“I don’t believe in capital punishment. But I’d travel anywhere to see Kissinger hanged.”

– Sydney Schanberg

Sydney Schanberg, you’ll recall, is the Pulitzer-winning reporter whose experiences in Cambodia, covering the bombing of the country and the rise of the Khmer Rouge for the New York Times, were turned into the film The Killing Fields.

If you’re unsure why Kissinger deserves the gallows, read “The Case Against Henry Kissinger” [part 1, part 2] by Christopher Hitchens, or the book based on these articles, The Trial of Henry Kissinger [excerpts here]. Or at least watch The Trials of Henry Kissinger [Google video].

Schanberg’s quote was recently revealed in All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page [book site] by Jerelle Kraus, who was art director of the op-ed page for 13 years. She briefly mentions that Schanberg gave his thoughts on Kissinger during a lunch at Sardi’s. (Besides the op-ed page’s greatest hits and lots of juicy behind-the-scenes info, this heavily illustrated book includes artwork that was rejected by or altered at the insistence of the Times‘ editors.)

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin website contains digitized, searchable versions of all of Franklin’s 30,000 extant papers - books, pamphlets, scientific papers, Poor Richard’s Almanacks, correspondence, etc.  This collection will occupy 47 printed volumes when Yale’s book series is completed. (Via Boing Boing, where the website was briefly mentioned in this post by guest-blogger Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air.)

The New Yorker has a long look at a new book about the Ludlow massacre, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.

In the spring of 1914, members of the Colorado National Guard machine-gunned and set fire to tents in Ludlow, Colorado, where striking miners were living with their families. Five miners, two miners’ wives, and twelve children died, most of them by suffocation while hiding in a cellar under a burning tent. The miners fought back, and, all told, more than seventy-five people were killed in the course of the dispute, roughly as many on the mine owners’ side as on the strikers’. In his new book, “Killing for Coal” (Harvard; $29.95), Thomas G. Andrews calls it the deadliest labor struggle in American history.

The newly published In the Shadow of the Master reprints a bunch of Poe’s best works accompanied by appreciative essays by 20 mystery and horror writers. In “The Genius of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” Stephen King writes:

When I do public appearances, I’m often - no, always - asked what scares me. The answer is almost everything, from express elevators in very tall buildings to the idea of a zealot loose with a suitcase nuke in one of the great cities of the world. But if the question is refined to “What works of fiction have scared you?” two always leap immediately to mind: Lord of the Flies by William Golding and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.

ABE has posted a gallery of books (all available for purchase, natch) bound in unusual materials, including rubber, burlap, sharkskin, silk,  gold, wood, and brass. Below, python skin binding on Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny by Oliver W. Holmes.

Twain’s irreverent, posthumously published Letters From the Earth is pretty well-known, and he gets in some passing shots at religion here and there in his canon, like early on in Huck, but his most uncompromising attack on religion doesn’t get much attention and is amazingly out of print.

I wrote about this in my anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, specifically in the further-reading guide, “Good Books.” Here ’tis:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Homespun Blasphemy

“Reflections on Religion” by Mark Twain, from The Outrageous Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider (New York: Doubleday, 1987).

America’s literary titan - Mark Twain (né, Samuel Clemens) - was largely unafraid to reveal and ridicule hypocrisy and stupidity with his legendary razor wit. Religion often felt the blade, but sometimes the results were so bloody that Clemens and his executors wouldn’t let the results be seen. Letters From the Earth - in which Satan’s commentary on humanity’s religious customs is the vehicle for irreverent but basically good-natured criticism - wasn’t published until 1962, fifty-two years after Clemens’ death. It’s been in print ever since.

The five short chapters on religion from his autobiography haven’t fared as well. Like Letters, the publication of these twenty-one pages - dictated in June 1906 - was blocked for decades. On the manuscript, Clemens wrote that they weren’t to be published until 2406, five centuries hence. In a letter to a friend, Clemens mentioned that he didn’t want them published until he’d been in the grave for 100 years. His executors complied for a long time, but his daughter Clara relented in 1960, and the five chapters were finally revealed to the world in the Hudson Review in 1963. Twenty-four more years would pass before they were published again, this time in The Outrageous Mark Twain, a collection containing other writings on religion, masturbation, and the legendary “1601,” a mock-Elizabethan story about a farting contest. Sadly, the anthology didn’t stay available for long, so the chapters are no longer in print. (Portions are included as an appendix in the slightly more recent The Bible According to Mark Twain (University of Georgia Press, 1995). Unlike most of Clemens’ work, the chapters are still under copyright. I approached the law firm handling his estate about reprinting them, but the cost was way beyond our means.)

