H.L. Mencken

[Byron In Exile]

just in case you might have the impression that mencken was at his peak in trashing miss lillie,

Peak? That was just the man.

check out his writings on music. excellent critical sense, and since he made me want to re listen, here are some links:

Do you think Lillie would have been interested in your links?

Do you think that most people would be interested in Mencken's thoughts about the music of classical composers?

"Most people" are the sort that would pay thousands of dollars for a ticket to the Staples Center.

I agree, his critical sense, in literature and music both, was unparalleled.

But I wonder whether it matters anymore, in a world overwhelmed by Lillies.

 

[trysail]

The Declaration of Independence in American
by H. L. Mencken
From THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, THIRD EDITION, 1923, pp. 398-402. First printed as "Essay in American" in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 7, 1921.


WHEN things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain't got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time whichever way he likes, so long as he don't interfere with nobody else. That any government that don't give a man them rights ain't worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of government they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any government don't do this, then the people have got a right to give it the bum's rush and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don't mean having a revolution every day like them South American yellowbellies, or every time some jobholder goes to work and does something he ain't got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons, and any man that wasn't a anarchist or one of them I.W.W.'s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain't hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won't carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won't stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.

He wouldn't allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn't pay no attention to no kicks.

When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by himself, or they couldn't have it at all.

He made the Legislature meet at one-horse tank-towns, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things like he wanted.

He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down or bawled him out.

When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn't allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn't nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.

He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of these here kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn't let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.

He monkeyed with the courts, and didn't hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.

He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn't like, or by holding up their salaries, so that they had to knuckle down or not get no money.

He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they could or not.

Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.

He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn't wear no uniform.

He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:

Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain't got no use for, and don't want to see loafing around.

When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.

Interfering with business. Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.

When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.

Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.

In countries that border on us, he put in bum governments and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own government as bum as they was.

He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the government so that he could do whatever he pleased.

He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

Now he washes his hands of us and even goes to work and declares war on us, so we don't owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever bad he ain't got no more.

He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.

He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us.

He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn't want to.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms and ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and chdren, and don't care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain't got no class and ain't fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

When we complained to the English we didn't get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we give them plenty of warning that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn't have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we was, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we'd have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn't like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn't pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain't for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.

Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows: That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now a free country, and ought to be; that we have throwed out the English King and don't want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not taking no more English orders no more; and that, being as we are now a free country, we can do anything that free countries can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, etc. And we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it.

 

[Byron In Exile]

The Declaration of Independence in American
by H. L. Mencken
From THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE, THIRD EDITION, 1923, pp. 398-402. First printed as "Essay in American" in the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 7, 1921.

WHEN things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody.

Tremendous. I have the Fourth Edition, 1937, and that was where I first read it. It's been a number of years. It was great reading it again. I wonder if Lillie might have even got something out of it if it had been yowled at her by a so-called "news commentator."

 

[Pure]

note to byron

byron said Do you think that most people would be interested in Mencken's thoughts about the music of classical composers?

"Most people" are the sort that would pay thousands of dollars for a ticket to the Staples Center.

I agree, his critical sense, in literature and music both, was unparalleled.

But I wonder whether it matters anymore, in a world overwhelmed by Lillies.

Pure: don't all artists and writers--those to whom we attribute quality*-- always address 'the few'; the world has always been 'overwhelmed with Lillies'.

[[*i'm excepting the w r hearst's and jacqui susann's]]


Originally Posted by Pure
pure: //just in case you might have the impression that mencken was at his peak in trashing miss Lillie, //

Byron:Peak? That was just the man.

P: well, if there is 'quality,' and some who claim to know it, one wonders how much of their time should be spent bashing the miss Lillies. the real measure of quality in a person, said nietzsche, is to overcome resentment, esp. of the ordinary.

 

[Byron In Exile]

byron said Do you think that most people would be interested in Mencken's thoughts about the music of classical composers?

"Most people" are the sort that would pay thousands of dollars for a ticket to the Staples Center.

