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Huckleberry Finn of the 21st century

Forrest Cookson
I want to introduce readers to the Huckleberry Finn of the 21st century. Most readers of this column will have read all or pans of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the story of a remarkable-young man in revolt against his society. Huck is a truly free person managing to escape such matters as going to bed when parents dictate, smoking if he wants, going any where at any time that crosses his mind, and avoiding school.
He is free to explore as he wishes; he makes friends without consideration of social status, race or wealth. To wander the wilderness was the dream of most American boys. Huck Finn is a symbol of how we would like to live: Not dependent on following a lot of rules, refusing to fill in a lot of forms, pretending to value things that are absurd, unwilling to honour fools posing as our leaders, and not conforming to the whims of society.
Middle class America and Bangladesh are full of people for whom pride and status are the most important values that determine their behaviour: Grasping for status and admiration, jewels and cars, houses too large to live in, servants to take care of their every
whim. Huck saw through such pretensions and simply laughed at such folly.
But at the same time he is the essential representative of a sarcastic interpretation of freedom: Do not cooperate, do not follow the rules, and a modern society cannot work The path of Huck's freedom may be open to a few but it cannot be a general rule or no human organisation would function. Nevertheless, this is a kind of freedom that we all crave but few can achieve.
I introduce a fictional hero Jack Reacher, hero of a series of books by Lee Child. The latest of these, Nothing to Lose, Bantam Press (2008], is particularly relevant at managing to poke the pretensions of modern conservative political thinkers in unexpected places. I suggest Jack Reacher is the new Huckleberry Finn, although Lee Child is neither as good nor as humorous a writer as MarkfXvain.
Although these books are detective type novels meant to entertain and amuse, there is something more serious here. Reacher is the ideal American patriot: A soldier who graduated from West Point but who after years of service became disgusted with the self-serving behaviour of senior military officers and set out to live a different life.
He effectively resigned from society. He had a modest pension sufficient to meet his needs. He has no home, just wanders about; he owns only the cloths that he has on his back and when they are dirty
he throws them away and buys new ones. He owns nothing -- no property, no car, no computers, no furniture, no stocks, no bonds, no anything!
He has no family: a brother who was a perfect member of a modern orderly society is killed in one of the earlier books; his hother dies in another but she has been living in France and he has had little contact with her. At once he is cut off and free of all of the paper work of modern life. An ATM card and a passport arc all that he has to define himselfon paper.
In Nothing to Lose Lee Child takes up three unusual themes related to the Iraq war and to the Christian religious conservatives. The first theme deals with the handling of depleted uranium. This is a heavy metal left over from extracting plutonium from rods in a nuclear reactor; it is used for anti- tank shells and a great deal of this ammunition was used in Iraq. It is very weakly radioactive. What happened to all of this depleted uranium?
The second theme deals with deserters. In any war where citizens go to war there are some who wish to run away. In Vietnam this arose from the compulsory participation in the war; those who did not want to fight deserted. In Iraq it arises from soldiers who volunteered to join the army but were not prepared to go through repeated tours of fighting in Iraq. No one knows how much of such desertion there is; I am sure this is a deep secret.
The third deals with those Christian religious fanatics who believe the world is headed for the "end times." This will feature a major war followed by the reappearance of Jesus Christ who will then sort out the good from the bad. The
triggering of such a war may well bring judgment day closer!
The combination of the evil consequences of the Iraq war along with Christian fundamentalists trying to accelerate God's program for man provide plenty of excitement and mystery as Jack Reacher struggles to do the right thing while fending off all who wish him harm.
Huck Finn was a fugitive from the American social system. But he was also innocent of the crimes of slavery and met the test of seeing everyone for what they were male or female, black or white. Huck solved problems by clever manipulation of those around him. He was a master of the indirect. Reacher is modern America.
In the earlier books Reacher uses rather clever methods of deduction to reach conclusions. Exaggerated versions of Sherlock Holmes these are amusing enough. But this deductive ability is downplayed in this latest book Now Reacher has come to terms with modern America as, he turns to violence; although a man who sees things as they are, he does not turn to the subtle to deal with his problems but rather he favors violence.
He personifies the America of the past eight years; his approach is to batter his way through problems. Lee Child is an Englishman who sees America very clearly. Jack Reacher -- this 21st century Huckleberry Finn stands as the new hero that every American male aspires to become, a throw back to a time before paper work, ID cards, tax returns, mortgage payments, degrees from university, etc; a man who take matters into his own hands and uses violence to overcome evil.
Forest Cookson Is an economist