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Brain function check. The Instituto Nacional music teacher said the kids were playing something from El Nuevo Mundo, and I recognized the piece. Something out of From The New World.

But who composed that? Was it Holst? No, let's not confuse this with The Planets. Aaron Copeland? No, he was the father of American classical music, Leonard Bernstein's mentor and many other things, but this sort of grandeur wasn't his style.

Ah, the Bohemian --- not necessarily a wild libertine, but someone from Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic --- Antonín Dvořák, who wrote his Symphony Number 9 while directing a conservatory in New York in the 1890s. I had to look that up. It's what you get from having been exposed to a lot of classical music as a kid but never having taken a music appreciation course, let along having learned how to play an instrument or read music.

That's one way to limber up the mind for a lecture on the towering giant of American literature, the first author of importance to write in the American vernacular.

The audience was mostly students, teachers and the principal from the Instituto Nacional, the elite flagship of Panamanian public high schools. There were also a Panamanian writer, this journalist, some professors from the University of Panama, a Supreme Court magistrate, a delegation of librarians and a mother with her young son present.

(Yes, I know. Gringos are fond of American football analogies and to resort to one, in a very serious game that was no game at all, back in 1964, the Instituto Nacional kids ran the Balboa High and the Canal Zone itself off the field, even if not many people quite realized it at the time. Because of that, and because of occasional inconveniences to motorists since then, there are many who don't think of it that way, but these are the smart kids, those most likely to eclipse the rich kids from the elite private schools. They don't let dolts into the Instituto Nacional.)

The featured speaker was Thomas Mesa, the embassy's public affairs officer and the venue was what has been popularly known as the Amador-Washington Library for many years but is now the Amador-Washington Information Resources Center, upstairs in its Eusebio A. Morales, in the large meeting hall known as the Centro Estamos Unidos.

(The library, which is across the street from the legislature, has many useful things but would do so much better at presenting the best of Americana if a lot of members of the local American community would donate a few good books to it.)

The subject was a man who passed through here back in 1866, one Samuel Clemens, and wrote about it for a Chicago newspaper. Better known by his pen name Mark Twain, his book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, didn't get into the travel writings, although it did touch on the man's travels.

Mesa gave a much better lecture on Twain than I ever got in the US schools. William Faulkner may have dubbed Twain the Father of American Literature and many US writers and academics may agree, but for political reasons coming from various points on the authoritarian spectrum, Twain's works have been the targets of censorship and exclusion. To give his worthy lecture, Mesa urged the students to study a writer in his or her historical context, and history in part by the literature of the period.

Mark Twain, Mesa explained, grew up in a slave state, Missouri, one of the border states that did not secede in the Civil War. Slavery and race relations, he pointed out, were central themes in Huckleberry Finn, which on its surface was a humorous adventure story aboard a raft on the Mississippi River. Mesa addressed head-on --- albeit in Spanish where the taboo doesn't exist as such --- the controversy over Huck's rafting partner Nigger Jim, explaining that the "n-word" may be socially taboo now, but it was part of the vernacular then and in the context of the story one will find Jim to be the only adult character with a sense of decency.

The key to understanding Twain, Mesa said, is to look beneath interesting stories like The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to see the profound social, economic and religious commentaries at their core.

The importance of the Mississippi River to the economy of the United States and to Panama's commerce were touched upon as Mesa explained how the great river system in the US midsection informed the writings of Twain, who was a river pilot before he began to write for a living.

(Requested show of hands indicated that this batch of Instituto Nacional kids are neither the children of Panama Canal pilots nor possessed of any ambition to become pilots, even though these may be among the best paid professionals who make honest livings in this country.)

Mesa noted that Mark Twain joined the great migration to California, and the importance of that state's Gold Rush to Panama.

So, is a US State Department guy going to talk about Mark Twain without getting into his views on US foreign policy? That's not possible in front of a group from the Instituto Nacional, and some of the Panamanian adults in the crowd emphasized the point. Mesa noted Twain's strong opposition to the Spanish-American War, even if he didn't do a reading from the posthumously published The War Prayer:


In the discussion period that followed Mesa's presentation, Panamanian writer David Robinson talked about Mark Twain, slavery, the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan and American race relations generally. Racism was something that Twain "never, ever defended," Robinson said, noting that the US heritage of slavery is not over and has made itself felt in Panama. "The Gold Roll and the Silver Roll --- this is the history of the Confederacy" as well as of Panama, he said.

After the comments of teachers and professors, and more questions, answers and contests, the band played again and it was snacktime --- time for this overweight reporter to go.

So was it cultural imperialism? Actually, some day this event may bear fruit in a new batch of smarter Panamanian radicals, who may argue against this or that policy of the United States with a much richer understanding of what US society is and has been. Americans who deplore Mark Twain and want to keep out of US public schools may then mutter about State Department liberals, while a better educated generation of Panamanian radicals may avoid torching the Amador-Washington Library, as was done much to the shame of the Panamanian left back in the riots of 1964.