I agree, his critical sense, in literature and music both, was unparalleled.

But I wonder whether it matters anymore, in a world overwhelmed by Lillies.

Pure: don't all artists and writers--those to whom we attribute quality*-- always address 'the few'; the world has always been 'overwhelmed with Lillies'.

[[*i'm excepting the w r hearst's and jacqui susann's]]

Yes, they do.

Originally Posted by Pure
pure: //just in case you might have the impression that mencken was at his peak in trashing miss Lillie, //

Byron:Peak? That was just the man.

P: well, if there is 'quality,' and some who claim to know it, one wonders how much of their time should be spent bashing the miss Lillies. the real measure of quality in a person, said nietzsche, is to overcome resentment, esp. of the ordinary.

You would be surprised at how much of his diary relates trivia, insignificant events, health complaints, and so on. He was a writer. He wrote. What I have singled out as interesting is not representative of what he wrote in his diary. Get the book, if you care. It's a valuable insight into his life for those to whom such things matter.

 

[Byron In Exile]

"Under the Elms"

From the Trenton, N.J. Sunday Times, April 3, 1927
by H.L. Mencken

Early in 1927 several suicides were reported from college campuses, and the newspapers played them up in a melodramatic manner and tried to show that there was an epidemic. In this they were supported by various alarmed pedagogues, one of whom, Dr. John Martin Thomas, president of Rutgers, told the Times that the cause was "too much Mencken." The Times asked me to comment on this, and I sent in the following. Thomas, a Presbyterian pastor turned pedagogue, was president of Rutgers from 1925 to 1930. He resigned to enter the insurance business.


I see nothing mysterious about these suicides. The impulse to self-destruction is a natural accompaniment of the educational process. Every intelligent student, at some time or other during his college career, decides gloomily that it would be more sensible to die than to go on living. I was myself spared the intellectual humiliations of a college education, but during my late teens, with the enlightening gradually dawning within me, I more than once concluded that death was preferable to life. At that age the sense of humor is in a low state. Later on, by the mysterious working of God's providence, it usually recovers.

What keeps a reflective and skeptical man alive? In large part, I suspect, it is the sense of humor. But in addition there is curiousity. Human existence is always irrational and often painful, but in the last analysis it remains interesting. One wants to know what is going to happen tomorrow. Will the lady in the mauve frock be more amiable than she is today? Such questions keep human beings alive. If the future were known, every intelligent man would kill himself at once, and the Republic would be peopled wholly by morons. Perhaps we are really mowing toward that consummation now.

I hope no one will be upset and alarmed by the fact that various bishops, college presidents, Rotary lecturers and other such professional damned fools are breaking into print with high-falutin discussions of the alleged wave of student suicides. Such men, it must be manifest, seldom deal with realities. Their whole lives are devoted to inventing bugaboos, and then laying them. Like the news editors, they will tire of this bogus wave after a while, and go yelling after some other phantasm. Meanwhile, the world will go staggering on. Their notions are never to be taken seriously. Their one visible function on earth is to stand as living proofs that education is by no means synonymous with intelligence.

What I'd like to see, if it could be arranged, would be a wave of suicides among college presidents. I'd be delighted to supply the pistols, knives, ropes, poisons, and other necessary tools. Going further, I'd be delighted to load the pistols, hone the knives, and tie the hangman's knots. A college student, leaping uninvited into the arms of God, pleases only himself. But a college president, doing the same thing, would give keen and permanent joy to multitudes of persons. I drop the idea, and pass on.

 

[trysail]

... He was a writer. He wrote...

"As I sat listening to them I could not help pondering the occult satisfaction that arises from the free and perfect performance of a function, as when a cow gives milk or a dog chases a cat. If the stars were sentient they would get the same kick out of their enormous revolutions, otherwise so pointless."

