| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 28 2008, 12:10 AM |
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HENRY THE GREAT Ah, the spectacle of it all. The lights have hardly cooled from the closing ceremony of the 29th Olympiad. Just enough time for a pit stop, and, lo, Denver takes the baton from Beijing, the lights go bright again, the Democratic National Convention is underway! I’ll not get to clean the popcorn machine for a few more days. Where is H. L. Mencken when we need him? Imagine what the Sage of Baltimore would do with such a lucky sequence of the Games and the Circus Maximus. Although the Olympics were almost always held every four years during the first half of the 20th Century, when Mencken stamped American journalism with his incomparable wit, they garnered nothing close to the publicity or interest we’ve taken for granted this past half century. And although the two national party conventions did draw big crowds and swarms of reporters in Mencken’s day, those shindigs, too, of late have been boosted by television and the Internet into a prominence that would have startled and amused the Curmudgeon of the Chesapeake. Mencken made an art form of ridiculing politicians and their hangers-on, the worst of whom inhabited that former swamp just forty miles down the road: “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” Like other mountebanks, our elected representatives gave their constituents what they wanted, but what Mencken could only deride as that fool’s gold—“uplift”: “The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.” When writing of the common man, Mencken let the good times roll: “No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” And in toasting American democracy, he almost ascended into heaven: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.” For Henry Louis Mencken, a national political convention—“fascinating as a revival or a hanging”--was a grand opportunity for sidling up to boatloads of fustian and pish-posh, hooey and balderdash. Where else could one see so many hacks and ward heelers--"on furlough from some home for extinct volcanoes”--and other invertebrates snorting and snuffling and never failing to give buncombe ever more amusing meanings at predictable four-year intervals? And what better example than a national convention to flesh out Mencken’s notion that “[t]he real charm of the United States is that it is the only comic country ever heard of”? With no loss of punch, Mencken could have substituted “national party conventions” for the final word in his answer to the question why he bothered staying in the United States, a land he deemed so unworthy of reverence: “Why do men go to zoos?” About sports Mencken had far less to say, primarily because it played a far less consequential role in American (and world) civilization in his time than it has come to play in our own. In Heathen Days, the third volume of his autobiography, he did say this: All that the Y.M.C.A.’s horse and rings really accomplished was to fill me with an ineradicable distaste, not only for Christian endeavor in all its forms, but also for every variety of calisthenics, so that I still begrudge the trifling exertion needed to climb in and out of a bathtub, and hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense. If I had my way no man guilty of golf would be eligible to any office of trust or profit under the United States, and all female athletes would be shipped to the white-slave corrals of the Argentine. Yet sportsmanship itself appealed to Mencken: “What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance—in brief, what is commonly called sportsmanship.” So if he were still with us, Mencken might have celebrated the athletes of the just concluded Olympiad—no small concession given his reluctance to praise anyone or anything dear to the common man, who for Mencken was eleven times out of ten either a dupe or a Philistine. But the politically driven overseers of the Games Mencken would have skewered just as ferociously and gleefully as he pilloried politicians and other assorted jackasses. Mencken was a man of almost legendary energy. In 1948, in his 68th year, and just months before he suffered a debilitating stroke that ended his career as a writer, Mencken covered all three major conventions (Henry Wallace and the Progressives having hit the big time). Perhaps those three debauches proved too much for the cigar-smoking, beer-swilling, invective-radiating man whom Walter Lippman saluted in 1926 as “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.” So as I contemplate the lights about to go on in St. Paul for the Republicans as the Democrats in Denver reach for the push brooms, I wonder if even the great Mencken would have been up to the task of covering, seriatim, Chinese dissimulation, Democratic huckstering, and Republican bloviating—and all within the space of four weeks. Then my doubts evaporate. I imagine Mencken marshalling his resources for one more go at the most stupendous trifecta of our age. I imagine how much more memorable (yes!) would be the achievements of Usain “Lightning” Bolt and hometown hero Michael Phelps if conveyed in print by Mencken. (Of television’s early days, Mencken wrote: “'Altogether, I would not give ten cents for an hour of such entertainment, even if it showed a massacre.”) I imagine how much smaller would be Ted, and Hillary, and Bill, and Joe, and Barack, and then John, and Dick, and even George after being painted by the wittiest, and deadliest, journalist ever produced by America: “Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.” And, finally, I imagine how much better off the rest of us would be, for nothing more effectively routs quackery and bombast than a good horse laugh.  |
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
6:45 PM Nov 30
