Morphology of Manifest Destiny: The Justified Violence of John O'Sullivan, Hank Morgan, and George W. Bush

Abstract

The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. ~~~George W. Bush It has been noted that Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court "portrays [two] supposed Utopias~~~the idyllic Camelot and the modern industrialized vision of the Yankee~~~as undesireable, unpleasant, and indeed truly dystopian" (Shanley and Stillman 274). The novel is, in fact, a narrative account of the violence that ensues when two absolutist world views come into conflict. The two absolute worlds in the book~~~represented by Camelot, on the one hand, and by Hank Morgan, on the other~~~form the basis for Twain's critique of self-assured sociopolitical visions in general and of the apparently inevitable violence perpetrated in the interest of that which is "natural" and that which is "good." The tension between the Catholic monarchy of Camelot and Hank Morgan's Protestant, New England progressivism adds an interesting dimen- sion to the Manichean structure identifiable in Twain's fiction. Notably, both sides of the dialectic are essentially the same. Although the medieval nobility's appeal to absolute authority is founded on a Divine Right, while Hank Morgan's appeal to authority is founded on the right of scientific superiority (itself a divine absolution of sorts), both appeals are justified on the basis of naturalizing the dominion of the appellant. The final result, at any rate, is that the justified powers (in Hank's case, in spite of to natural causes and democratic sentiment) arrogate to themselves the authority to enact unthinkable violence on those "others" relegated to inferiority. As David Sewell has insightfully commented, " [Democratic Boss and aristocratic King [come to be] allied against peasants" (148). In the contest of monological Utopian visions, it is the people, those pawns in the conflict between authoritarianisms, who ultimately lose.