Tonight the results of the 2018 U.S. midterm elections will come streaming in – first as a trickle, then as an hysterical gush of hot takes and fevered prognostications. I am pretty sure there are alerts coming in on every device in the house. By the time this is published, they will already have dictated the direction our fine nation will take for the next two years, and likely much, much longer. But I am paying no attention whatsoever at this singular moment.
I am instead sitting here in my favorite chair in my quiet house on a rocky ridge overlooking a New Jersey highway, reading something one of America’s greatest writers wrote in the 19th century. Even after my years as a reporter eating pizza and writing for deadlines extending way past midnight, the great democratic experiment is something I know will be there in the morning, waiting.
“Cannibalism in the Cars,” a short story by Mark Twain, can in some ways tell me much more about what’s going on than my Twitter feed. It’s the nihilist, cynical balm anyone could use after the farce of the last several years of American “discourse.” You see, it’s not that I’m so sage and wise to avoid the results this evening; I’m just so goddamned tired of it, I’m content to listen to such a timeless voice mock such a ridiculous thing as “government for the people and by the people” and all the high-spirited bullshit that it entails. I recommend it highly to you, too, no matter what outcome may be materializing out there beyond my window, whether there are fires on every street corner tomorrow, or not.
“Cannibalism,” in sum: a strange man aboard a train tells a tale to his fellow passengers. It takes place on yet another train, this one leaving St. Louis bound for Chicago in the winter of 1853. The train gets marooned on the track by an historic snow storm. After several days, the hungry and desperate men come to a conclusion: they must start eating each other to stay alive. Being good Americans, they decide on a democratic system involving nominations and ballots and majority rule. At one point, the strange old man relating the tale talks about the process:
“After breakfast we elected a man by the name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper. He was very good. I wrote his wife so afterward. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember Walker. He was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to - handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently… a perfect gentleman he was, and singularly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no question about it – old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture the reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will wait for another election.”
In the end, they are rescued, as relayed by the strange tale teller, who then excuses himself to get off at the next stop. In the end, another listener to the tale simply assures the rest that though the man had been a Congressman previously – and the tale was all fictional, and one told by a lunatic.
“I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal,” relates the narrator.
But whether he's insane or a truly democratic man-eater is ultimately unclear.
I gobbled it up, myself.
You see, the night of this historic election, I’d much rather ruminate on madness and cannibalism in Twain’s story. Because, compared with whatever those alerts portend, at least this shit’s entertaining.