I was watching the WETA special on Sam Clements last night, and one of the things that struck me about him was that he was the last great voice of America of whom I can think whose place in the canon is assured. In his time and place, no one more than Mark Twain embodied what it meant to be an American, quarrelsome and ornery and deeply concerned with the issues of freedom and honesty. It made me wonder if in America today we're too fragmented to all rally around a single popular icon like that ever again.
There's no harm that we're all from different countries. We've always been a land of immigrants and oddities, but we're so inundated with media, we have no common ground in which a voice like Mark Twain's could reach us all. So many thousands of books a year are published, it would be impossible to read them all.
Anyhow, that's my random thought for the day.
Posted by karen at January 15, 2002 12:00 AM