Unlike Letters From the Earth, these chapters - collectively titled “Reflections on Religion” - are harsh. No gentle mocking here; Clemens took off the gloves and opened a can of whup-ass. Since these are the raw transcriptions of what he dictated to his secretary, they’re not as polished or organized as they would’ve been had Clemens prepared them for publication. Still, it’s a joy to see one of America’s most beloved writers take Christianity behind the woodshed.

He jumps right into the thick of things by attacking none other than God, accurately describing the despicable nature of the Old Testament’s supreme being, who is constantly murdering, mutilating, and otherwise viciously abusing humans. “It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.” He rails against the endless suffering that God continues to cause, saying that “we would detest and denounce any earthly father who should inflict upon his child a thousandth part of the pains and miseries and cruelties which God deals out to his children every day…” But as horrible as the Old Testament God is, Clemens writes, at least he’s consistent and forthright, whereas Jesus spoke of mercy and love yet also threatened people with eternal punishment and damnation. He healed a few people, fed a few people, yet refused to use his God-powers to heal and feed everybody.

The next chapter mainly concerns the fact that the Bible, as well as other sacred literature, plagiarizes earlier holy books and mythologies without admitting it. “Each in turn confiscates decayed old stage-properties from the others and with naïve confidence puts them forth as fresh new inspirations from on high.” Clemens mentions the ubiquitous flood stories but concentrates on gods born of virgins.

In chapter three, the old man rails against the bloody tactics of Russia, Britain, and Belgium, all having Christian governments at the time. After tangentially stating that “the Bible defiles all Protestant children,” Clemens looks into his crystal ball. He sees Christianity eventually going the way of all religions - fading away and being replaced by “another God and a stupider religion.”

Setting his sights once again on God in the following chapter, Clemens wonders how a supreme being can inflict such endless misery on all of his creatures. He scoffs at the notion of prayer, which he likens to begging. The originality of Clemens’ inquiries goes up a notch when he dismantles the excuses that preachers make for the suffering God puts us through - namely, that it helps us, elevates us, purifies us, and makes us worthy of heaven. If that’s so, he wonders, what about the suffering of animals, who experience violence, disease, hunger, and agonizing deaths in ways similar to, and often worse than, humans? No Bible-banger ever claims that “alligators [and] tigers” are being tested and strengthened so that they can earn a heavenly reward. And if God brutalizing his children is so wonderful, why don’t preachers recommend that parents do the same horrible things to their own children? Sure, they often say you shouldn’t spare the rod, but why not torture and starve your kids, purposely give them diseases, kill everyone they love, since these things build so much spiritual character?

Clemens uses his final chapter to ridicule the idea of heaven. “If King Leopold II, the Butcher, should proclaim that out of each hundred innocent and unoffending Congo Negroes he is going to save one from humiliation, starvation and assassination, and fetch that one home to Belgium to live with him in his palace and feed at his table, how many people would believe it?” Finally, turning his baleful gaze to the human race, Clemens unexpectedly softens:

I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it - it is like hitting a child. Man is not to blame for what he is…. He is flung head over heels into this world without ever a chance to decline, and straightaway he conceives and accepts the notion that he is in some mysterious way under obligations to the unknown Power that inflicted this outrage upon him…

Edward Gorey - the illustrator and writer whose macabre, darkly humorous Edwardian-Gothic style is immediately recognizable, even if his name isn’t - wrote over a hundred small books, the best-known probably being The Gashlycrumb Tinies (an ABC book in which 26 children meet gruesome ends. A digital bootleg us here).

A lot of the late Gorey’s work has been reprinted over the years, but his etiquette-book parody The Recently Deflowered Girl (1965) isn’t one of them (and it doesn’t seem likely to be). Copies go for around $100 on the antiquarian market. Luckily for us, someone at LiveJournal scanned the entire thing, but it was pulled, whether for drawing too much traffic or for copyright violation, we don’t know.

Now it’s mirrored at the “Accordian Guy’s” blog here.

Thomas Fleming, author of The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I and 40+ other books, has a review of The Question of MacArthur’s Reputation.

In an astonishing analysis of these three violent, chaotic October days, Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history emeritus at Indiana University, concludes that Brigadier General MacArthur’s heroism is fiction. In the savage fighting that eventually carried the Cote de Chatillon,  MacArthur never left his command post, three miles behind the front lines. Two other officers,  largely unrecognized to this day, achieved the victory by ignoring General MacArthur’s murderous demand for a frontal assault and finding a way to attack the hill on a relatively unfortfied flank. General MacArthur did not deserve to be nominated for anything, much less the Congressional Medal of Honor. It is probably significant that the nomination was rejected. MacArthur filed a protest, and the decoration was reduced to the Distinguished Service Cross, the next highest level of honors for bravery.

The story gets worse.