Connie Willis on H.L. Mencken ...

[eppur_se_muova]

I just finished reading The Best of Connie Willis, including "Inside Job" (the second time I'd read that story). In it, she features H.L. Mencken, a debunker of mystics, psychics, and other con men, who comes back from the grave ... through a "channeler". Irony, I know. But it's the next best thing to having Mencken in the flesh, and the antagonist of the story is a self-made authority on Mencken, which provides a nice way to work a lot of quotes, or pseudo-quotes, into the story. I thought the afterword was worth sharing -- I've often wondered what Herblock, or Walt Kelly, and other great cartoonists of the recent past would have made of the political brouhahas of the past few decades, and a recent post raised speculations about what Hunter S. Thompson might have had to say about today's politicos. So enjoy some Mencken, and ponder what might have been.

Enjoy, and rejoice !

Afterword for "Inside Job"
--------------------------------------------------------------
I really miss H. L. Mencken. I have spent the last forty years (since Nixon and Watergate) following politics, observing my fellow humans, and saying, "Where is Mencken when we need him?" And wishing desperately that he'd come back from the grave to say all those things that desperately need saying.

Like:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

And:
"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

And:
"It may be hard for the average man to believe he is descended from an ape ... Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

I also miss him because he loved language. His book The American Language is a masterpiece, and he was the first to document what Mark Twain had understood, that "American" is not "English" but a language all its own.

Most of all, I miss the Mencken who loved music and women and a good, stiff drink and who wrote: "Life may not be exactly pleasant, but is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible."

I wish he had hung on a bit longer.

But at least we still have his books. And the occasional not-quite-as-phony-as-she-thought channeler.

[frogmarch]

1. He was anti-populist – a *libertarian - and

apparently a racist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Racism_and_elitism

In 1989, per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H. L. Mencken. According to an item in the South Bay (California) Daily Breeze on December 5, 1989, entitled "Mencken's Secret Diary Shows Racist Leanings", Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it", Charles A. Fecher of Baltimore.[34] There is a club in Baltimore called the Maryland Club which had one Jewish member, and that member died. Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable", according to the article. And the diary quoted him as saying of blacks, in September 1943, "...it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman. They are all essentially child-like, and even hard experience does not teach them anything." However, Mencken opposed lynching. For example, he had this to say about a Maryland incident:
Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.

Mencken also wrote: "I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him."

*libertarian

Mencken recommended for publication libertarian philosopher and author Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, calling it "a really excellent piece of work". Shortly after, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the greatest representative of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life, "individualism", and, later, listed him as her favorite columnist.

I have reservations about him.

[Tom Ripley]

3. +1000

[Wolf Frankula]

2. H.L. Mencken was raised in a racist Baltimore

and was a closet anti-Semite. He also enthusiastically published the authors of the Harlem Renaissance, had many close Jewish friends, declared the Negro spirituals as the best real American music, detested the Klan (I understand he received many death threats from them. He ignored them.) spoke up boldly for free speech, denounced lynching, (When an anti-lynching bill came before Congress, one journalist testified in its favor, H.L. Mencken) and scorned the Nazis, funnymentalists, and Prohibitionists. His last published article was one denouncing segregated parks and tennis courts.

Wolf