H. L. Mencken
Heathen Days
"The Tone Art"

 

[trysail]

Mencken's Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I— but the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

 

[Pure]

the creed,

where it's not standard--and commendable-- 'freethought' stuff going back to Voltaire, Paine, etc, it's pretty vacuous, in general.

it is simply missing any reference to the issue of what's good in life, except "progress."

its vision of evil --outside religious delusions and persecutions--is apparently limited to mr comstock: some postal inspector telling you you can't get your dirty pics in the mail.

it's third premise is american boilerplate, and demonstrably false:

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

one need only look at behavior during police strikes and other periods of civil chaos and wars to see that the alleged 'evil' of government is less than any feasible alternative, the most famous being correctly labeled, 'the war of all against all.' Hobbes figured this out about 400 years back.

===
Mencken's Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I— but the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

 

[Verdad]

Thank you, Pure.

I'm but cursorily acquainted with Mencken, which makes it unwise of me to argue with Mencken scholars and fans. Still, the unbridled enthusiasm displayed thus far deserves some differing opinions. There is, after all, a reason I haven't read much of the guy.

Firstly, Mencken is not quite the timeless classic in the world's eyes he is in Americans'. The rest of the world, I suspect, feels about Mencken more or less the same as you'd feel about a Finnish gossip columnist. More of a local celebrity than a world-class author.

Secondly, from what I have read, I was able to derive only so much amusement and not that much insight from Mencken's continuous bile. His eye for ugly and absurd seems to me unfiltered by compassion, humility, or a sense of self-irony, the very qualities that make a difference between an endearing misanthrope and a pompous ass. His elitism, too, seems to me deprived of noblesse oblige, dwelling instead on the flaws of his alleged inferiors with an all too common glee. Much as I've tried to read between the lines, I was unable to detect with certainty a wink or a nudge that would tell me he understood there's, in fact, no existence as vacant as his description of Miss Lillie's—or perhaps that all are—nor that he counted himself, even for a minute, among those "professional damned fools."

As I've already said, however, my impression comes from a limited reading and isn't intended to offend the fans. I'd rather enjoy it if some of the initiates explained to the rest of us wherein lies Mencken's greatness.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

To understand Mencken you need to understand his Age, circa 1900-1950.

Inspite of the Depression, it was a time of wild optimism and enthusiasm about everything. It was a time of corruption and lawlessness at every level of society. It was a time of audacity. It was a time of unbridled arrogance. The Age spawned disasters that remain World Class:

TITANIC, COLONIALISM, COMMUNISM, WORLD WAR I, PROHIBITION, THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE 3RD REICH, WORLD WAR II & THE HOLOCAUST, ATOMIC BOMBS.

It was the Age of Mania, and Mencken resonated with his Age. There were other equally gifted commentators, Walter Lippman, A.J. Liebling, William Shirer, etc, but they were too sober, reserved, and laconic to be appealing. Mencken disturbed the peace, like everyone else.

 

[Pure]

note,

though i've read only a sampling of mencken, lots of which i enjoyed, it seems to me he'd more or less written himself out by about 1930. i'd speculate that 90%, or more, of his best is written before that.

so some of the best stuff is for the 'teens, before WWI [Harding times! Most mediocre and corrupt Pres until a few years ago], and then in the wild and wonderful 1920s when there was a degree of prosperity, and buncombe [bunkum] still abounded:

Examples-- Prohibition, a uniquely American folly (excepting Calvin in Geneva, Jesuits in 17th century Paraguay, etc.) ran from 1919-1933, so again, i bet Mencken had 'written himself out' on this irresistible topic by about 1930. the Scopes trial [anti-evolution, pro-Bible] was in the mid 1920s. likewise the Boston incident--HLM got himself arrested-- regarding the Comstock [postal censorship] laws.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

PURE

I agree. By 1930 it was pretty much over for Mencken. Plus Roosevelt was an impossible nut for Mencken to crack. America was goofy for FDR.

 

[trysail]

PURE

I agree. By 1930 it was pretty much over for Mencken. Plus Roosevelt was an impossible nut for Mencken to crack. America was goofy for FDR.

