A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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is being started by snooping Puritans, or in some other way, always noisy, usually three-fourths silly, the peace, dignity and well-being of intelligent men are being invaded.
Certainly Baltimore must have a few citizens who do not fall for all or any of this buncombe—who can tell a hawk from a handsaw without a helping diagram—who have no faith in boomery, no faith in militant morality, no faith in political mountebankery—who believe that a fact is eternally a fact, and that all the yowling of a thousand gullets cannot change it—who possess, in brief, the faculty of elementary reasoning, of ordinary logic, and exercise it unemotionally, even while the yells resound and the red fire burns and the smell of punk2 is in the air. I do not say that there are many such men in Baltimore. In our population, as everyone knows, there is an abnormally large proportion of ciphers—darkies, foreigners, invading yokels, professional loafers and so on. And despite the presence of excellent educational opportunities, the educated man, in the true sense of the term, is still a rarity in the classes above—so much a rarity, indeed, that he exhales a smell of sorcery, and it is always possible for political bawlers to rouse the rabble against him. Again our so-called polite society is shoddy and ignorant: its influence, if it has any influence at all, is frankly on the side of buncombe. And the measure of our “leading” lawyers and “prominent” business men is revealed by the acts and pronunciamentoes of the grotesque organizations which represent them.
But for all this, Baltimore still has its faction of intelligent, unemotional, fully adult men—not a large faction, true enough, but still a faction, and one influential enough, if it would but speak in one voice, to knock out, or at least cripple, most of the wizards whose fallacies now reach the common people as wisdom. A few such men found their way, I suppose by accident, into the recent Red Cross Committee of chartermakers: you will see their hand in the demand that the City Council, that incurable and intolerable evil, that worst and costliest of pests, be destroyed root and branch. And there are others, perhaps a thousand all told—men who are capable of ordinary ratiocination—who don’t intrigue for political jobs, who have no desire for the applause of numbskulls, who see the truth with reasonable clarity and can afford to tell it—men, in brief, who approximate, more or less roughly, to the intelligence, or at least to the courage and degree of civilization, of such a man as the late Richard M. Venable.
Why are such men heard from in Baltimore so seldom? Why don’t they rise up more often and haul down the ballyho men who try to sell us cure-alls? Why are they silent, knowing the truth, when balderdash in mountainous bales is being unloaded upon the town? Why, in a word, don’t they form a posse comitatus, launch a counter-reformation, and wage a persistent and useful war upon all that riot of snide politics, of bluff and bluster, of anemonic and anemic boomery, of unintelligent agitation, of grab and guff, of puerility and piffle which now assaults and pesters every Baltimorean, keeps the city in a barbarous wallow and makes it laughable in the sight of all creation? [30 December 1911]
THE CENSORIOUS MENCKEN
From an earnest but ungrammatical essay by the Hon. Thomas G. Boggs in the current issue of the Baltimoreische Blaetter, the monthly comic paper of the Honorary Pallbearers:
There are critics and critics. Honest, constructive criticism by able and earnest persons is valuable. The object and service of such tend to betterment, for which every human and communities of humans should and do, as a general thing, strive for. But the critic, or rather he who criticizes in flippant, reckless and even smart Aleck manner, for fun and personal gratification, who offers no remedies for that with which he may justly find fault, is a pusillanimous pest and a damage to his community. We have in Baltimore, connected, unfortunately, with one of our newspapers, such a one. He is given a latitude that is surprising—far beyond the editorial privileges in the same paper. We are told that he writes certain editorials which praise Baltimore and its people, while on the same page, over his own signature, he abuses the city and those who are endeavoring in an unselfish manner, to benefit the community.
Reducing these amazing snarls of verbiage to simple English, one discovers that they set forth two propositions, to wit:
1. That I engage in loathsome critical vivisections wantonly, and with no intelligible plan of improvement in mind.
2. That I am two-faced, or rather two-handed, writing anonymous eulogies of Baltimore with one hand and signed attacks on Baltimore with the other.
Such are the allegations of the Hon. Thomas G. Boggs, editor of the Baltimoreische Blaetter and chairman of the standing committee on boggus statistics. My answer thereto may be divided into two asseverations, viz:
1. I deny absolutely that I have ever, at any time since the year 1900, written a single line anonymously, for THE EVENING SUN or any other publication, which has conflicted, in any essential, with any article bearing my signature.
2. I deny absolutely, and with a staggering emission of oaths, that I have ever written a single paragraph about the needs and defects of Baltimore which has not revealed on its face, or by plain implication, a definite and intelligible plan of improvement.
But what plan of improvement? A very simple and workable plan. A plan, in brief, involving a rising of the civilized and intelligent people of this town against buncombe and balderdash, fake and fraud, sophistry and salve-spreading—against the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association and its gaseous resolutions, its oblique attacks upon good government, its boggus statistics—against all the other camorras of boomers, with their childish rivalries and back-bitings, their idle blassmusik and windjamming, their incessant manufacture of Prominent Baltimoreans—against all the militant moralists who seek to make life in Baltimore as dull and depressing as life in the House of Correction—against the Old-Fashioned Administration, its rabble-rousers and frauds, its chicaneries and indecencies—against that low and revolting form of journalism which apologizes for such things and encourages such things—against all that saturnalia of bluff and bluster, of quackery in business and politics, of disingenuousuess and stupidity, of noise and nonsense, of slobbler-gobble and rumble-bumble, of false starts and false pretenses, of maudlin bawling and tin-horn magic, of rotten respectability and stuffed dignity, which makes every true Baltimorean ashamed, at times, of his city, and honestly fearful, at other times, of its future.
I myself, my dear Tom, am a Baltimorean—a Baltimorean of the third generation, born here, living here in great contentment, and hopeful of finding a quiet resting-place, along about 1975 or 1980, in Loudon Park.3 I have the greatest faith in Baltimore—and not only in the future of Baltimore, but also in its present. The one thing we suffer from, at the moment, is a plague of bad advisers, of moral, political and economic charlatans. On the one hand we are besought, with loud yells, to make improvements which would not be improvements at all; on the other hand, we are taught that the best way to deal with certain pressing evils is to deny them. Under the first heading fall most of the plans of the so-called boomers; under the second heading, to cite but one example, falls the joint effort of the Health Department and Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association to sophisticate the mortality returns.
Such enterprises, I believe, are dangerous. It is dangerous to spread the crazy notion that commercial prosperity is the only measure of a city’s progress, and it is dangerous to preach the doctrine that evils are best dealt with by denying them. But despite all this false teaching, despite all this quackery and flapdoodle, this mountebankery and mendacity, this rhetoric and rottenness, Baltimore wobbles along. We Baltimoreans get enough to eat; we live in decent houses; we are pretty well satisfied with our comfortable old town. And if, from baffled boomers, comes anon the allegation that we are stupid, that we are slow to comprehend, that we do not rise promptly to ideas, then we may answer quite safely, in defense of our intelligence, that we still have sense enough to see the essential hollowness and insincerity, the guff and gabble, the buncombe and balderdash of boomery. [24 January 1912]
THE VIRTUE OF HOWLING
From an editorial in the Baltimore Southern Methodist entitled “With Our Compliments to the Free Lance” and showing the suave literary style of the Rev. Dr. C. D. Harris:
We must confess we cannot understand his caustic strictures upon men of this community of the highest integrity and character. Must men who