🏛️ Twain’s Gazette of the Absurd

The Architecture of Memory

💬 Dear Citizens Twain,

The world is absurd enough to make even Mark Twain blush. Every headline clangs like a cracked bell—equal parts comedy and tragedy—and yet, somehow, we keep moving forward.

I’m proud of you, America.
We showed them we’re watching.
Accountability doesn’t rest on one person; it’s built into the architecture of the whole system.

That’s what we explore together here—as Citizens Twain: not just personalities, but the blueprints of power.

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📚 A Republic Worth Studying

I’m working on a small-format series of booklets that subscribers will receive first. They’re meant to re-introduce young readers—and the rest of us—to the civic architecture of this country: the structural poetry of checks and balances, the beauty of ethics, and the artistry of good government.

We once taught those things.
Then the 1980s arrived, and our public intellect was quietly dismantled—no more civics, no more ethics, no more art. By the time they were finished, they didn’t even teach cursive.

When I was a middle-school girl, I couldn’t wait to reach high school so I could study Civics and Ethics. I came from a long line of civil-rights warriors, born in the segregated South where signs told me where I could sit, where I could go, and when I’d better be home.

A five-year-old girl couldn’t even take ballet lessons in her own town.

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🎭 Excerpt from “Kimberly’s Room” (A One-Woman Play)

I remember vividly being five years old, watching ballerinas on television. Every little girl wants to be one. I told my mother.

She must have known what was coming. She searched for a teacher who would take us, but in that little southern town there were none—not at any reasonable distance. My mother didn’t drive, yet she tried. Our family had found piano teachers thirty miles away in Monroe, Louisiana, where Cousin Georgia Mae drove me every Saturday morning. But there were no Black ballet schools nearby. Finally, Mama said, “There are no Black ballet schools where you can go, my darling.”

I was hurt and didn’t understand. “I wish I was white!” I cried. It must have cut her to the quick.

That night she pulled out our family’s history books—tales of great-great-Grandma founding a country school for Black children at the turn of the century, and great-great-Grandpa Jasper riding a horse from town to town teaching, at the peril of his life. “We are the lucky ones,” she said. “We fought Jim Crow and survived without lynching. We don’t need to be verified by them. We don’t need to be justified by their gaze. We must gaze at ourselves and love ourselves.”

Then she bought my sister and me little ballerina costumes—mine blue, hers yellow—and we danced around the house in our tights and ballerina slippers

pretending to be in Swan Lake. We knew exactly who we were. The tragedy wasn’t ours; it was theirs—for missing our brilliance.

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🪶 Civic Epilogue

That’s what the coming Twainian Civics Series is about: remembering what was built, who built it, and why it’s worth restoring.
Because architecture—of cities, of nations, of the soul—can be rebuilt once people remember the plan.

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🧭 Twain’s Gazette of the Absurd
“Where the blueprint still matters.”

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