B.P.C.  Excerpts from a piece by Russell Baker in the NY Review of Books on H.L. Mencken (pity the whole thing is subscriber only):

A Genius for Contempt

Prejudices

…Even when his content seems a bit flimsy, however, the pleasures of the language and sparkle of the style can be irresistible. It is a style entirely alien to the modern fashion for understatement and genteel silences, which has characterized American prose since Ernest Hemingway and The New Yorker began in the 1920s to purge it of clutter, Victorian furbelows, and hyperactive language. Mencken had fully mastered his own prose style by that time, and it was the voice of a writer who had no interest whatever in understating anything or filling his reader’s head with silences heavy with vague significance. The Mencken style glorified overstatement, sometimes burst out in bombastic invective…

He despised the farm lobby, for example, for its mastery over a supine Congress that in the early days of the past century regularly enacted costly favors for farmers while extolling special virtues it attributed to tillers of the soil—submerging them “in rhetorical vaseline,” as he put it. He opens a five-thousand-word blast with some sport at the expense of the Congressional Record:

I have encountered in its dense and pregnant columns denunciations of almost every human act or idea that is imaginable to political pathology, from adultery to Zionism, and of all classes of men whose crimes the legislative mind can grasp, from atheists to Zoroastrians, but never once, so far as I can recall, has that great journal shown the slightest insolence, direct or indirect, to the humble husbandman, the lonely companion of Bos taurus, the sweating and persecuted farmer. He is, on the contrary, the pet above all other pets, the enchantment and delight, the saint and archangel of all the unearthly Sganarelles and Scaramouches who roar in the two houses of Congress. He is more to them day in and day out, than whole herds of Honest Workingmen, Gallant Jack Tars and Heroic Miners; he is more, even, than a platoon of Unknown Soldiers….

After almost a thousand words spent warming up, he comes to the point:

Let the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forevermore! To hell with him, and bad luck to him! He is, unless I err, no hero at all, and no priest, and no altruist, but simply a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack…. No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea.

A final shot at the farmer—”this prehensile moron”—and Mencken is off to abuse what he truly despises: Congress and presidents.

…In the Mercury‘s early days it was widely assumed that he had “some aspiration to lead the so-called opinion of college students,” he wrote. This was utterly wrong, his diary says:

I have, in fact, almost no interest in the ideas of college students. They seem to me to be simply immature men. They are always following fresh messiahs. That I served for a short while as one of those messiahs was not only surprising to me, but extremely offensive…

Don’t that beat all, President Obama?

Mark
Ottawa