I never could understand the fascination with that guy. I was forced to read some of his stuff years ago. He was pretty much an a-hole from what I could tell.
You have to speak and READ English as a first language, or else you pretty much won't have a clue.
What Huck said....(in #6)
That's why they sent you there [school], because you didn't know jack. and you needed to be assigned some stuff to read. Apparently, though, another piteous failure of our schools.
(You give me pleasure, Eyes. It is rare that a single post so definitively marks someone out as a complete boob that one hasn't least hesitation to offend him.)
Yes.
Yes, but quotable.
And reading Mencken in the Carter years, his cynicism seemed about right. Mencken captured some features of American politics, culture and life that are as relevant now as they were eighty years ago.
If you come to Mencken older and have more life experience, your experience may be different. If you read his works expecting a deep thinker, you'll probably be disappointed.
Mencken fits well with times of public cynicism. When people really believe the political system is working or that the work of politicians is important, they have little time for Mencken.
In his own lifetime Mencken was popular in the 1920s, when the country more or less ran itself. In the Depression years, when people feared political collapse there was little demand for his cynicism.
"In all that gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate," he contended, "there is not a single picture gallery worth going into, or a single orchestra capable of playing the nine symphonies of Beethoven, or a single opera-house, or a single theater devoted to decent plays." Most southern poetry and prose was drivel, he charged, and "when you come to critics, musical composers, painters, sculptors, architects and the like, you will have to give it up, for there is not even a bad one between the Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf."