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Bill Moyers interviews Mark Twain impersonator Hal Holbrook.

Some Highlights

VIDEO CLIP HOLBROOK (as Twain): You know when I talk about the decay, in the art of lying, I'm talking about the silent lie. It requires no art. You simply keep still and conceal the truth. For example it would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery and yet in those early days of the emancipation agitation in the North, those agitators got small help from anyone, argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that rain from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society. The clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion, the silent assertion that there wasn't anything going on in which humane and intelligent people ought to be interested. Well when whole nations of people conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies like that one in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling ones told by individuals? Why make them undesirable? Why not be honest and honorable and lie every chance we get? Why should we help the nation lie the whole day long and then object to telling one little, insignificant private lie in our own interest? Just for the refreshment of it and to take the rancid taste out of our mouth. No there is no art to this silent lying, it is timid and shabby. [END VIDEO CLIP] MOYERS: The silent lie.

VIDEO CLIP] HOLBROOK (as Twain): Man is the only animal that deals in the atrocity of war. He is the only one that for sordid wages goes forth in cold blood to exterminate his own kind. He has a motto for this, 'our country right or wrong'. Any man who fails to shout it is a traitor. Only the others are patriots. Say, who is the country? Is it the government? In the republic the government is merely a servant, a temporary one. Its function is to obey orders not originate them. Only when the republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it's wrong. Otherwise the nation has sold its honor for a phrase. [END VIDEO CLIP]

MOYERS: What is it about Mark Twain that frightens people, even as he makes us laugh? HOLBROOK: Because he is riding so sharply on the edge of truth. He is balancing right on the edge of truth. And we don't have truth delivered to us very often. Especially in this very commercialized world we live in. Where half-truths are commercialized into truth. And half-lies, which is the other side of half-truth, is commercialized into truth. We live with this, day and day, every day, every time we turn the TV set on. Every time we pass a billboard. And Mark Twain cuts right straight through that with a knife. And people recognize it. And it scares you a little bit, but there's something exhilarating about it and daring and funny.