Uh..., er...., ummm:

Happy Days, 1940;
Newspaper Days, 1941;
Heathen Days, 1943.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Uh..., er...., ummm:

Happy Days, 1940;
Newspaper Days, 1941;
Heathen Days, 1943.

I know when they were written, and they were memoirs. No need to sell me on Mencken.

 

[trysail]

"......Pearl argued that any man who entertained a lady for so little as two minutes was guilty of a gross offense, not only against her person but also against the peace and dignity of the human race..... [Brodel] had simply never heard that copulation could be prolonged at will- at all events, far beyond the limits he had set..... On the heels of this grotesque discussion Pearl announced the founding of an organization to be called the Society for More and Better Fucking in the Home."

-H. L. Mencken
The Diary of H.L. Mencken
New York, 1989

 

[Pure]

some further mencken material; "last words"

interview, 1933. HLM sounding feisty, but tired.

http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/interview.html


here is an interesting piece, but weak:
"constitution for the new deal" alleges that Roosevelt grabbed dictatorial powers. Mencken satirically rewrites the constitution to say the Pres can do as he pleases with legislature, courts, and suspending the bill of rights.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/mencken1.html

i wonder where the menckenites were when GWB actually implemented large parts of this "Constitution" (indefinite imprisonment w/o charges, on order of the pres, for example.)
==

here's a fun read on the topic of democracy. it does, however, mostly avoid the question of alternatives. is there a defensible form of elitism, in politics? a way to ensure that 'the best' are ruling [with consent, of course] over 'the worst.' a deeper question, in most cases why would the putative ubermesch [the best type] *want* to be a ruler/president, etc. for every Julius Caesar and Napolean, there are a hundred Heliogabali, Ceaucescus, Pinochets, Kim Jong Ils.

Last Words
by: H. L. Mencken (1926)

I have alluded somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth.

It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth.

The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world - that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters - which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.


All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don't last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion - so beautifully Christian - that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula.

Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion.

Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don't come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.


I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled.

Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it.

I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day.

All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us—but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws - but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state - but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive.

In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?

 

[trysail]

i wonder where the menckenites were when GWB actually implemented large parts of this "Constitution" (indefinite imprisonment w/o charges, on order of the pres, for example.)

My guess is that most "menckenites" are likely profound isolationists.
"I think the United States should mind its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo and Mississippi."




You appear to have found Gibbons Burke's website:
http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/
http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/megaquotes.html


There's some good stuff there, particularly a link to Gore Vidal's response to the charges of bigotry in his foreward to Marion Elizabeth Rodgers' The Impossible H. L. Mencken: http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mencken.htm


Nobody said Mencken was perfect. None of us are.

 

[Pure]

good links!

thanks, try. yes i was there among other places.

 

[The_Trouvere]

I will say that of all the persons of letters that I admire, and that is a very broad field, I would rank George Orwell first, and H.L. Mencken second.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism."

- George Orwell, from "Why I Write"

 

[trysail]

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

- H. L. Mencken

 

[Monkey_Face]

Baltimore, April 15, 1945

All the saloons and major restaurants of Baltimore were closed last night as a mark of respect to the dead Roosevelt, whose body passed through the city at midnight. It was silly, but it gave a lot of Dogberries a chance to annoy their betters, and so it was ordained. As a result, the Saturday Night Club missed its usual post-music beer-party for the first time in forty years. All during Prohibition the club found accommodations in the homes of its members, but last night no member was prepared, so the usual programme had to be abandoned. August and I came home, had a couple of high-balls, and then went to bed.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself, and his opponents showed no sign of being able to flush out such a marvel. The best they could produce was such timorous compromisers as Willkie and Dewey, who were as impotent before Roosevelt as sheep before Behemoth. When the call was for a headlong attack they backed and filled. It thus became impossible, at the close of their campaigns, to distinguish them from mild New Dealers -- in other words, inferior Roosevelts. He was always a mile ahead of them, finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparallelled professor.

