Jesus Christ, Mark Twain and the Moral Revision of Steven L. Carter

What exactly would happen were the much idealized by Western Civilization, Jesus Christ, the Son of Man to storm into the New York Stock Exchange and re-create the assault on the New Testament's Temple money changers with another whipping and beating of contemporary speculators? There would naturally be another Crucifixion re-creation.

Fast forward to this moral revisionary excuse of Mark Twain's racism by the Yale Professor of Law. Stephen L. Carter in the 7/14/08; time Magazine. Every time the failings and shortcomings of accomplished human beings are explained either in diminishing posture as Mark Twain's racism or the exaggerations of those history revilies. Contemporary sensibilities and the human condition as a totality is defined fraudulently.

In a preparatory essay for the Obama Presidency. Stephen L. Carter on Mark Twain on the issue of race wrote:

"Twain's racial pitch was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were
called "Nigger Shows" in his youth..."

Carter goes on to pose this question:

Was Twain a racist?... If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of considered moral judgements of the present, we will find othing but error.

First of all the only error to be found is Stephen L. Carter's pathetic mental cowardice. The oppositionary root to American racism of Mark Twain's period is the contemporary reality of racist and racism being anathema. Carter's "pompous "wisdom" of the present," has nothing to do with historical racism of Mark Twain nor does excuse or mitigate it.

The human condition would be better served with dialectical facts which simply state: A Mark Twain could be a racist and schizophrenic-like, critically satirize it's hypocrisy.

If as Stephen L. Carter proposes that the specific backwardness of racism is a mere relative sensibility. Then religious fundamentalism of all stripes should be given no quarter and ridiculed as mere idealistic exercise devoid and divorced from the objectivity of Carter's "pompous wisdom".

by Apropos