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Where have all the Menckens gone?
Colin McNickle is the Trib's director of editorial pages. Ring him at 412-320-7836. E-mail him at: cmcnickle@tribweb.com.
Mencken was a poet, novelist, literary critic, linguist, religious skeptic (some would say blasphemist) and editorialist. For years he was a fixture at The Sun newspaper of Baltimore and the most incisive political commentator of the first half of the 20th century. Humorist P.J. O'Rourke said Mencken invented the "big-city smartass" genre of journalism.
Actually, Mencken was a newspaperman's newspaperman -- honest, deep and thorough in his reporting; eloquent, concise and blunt in his writing. It's something too few of today's journalists, opinion or otherwise, are or are allowed to be.
H.L. Mencken was 75 when he died 50 years ago today. Complications from a stroke robbed this voracious reader and writer of both pleasures for the last eight years of his life. It is a more than apropos commemoration to share with you some of his more wickedly wonderful prose that stands the test of time:
"The whole proceedings ... will be largely formal. Some dreadful mountebank in a long-tailed coat will open them with a windy speech; then another mountebank will repeat the same rubbish in other words; then a half dozen windjammers will hymn good Cal (Coolidge) as a combination of Pericles, Frederick the Great, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and John the Baptist; then there will be an hour or two of idiotic whooping, and then the boys will go home."
"To a lifelong Democrat, of course, it will be something of a wrench. But it seems to me that the choice is one that genuine Democrats are almost bound to make. On the one side are all the basic principles of their party, handed down from the first days and tried over and over again in the fires of experience; on the other side is a gallimaufry of transparent quackeries, puerile in theory and dangerous in practice. To vote Democratic this year it is necessary, by an unhappy irony, to vote for a Republican. But to vote with the party is to vote for a gang of mountebanks who are no more Democrats than a turkey buzzard is an archangel."
"I live in a town which also houses an archbishop. Not infrequently I meditate in wonder upon his awful powers. They are seldom mentioned by his fellow citizens, yet they exist all the while. He can bind and loose alike in Heaven and on this Earth; he can dispense from all the consequences of sin, whether natural or revealed; he can do many other extraordinary things. His subordinates are in many cases charming fellows ... nevertheless, they remain magicians as he is, and believe in all sincerity that they can perform feats enormously more difficult than Merlin. The survival of such fantastic characters in modern society is all the proof we need that civilization is still only a superficial dermatosis."
"Capital punishment has failed in America simply because it has never been tried. If all criminals of a plainly incurable sort were put to death tomorrow there would be enormously less crime in the next generation."
"Uplifters of all sorts spend their time cadging money from A to save the so-called underprivileged B. Once they settle down to their business the cadging of this money becomes an end in itself, and they'd keep on doing it even if all the underprivileged were succored. ... Every quack always ends by convincing himself that his quackery is a boon to humanity. It is impossible to convince any given uplifter that the world would still go on if his graft were abolished."
"Any kind of handicap save one may be overcome by resolute spirit. .. (N)o spirit can ever overcome the handicap of stupidity. The person who believes what is palpably not true is hopeless."
"Most people want security in this world, not liberty. Liberty puts them on their own, and so exposes them to the natural consequences of their congenital stupidity and incompetence."
"(Its) sole purpose seems to be to get the highest possible wages and the shortest working hours for the least competent."
"It seems to be the common belief in the United States that a new factory is a valuable acquisition to a city or town, and that any man who sets up one is a public benefactor. The local Rotarians and other such imbeciles give him a hearty welcome, and not infrequently he is accorded substantial tax exemptions. ... Some of them (are) set up as civic leaders ... and not many (of their projects) returned in taxes the extra expense they laid on the community."
"Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it but precisely because they appear to be against it."
"To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason. Such notions do not make for innocence, and hence for self-respect; they make for hypocrisy."
What a tragedy that the kind of verity Mencken made a career of proffering today is widely misunderstood if not derided, considered impolitic if not profane. Consider that a sad victory for those who profit from either concealing the truth or being too ignorant to know it.
Outraged that the truth often was the first casualty of politics, government and religion, Mencken used words like a cudgel to ridicule those who pandered in falsehoods. It seldom fit the definition of "civil," as defined then or now. But then again, there was nothing "civil" about the kind of charlatanry Mencken exposed and railed against.
The quacksalvers, of course, ply their trade still; they always will. Unfortunately, 50 years after his death, there are too few Menckens to keep these common chiselers and cozeners at bay.
Our pocketbooks, our faith and our republic are worse for the deficit.