If Huey Long had lived, I wonder if he would have beaten Roosevelt.

 

[trysail]

"Puritanism-
The haunting fear that somewhere, someone is happy."

-H.L. Mencken

 

[trysail]

S. T. Joshi is a Mencken scholar. The following is a brief excerpt from his introduction to Mencken's America ( Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004) and can be found at: http://www.stjoshi.net/ , specifically at: http://www.stjoshi.net/intro_mencken.html



Mencken knew that the cornerstone of liberty was freedom of thought: "As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. Take away his right, and none other is worth a hoot; nor, indeed, can any other long exist."

Mencken himself exercised that "simple right" on every possible occasion, and never more vigorously and iconoclastically than in the realm of politics. It was not merely that he tirelessly exhibited the blatant and undisguised hypocrisy and duplicity of self-serving politicians, who he considered merely jobholders intent on keeping their positions from one election to the next with the least amount of effort; it was that he boldly challenged the most cherished shibboleths of American political thought. Specifically, he presented--briefly in some of the essays in this book and more exhaustively in the treatise Notes on Democracy (1926)--a systematic critique of the very principle of American democracy. Democracy, in his judgment, was flawed in its very conception; as he wrote in "What Ails the Republic" (1922), it "always resolves itself, in the end, into a scheme for enabling weak and inferior men to force their notions and desires, by mass action, upon strong and superior men. Its essence is this substitution of mere numbers for every other sort of superiority--this fundamental assumption that a group of idiots, if only its numbers be large enough, is wiser and more virtuous than any conceivable individual who is not an idiot." Mencken would have agreed emphatically with his erstwhile correspondent Ambrose Bierce, who only a few years earlier had written a "future history" in which the downfall of the American republic was memorably etched: "An inherent weakness in republic government was that it assumed the honesty and intelligence of the majority, 'the masses,' who were neither honest nor intelligent." And Mencken would have agreed with both facets of Bierce's condemnation: it was not merely that the American people were uneducated (and therefore unable to grasp the complexity of the political, economic, and social issues that they were called upon to adjudicate); it was that they were also fundamentally dishonest. The "liberty" they touted was in reality liberty for themselves and restraint for everyone else; the moral "evils" they condemned were those that they had neither the desire nor the capacity to commit themselves, or knew that they could commit without detection.

The whole issue of the viability of democracy as a political principle is well beyond the scope of this introduction, but some further thoughts on Mencken's attitudes may be in order. The basis of his critique of democracy was the very low opinion he held of both the abstract intelligence and the educability of the "plain people":

. . . I doubt that the art of thinking can be taught at all--at any rate, by school-teachers. It is not acquired, but congenital. Some persons are born with it. Their ideas flow in straight channels; they are capable of lucid reasoning; when they say anything it is instantly understandable, when they write anything it is clear and persuasive. They constitute, I should say, about one-eighth of one per cent. of the human race. The rest of God's children are just as incapable of logical thought as they are incapable of jumping over the moon. Trying to teach them to think is as vain an enterprise as trying to teach a streptococcus the principles of Americanism.​

 

[trysail]

From the August, 2009 newsletter of The Mencken Society ( http://www.mencken.org ) comes news:

MR. MENCKEN ENTERS THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

Congratulations to the Library of America for deciding to add to its list a volume collecting HLM's choicest writings— and to Marion Rodgers for accepting the heroic task of making the selection...

This is, of course, fabulous news. For those of you who are not familiar with The Library of America, the not-for-profit organization publishes reasonably priced, handy ( at 5" × 8" they fit comfortably in one hand ), very high-quality ( acid-free paper, sewn bindings ) hard cover editions of American authors ( paperbacks are also produced ). Many of these works are out-of-print and would not otherwise be readily obtainable. See: http://www.loa.org/

I've been lobbying The Library of America to include Mencken for some time and feared that copyright, ownership and estate issues ( and, yes, "political correctness" ) might have presented insurmountable and, perhaps, unspoken obstacles.

Hooray for The Library of America!




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