Innocents Abroad

"In 1867, Mark Twain accompanied a group of American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. As part of this excursion, they also enter Russia and various places in and around continental Europe. In this book, he sends them up marvellously – their pretensions, their messianic belief that they were better than anyone else in the world and their inability to understand what was going on around them. It’s a wonderfully wry look at a certain type of American who is striding the world, probably at just about the stage where America was about to take over the world. Well, since then far more Americans have been abroad and America has fought two world wars. When Americans leave home now, they don’t really leave home any more. They come to places that have been taken over by the American world economy and they will see the same things abroad that they will see at home: McDonald’s, Starbucks, chain clothing stores etc. All of these things will be very familiar to them, whereas in 1867 they were coming to strange lands without outlets to American culture. Mark Twain wasn’t very impressed by anything, actually. He was a very funny character. In Baalbek he noted that every jackass from Missouri to New York had carved their initials into the temple of Jupiter. He was taken to the court of the Czar where he was singularly unimpressed by the figure of the Czar, and Lake Galilee, which he compared to Lake Tahoe, comes out as nothing much more than a mud puddle. And the kings of Israel, he realises, were just a bunch of local village headmen. Luckily he didn’t trivialise quite to that degree about anything. He didn’t tend to moralise; in fact, he didn’t like moralising."