Mark Twain's Contemplation's on Murder

A Preface

            This one will not be as light-hearted as usual because the horrible things that people do to one another is a subject of which I am morbidly fascinated and completely repulsed. Please expect more questions and frustrations than usual, from me, in regards to this topic.

 

A difficult discussion is coming.

            I have written about Mark Twain’s travel writings before on this blog, and, in that previous look at Twain the traveler, he was staring at the Sphinx while experiencing a sublime moment as he pondered the ages observed by the behemoth. This post will look at his travels in the Pacific. More specifically, I’ll focus on an anecdote he told within the chapter on the Pacific in the book Mark Twain on Travel.

I wish the story was this pleasant.

            The anecdote is titled “A Christmas Pudding.” The brief story is about an unnamed squatter in Australia “whose station was surrounded by Blacks”(100). Gee, I wonder why. It could be because he was a settler in their native country. Sarcasm aside, the race relations between settlers and aboriginals in the “Land Down Under” was about as messy as race relations anywhere else where settlers and natives were involved. I think that’s part of the reason that Twain shares this story, and before I continue be assured that he is trying to make a point here.

            The surrounded squatter assumes, likely because of the already established territorial tensions, that the aborigines are hostile. So, does he establish a line of communication with them in an effort to find out and possibly smooth out the problems? Nope. He tells them its Christmas and makes them a pudding “sweetened with sugar and arsenic” (101), which they eat and die. Why was that necessary? A person assumes a threat and kills people just to be safe, and he uses Christmas, the supposed “most wonderful time of the year” (That song sung by everybody who’s ever had a music career in the history of recorded music), as a pretense to commit a massive act of premeditated murder. Why were people okay with this?

            Well, they weren't.  According to the story, this act got a lot of attention from people abhorred by the squatter’s actions. I think, Mark Twain wanted to know why. He wrote that one response was that the squatter’s name should be “handed down to the contempt of posterity” (101). He agreed that what the man did was awful but no more than what other “Whites” were doing and have done throughout history. And the question is one worth asking: Why did this guy receive such infamy when there were many others who were mercilessly slaughtering the aboriginal people on a daily basis without any notice at all? I’ll refine the question further by asking: Is straight-up murder and butchery preferable to subterfuge and pretense? Apparently, it was at the time, because Twain writes in the popular mindset of that time to drive his point home.

Totally acceptable.

            He says, using the accepted mindset, that the squatter’s “spirit was right, but his method was wrong” (101). This is the idea he is questioning with this section. The idea that riding up on horses and slaughtering natives is acceptable, but tricking those natives into ingesting poison is just wrong. He calls that mentality to attention and pokes at it further by saying, “I blame him for the indiscretion of introducing a novelty which was calculated to attract attention to our civilization”(101-102). This passage says that the most horrible thing the squatter did was not murdering people who had done nothing to him, but rather the fact that he did it in an unacceptable way. Because there are totally acceptable ways to murder innocent people. This section is difficult to read, for me at least, because I was so caught up in the horrible things he had written that I momentarily forgot that he was trying to make a point. Which he does at the very end of the section with this: “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages”(102). *Then he drops the mic*

Sorry, bur community always cheers me up.

            This section about the Christmas Pudding is tough to read, because he adopts the disturbing contemporary mindset, in order to point out just how absurd it is that many people at that time accepted the direct murdering of natives as common practice but cried foul at someone who did it indirectly. I may pursue this topic for the abstract assignment, due in a few weeks. I think there are many connection I could make with a critical text I’ve been reading called Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. I’ll likely post it too when I’ve written it, and if I can find the time and the energy I may pursue it to a full conference paper.