Mark Twain's War Prayer, a remarkable read

(this is a previous entry, on which the photo bore an ad from the software co. i used to convert the image to a jpeg file.  the incredible, the awesome, the goddess-incarnate, Muse herself, sent me instructions on how to crop an image.  who knew?  there is a tool lurking on the "File" dropdown menu that will let us do all kinds of things with image files.  so, i removed the banner and now i am reentering my previous post.) 

During the leadup to the war, the early days of the war, this piece made the lefty rounds of the internet.  you may have encountered it then.  in light of the continuing carnage in the middle east, i think it is time to read it again.  it's frightening how something written 100 years ago, during a war most Americans have never heard of (the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902), can be so uncannily accurate about contemporary attitudes.  I ran into this recently at Infinite Jest, and was hit in the solar plexus by it all over again.