Hal Crowther wonders what made the famous journalist such a notorious grump:
It’s precarious trying to isolate, precisely, just what it was about his time that most infuriated Mencken. … An educated guess is that the thing he loathed most was optimism. Animal
optimism — animal spirits — he endorsed and enjoyed. Food and drink, sexual attraction, good music (as he defined it), good company, and good conversation were essential to his well-being. This was no sour ascetic or life-denying hermit. What he detested was delusional optimism, as he saw it — organized religion with its promises of ecstatic afterlife, the cult of human progress, American exceptionalism, popular beliefs in the essential goodness of humankind and the benevolence of representative democracy. It was this doctrine of the Ascent of Man, of cultural, moral, spiritual, and supernatural uplift, that never failed to raise his hackles and provoke his most venomous rhetoric.
Crowther goes on to imagine what Mencken would have made of society today:
[I]f he were here today to instruct us, as was his habit, he would point to the dreadful symmetry of our follies as he chronicled and predicted them. We were on the winning side in two wars, and each of them was followed by Red Scares and communist witch hunts, the notorious Palmer Raids in 1919–1921, and the equally notorious reign of Senator Joe McCarthy after World War II. These paranoid periods were characterized by jingoism, censorship, grotesque hypocrisy, and the righteous suspension of most of the liberties of which America loves to boast. Mencken would have nodded his head, ruefully, at the Patriot Act and the war on terrorism with its constitution-defying domestic spying, all spawned by the bombings of September 2001. Coddle them and they love freedom, he would have said; kick them and they destroy it.
(Photo via Flickr user mistermencken)
The Dish 