Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland.” With these words Mark Twain closed his pilgrimage to Palestine, and in them can be seen the complex attitude of nineteenth-century Americans toward the Orient. For many nineteenth-century Americans, Palestine was a dreamland, a region of the world to be visited through the Bible and travel literature. The intense spiritual connection felt between Americans and the Holy Land, the idea of Palestine, would lead them to the region first as missionaries and then as tourists. Yet, to Americans, such as Twain, coming to Palestine from the western American frontier, Palestine did not compare in beauty, size, or material progress to their homeland. This comparison reflects the influence of materialism on the new wave of middle-class American travelers of which Twain was a member. The

Consider this: what if the following comment from [Mark] Twain’s notebook appeared as a boxed quote in history textbooks? Patriotism “is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive ‘owners’ who each in turn, as ‘patriots,’ with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of ‘robbers’ who came to steal it and  did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in  their  turn.” What if teachers asked students to write essays agreeing or disagreeing with this idea in high school? Or what if the final exam required students to respond to a comment Twain made in the  North American Review  five years before his death—“the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the nation all the time, loyalty to the government when it deserves it”? Mark Twain’s Inconvenient Truths Related: Censoring Mark Twain’s ‘n-words’ is unacceptab