Posted on 06/29/2002 5:48:51 PM PDT by tiddlywink
Read the whole article here: http://www.theopinion.com/engine/article.asp?id=1311
Oh, and by the way, the author hangs out there, and you can comment about it on a bulletin board.
Some choice excerpts:
"H.L.Mencken was a conservative. But he was no bigot--and for that reason he would be vilified today as a 'liberal.'
Translation: To be conservative is to be a bigot.
"'Liberal' once meant 'free' but that predates Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the current occupant of the Oval Office who have attacked our language as surely as they have attacked and distorted the very notion of freedom."
Translation: It had nothing to do with the statist policies of those who call themselves "liberal"
"In his day, Mencken towered above his peers; today, the some four to six conservative conglomerates who control the mass media wouldn't hire him."
Translation: Dan Rather and Peter Jennings are conservatives!
"Admittedly, "liberalism," of late, may in some cases be identified with a certain "intellectual snobbery"--but given the educational level of those in opposition--who can blame them? It has become increasingly difficult to explain a historical context, a conceptual nuance, a logical subtlety to a right-wing ignoramus these days without slipping into a forgivable condescension."
Translation: Conservatives are uneducated.
"In other words, I am wasting my time trying to reason with the morons of the right-wing."
Translation: No, wait, they're not just uneducated, they're mentally deficient.
Guess that means Liberals are anti-semites. But we already knew that.
Does the fact that you found it necessary to add your
translations of the article indicate that you think
Freepers are too uneducated and mentally
deficient to read something and make up
their own minds? Think about it.
Mencken has come full circle. The young liberals and radicals of the Twenties idolized him. When Mencken applied the same ironic denunciation to FDR as to Coolidge, Harding and Hoover, the more earnest liberals of the 1930s reviled him. Conservatives and libertarians picked Mencken up again in the 1970s. Now it's a liberals turn to argue that Mencken was really a liberal. But it doesn't wash. Mencken was a cynic, an antinomian, an ironist, a Nietzschean, and more than half a nihilist. Of course Mencken would sock it to conservative, religious, political and business leaders, but he was even more scathing with liberal or radical "idealists" and "crusaders." His denunciations of Puritans apply equally to the Ralph Naders and Hillary Clintons as to the Fallwells or Robertsons.
Mencken knew language. He wielded it like a saber or a rapier, but not like a "surgical laser," unless Dr. Evil was working it. Striking the deepest blow and drawing blood were more important to Mencken than precision or accuracy or fairness.
I consider Mencken's insight of the nature of man rivalled only by Twain, Vidal, and Hunter Thompson. All of whom wrote well of man's inherent inadequacies when the subject turned to "virtue" and "power".
You say that HLM's denunciations apply equally across the ideological spectrum and then claim that his attacks were motivated more by malice than by reason. Do you have a specific critique in mind when you say that HLM was imprecise, inaccurate, and unfair?
Surely there was more to Christianity than Mencken was willing to credit. If there had been as little in it as Mencken allowed would it have lasted two millennia?
I thought his article on Lincoln at Gettysburg didn't address the real issues of the speech, but oversimplified. But let's take the other point of view: surely there was more to the evangelical, "Jeffersonian" South than Mencken allowed in his writing on the Scopes trial. Mencken's picture of it was very scathing.
I guess it depends on what you are looking for. You won't find the balanced "on the one hand ..., on the other hand ..." in Mencken. He presents you with only one side of the story, which you can accept or reject as you choose.
On the other hand, there was a certain sympathy or complicity that entered into his obituaries on those like Bryan, Harding or Coolidge that he had savaged when alive. And that is to his credit.
The question that you raise is an excellent one. I think Mencken was more interested in expressing his own views and writing with zest than in power or coercion, hating or punishing. Therefore, he was capable of being truly scathing in some articles written in the heat of the moment, and of being more understanding and forgiving at other times. But reading some of the individual articles or those of Mencken's imitators one doesn't see this depth.
I do have to admit that Mencken was capable of fairness and accuracy, but much of what's remembered from his work is the savage satire that doesn't concede anything to the other side. Take the article that we are commenting on as an example of what's survived of Mencken.
There is a "malady" that I suffer, which I believe I inherited from Mencken, and is quite common among present day politicos. That when writing opinion, to attack with an equal extremism to that of the original assertion. The more widely held the myth, (Christianity, Lincoln, FDR, etc.) the more virulently Mencken wielded the pen. After all he was but one man against millions.
Now if only I had inherited his talent?
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