Next up on the essays shelf:
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
It is certainly no surprise that Mencken, with those libertarian leanings, hated professional politicians. He watched the compromises and saw idiocy, not just in the men who made those compromises but in the system itself. He was not a fan of democracy (but we’ll get to that). He had no faith in the wisdom of the mob. He thought polls were just a way to catalog the thoughts of morons. I don’t get much sense from him that he feared the mob (as Hamilton feared it), but held them in contempt. They are the lowest-common denominator, and Mencken did not like hanging out with such people. He liked the elites, or at least those who were not fearful when faced with new ideas. He repeatedly makes the point that the Founding Fathers would never be allowed into politics in the current day, because those men were unabashed members of the elite who did not have great trust in the common man.
Mencken, in his typically sarcastic and entertaining manner, wrote, “I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.” That’s the general tone of his political commentary: he is amused. These political columns, even when they go against the grain of my own thinking, make me laugh out loud. His word choices, his choice of metaphors … unparalleled, just in their sheer entertainment factor. I realize there are those who are incapable of finding hilarious a concept/opinion they find abhorrent, but I am not one of those people. I wish there was more comedy in public life, I wish we had more truly gifted mockery. We do, but it rarely shows up in op-ed columns which are dull and earnest. That was true in Mencken’s day, too. A Mencken doesn’t come along often. Even when he’s criticizing politicians (and that’s pretty much all he does), he does so in rollicking prose that is so compulsively readable it almost works like magic. I am trying to think of an equivalent. Hitchens often had that, although his anger often overwhelmed his humor. Sometimes the sheer audacious nature of Hitchens’ opinions (his post-mortem for Mother Teresa comes to mind) is what makes them funny, in a way. Mencken is not interested in myth-making. He wrote a column on Lincoln that caused outrage, but when you read the column it’s pretty level-headed (for Mencken). He was supremely uninterested in sacred cows. He distrusted simplistic thinking. He went after it.
He always took a very jaundiced view towards ANYONE who chose to go into politics, a view I completely share. I think it’s the safest way to go. I have never fallen in love with a politician. Not once in my life. I’m proud of that. I vote. I am not that cynical. But when I vote, I usually have the “lesser of two evils” attitude. I see nothing wrong with that. I don’t feel like I’m “missing out” or anything. Blind devotion scares the shit out of me.
This piece about “The Politician” was actually the transcript of a lecture given by Mencken in 1940 at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at Columbia. Think about that date, and think about how UN-ingratiating such words would be in such perilous times. Mencken says that people do not get into office on merit; those who get into office get there through “their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged.” Mean? Yes. Funny? Yes. And I am not ashamed to admit that I have often thought such things, only not in quite so literate a way. Classic Mencken.
(I think my favorite moment in the essay below is where he writes “if I had any such things”. He is always pulling the rug out from under statements of certainty. Nobody is safe. Stop looking for safety. It’s overrated. This is the general feeling I get from Joseph Heller’s sentence structures, too, in Catch-22. Almost every sentence through that book contains a massive reversal. Speaking of which: Catch-22 was published on this day. Happy birthday!)
A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing
After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them. Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest. Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office. They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged. It is a talent like any other, and when it is exercised by a radio crooner, a movie actor or a bishop, it even takes on a certain austere and sorry respectability. But it is obviously not identical with a capacity for the intricate problems of statecraft.
Those problems demand for their solution – when they are soluble at all, which is not often – a high degree of technical proficiency, and with it there should go an adamantine kind of integrity, for the temptations of a public official are almost as cruel as those of a glamor girl or a dipsomaniac. But we train a man for facing them, not by locking him up in a monastery and stuffing him with wisdom and virtue, but by turning him loose on the stump. If he is a smart and enterprising fellow, which he usually is, he quickly discovers there that hooey pleases the boobs a great deal more than sense. Indeed, he finds that sense really disquiets and alarms them – that it makes them, at best, intolerably uncomfortable, just as a tight collar makes them uncomfortable, or a speck of dust in the eye, or the thought of Hell. The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House.
I hope no one will mistake this brief account of the political process under democracy for exaggeration. It is almost literally true. I do not mean to argue, remember, that all politicians are villains in the sense that a burglar, a child-stealer, or a Darwinian are villains. Far from it. Many of them, in their private characters, are very charming persons, and I have known plenty that I’d trust with my diamonds, my daughter or my liberty, if I had any such things. I happen to be acquainted to some extent with nearly all the gentlemen, both Democrats and Republicans, who are currently itching for the Presidency, including the present incumbent, and I testify freely that they are all pleasant fellows, with qualities above rather than below the common. The worst of them is a great deal better company than most generals in the army, or writers of murder mysteries, or astrophysicists, and the best is a really superior and wholly delightful man – full of sound knowledge, competent and prudent, frank and enterprising, and quite as honest as any American can be without being clapped into a madhouse. Don’t ask me what his name is, for I am not in politics. I can only tell you that he has been in public life a long while, and has not been caught yet.
