The War Prayer by Mark Twain

The theme of this reading is double entendre. The church congregation prays one thing, but they don't realize what they are actually praying to happen. This piece of writing wasn't published until after Twain's death, mostly due to pressure from his family to refrain from doing so because it could be sacrilegious. According to "Mark Twain: A Biography" by Albert Bigelow Paine, when Twain's publisher asked him if he wanted to publish it anyway he said, "No. I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead."

Twain wrote this before both World Wars and it was published in 1923, five years after the first World War ended. The Schlieffen Plan, written by Germany, had just been devised in 1905. This plan was created around the idea that war would be quick and "painless", in a manner of speaking. There seems to be a same way of thinking between the Germans and the congregation members of this story. They both see the good side of war - war is romanticized, in a sense.

Something I find interesting about this reading is that Twain brings in a messenger from God to speak truth to the congregation. And after all that, after everything he says, people think that he was a lunatic. I understand that this is a work of fiction, but honestly, how could they not see that there are two sides to every victory? Does that go back to what we were talking about in class today - that their enemies were de-humanized and so they deserved all the pain and suffering? I guess it was a different time, but surely people understood death by then.

Today I see this de-humanizing in the retail industry. Human trafficking is not just about sex...it's also about people being forced to work for almost free (if not absolutely free!) in poor facilities, while being treated like less than human. All this so that we can get a "good deal" at Walmart. I'm sure that's not the only business that allows for their goods to be manufactured by people who have been trafficked. So for every good deal that we find or "pray for" like the congregation in this reading did, there is another side of people who are being mistreated for us to get that deal.