Posted on 01/28/2006 7:32:20 AM PST by Borges
Yes. Ol' Woodrow.
Mencken was in no way shape or form a liberal. he was far too rational for that bilge
He's the early incarnation of Andy Rooney or others talking about how dumb the American people are. Typical liberal thought where all the regular people are stupid.
If recognizing the inescapable average-ness of average people makes one a liberal, what sort of delusion makes one a conservative?
Mencken was a realist, a painful one, true, but a realist. He could never be called a liberal in any rational sense of the word. His love of liberty alone and his acceptance of the risks therein separates him from liberals.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Besides the "black flag" quote... my favorite.
They may have had in common a certain disdain for the average fellow. But that is absolutely as far as the comparison goes, IMHO. Rooney postures himself as some kind of great writer, but I have not seen the evidence, nor have I heard it said by anyone not on the CBS payroll. Being a grump and being a great writer is not quite the same thing.
I heard Rooney on a lengthy roundtable radio program reflecting on the end of the millenium. After a couple of hours, each participant took a few seconds to sum up the state of mankind as the calendar page turned over to 2000. Rooney took his opportunity to opine that there was nothing worthwhile on the Internet...that it was for idiots. It was not a joke, but he is.
The word liberal definitely does not leap to my mind when I think of Mencken, although he is famously associated with support of Darwinism, among other liberal causes.
But Mencken ~was~ an elitist...as far as it is possible to get from most modern liberals who posture themselves as populists and are filled with enthusiasm for the ordinary working man.
Here are a couple of quotes (there are hundreds) in which Mencken drips with contempt for simple folk and their beliefs.
On William Jennings Bryan:
“He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition – the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he might shine.”
On chiropractic:
“Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on rural politicians to get themselves licensed. Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits – retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school – say homeopathy – plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.”
He much to self-indulgently and self-consciously iconoclastic to be conservative.
Gosh...I hope I am misreading but it sounds like a cheapshot suggestion that I got my quotes from Wikipedia. Please correct me.
For the record, I got them by pulling down my copy of "The Vintage Mencken" and browsing through passages that I highlighted years ago.
WOOHOO! Give 'em hell, H.L.!
This Mencken quote from Billthedrill reminds me of my reaction to some of Bob Dylan's lyrics: I made be completely out of synch with the message but the rhetoric is so bracing that I can't help jumping around a bit!
William Jenning Bryant was a crackpot (though a fine Secretary of State) who's supporters were a bunch of Deliverance rejects and snake handlers. Its no wonder he got his a-s kicked twiced by a great REPUBLICAN from Ohio.
Mencken was right in condemning both the Socialist Utopian morons of the Left and the Moralistic morons of the Right IMHO.
No. I did not mean that at all.
My bad! I see that I misunderstood. I am sorry for being snippy. Cheers, my friend.
I thank you for adding me to your ping list.
Might I suggest in passing that some of your favorite quotes would be well put on your home page -- which does not yet exist -- where we can all find them later?
I came to life philosophically when I first read Nietche, and came to realize individuals need an ideal, and by their ideal, they evaluate their associates in generalities.
I've come to wonder what sort of ideal Mencken had that he would advise his fellow men to admire.
It is sad that all the fire in politics seems to come from people on the extremes. Often the best solutions are somewhere in the middle (i.e., ~between~ utopian morons and moralistic morons). Middle positions are not always unprincipled, baby-splitting compromises like those of recently sainted Sandra Day O'Connor. They are "middle" only in the sense that there are political loons both to the left and to the right.
While some of my positions would satisfy the most fierce rightwinger, on other matters I find my principled truth "between the forty yardlines," in George Will's phrase.
I aspire to Mencken's passion in advocating all good causes, even those that don't have the bracing whiff of extremism about them.
(Anybody who doesn't agree with that can go fishing with Al Neary, IMHO ;-)
"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace." – H. L. Mencken
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