Plus ça change...

... plus c'est la même chose.  I've mentioned in passing that I'm reading Mark Twain's Autobiography, albeit reading slowly... very slowly... almost to a point where "reading at it" would be more accurate.  It's not that the book isn't entertaining (it is), or that the prose is inaccessible (it's not), or any of the myriad reasons one has for not plowing through a book in a couple o' sittings.  I did put Twain aside in favor of Clancy a while back, but that was when I was in the weeds of the academic notes.  We've since moved to Twain proper and the reading is easy.  But I'm a lot slower than I used to be, in almost any life-category you'd care to mention.  It is what it is.

We digress.  The post title refers to this lil excerpt I ran across yesterday:

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one—the one we use—which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it.

Look at it in politics. Look at the candidates whom we loathe, one year, and are afraid to vote against the next; whom we cover with unimaginable filth, one year, and fall down on the public platform and worship, the next—and keep on doing it until the habitual shutting of our eyes to last year’s evidences brings us presently to a sincere and stupid belief in this year’s.

Look at the tyranny of party—at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty—a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes—and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master. If we would learn what the human race really is, at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

That bit o' wisdom was written at the turn of the 20th century... say around 1901, or thereabouts... in an unpublished article Twain wrote for The Atlantic, but published in its entirety in his memoirs.  There is a lot more in this vein and I could quote from the piece from now until the cows come home.  Twain was an Independent rather than a registered Republican or Democrat, and waxes eloquently about voting for the man rather than the party, claiming he never once voted a straight party ticket.  That's pretty good advice, no matter what era you live in.  But it's Twain's larger point about humanity's worst aspects being on display at election time that interests me.  I find it fascinating that the more things change, the more they remain the same.  It has been ever so.

The image comes from a generic Google image search.  I chose Twain with a cigar for obvious reasons, that being the only thing we have in common.