try to alert us, to see if somewhere out there is a another voice who can come through for us, who can level with us, challenge us to be smarter, kinder, better. Where is it? Where is it now?

“Truth has no place in Washington.” Boy, you can say that again.