A Saturnalia of Bunk. H. L. Mencken
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Blue Mondays. [6 February 1914]
MENCKEN TAKES A VACATION
Au revoir, dear hearts! Auf wiedersehen! In this place, during my absence in the service of the Kaiser, various sophists and wordmongers will purl and cavort. I beseech you to hear and bear their rumble-bumble with patience; I shall return anon, and once more an orthodox and laudable doctrine will be on tap. I need not remind you how many misguided and fatuous persons there are in this town, State, republic, hemisphere and world. You and I are fortunate in that we are not to be reckoned among them. Whatever we believe is true, and in most cases, self-evident. We are not deceived by the mere appearance of things. We do not suffer ourselves to be stampeded by the sough and burble of empty words. We never make mistakes. What, never? Well, hardly ever.
Nevertheless, let us not take too much flattering unction to our souls. It is not because of any merit of our own, but simply by the providence of God, that we are not such boobs and suckers as other men are. How thick, after all, is the partition which separates us from the Socialists, the Bryanistas, the uplifters, the peruna-swallowers, the Christian Scientists, the believers in palmistry and international peace, the osteopaths and osseocaputs?7 Not more than an eighth of an inch. A slight shove in early youth and we would have burst through it, and so come to manhood as forward-lookers and right-thinkers. Think how narrow the escape! And then give thanks for it in all humility of spirit.
Furthermore, let us not underestimate these lowly brothers, for they, too, serve their benign uses in the world, and have human needs and feelings. Even a Socialist, for all his stupidity, may yet be a very respectable specimen of a man. He may labor diligently at some necessary, though perhaps ignoble, trade, art or profession—for example, vest-cutting, journalism or beer-bottling. His wife may love him, and even venerate him. His children may look up to him as to a pillar of wisdom. He may be esteemed in his submerged circle for qualities which do credit to his heart however they may expose and denounce his head. He may go, in the end, to Heaven, and shine the shoes of Karl Marx for all eternity. Such a man is not to be sniffed at. He may be foolish, but he is surely not quite degraded.
So with all other uplifters and press agents of the millennium. You and I know, true enough, that they are bughouse, but let us not fall into the error of assuming that they are therefore wholly devoid of merit. Within his narrow sphere, within the circumscribed and unyielding circle of his capital ivory, the uplifter may even be faintly creditable to the human race, just as an industrious peasant may be creditable, or even an Englishman. I know, in fact, a number of such uplifters. They approach a capacity for human reason very closely; they are at least anthropoid; mammals without a doubt, they bring forth their young alive, and their ideas in passable English. I hope I am not one to sneer at these worthy creatures. A few seidels of authentic Pilsner would convert the best of them into excellent second-rate men.
Even Sunday-school superintendents, I dare say, are occasionally full of virtue, though the impression to the contrary seems to be widespread and ineradicable. Personally I do not share in the common suspicion of them. I am willing to admit, of course, that their vulnerability to temptation is greater than that of bartenders, and that more of them thus go wrong, but perhaps this is only because they are exposed to greater temptations—which is also the case, I suppose, with working girls. The bartender, let it be remembered, is protected by the cash register, a device which interposes such obstacles to his cupidity that it must often save him when he would otherwise sneak a yellowback.8 The Sunday-school superintendent enjoys the protection of no such checks and balances. Widow ladies with insurance money to invest continue to place it in his hands; dealers in Mexican mine stock never overlook him; many women fall in love with him. Is it any wonder that he so often ends as a fugitive from justice, a price upon his head?
I did not start out, however, to defend Sunday-school superintendents, but to protest gently against a too contemptuous view of the boneheads of the world. Secure behind the ramparts of our superior sagacity, let us look down upon them, gents, with kindly feeling and genuine brotherliness. They do their darndest with their meager machinery and angels could do no more. It is surely nothing against them that their skulls are somewhat tight, and so give little play to the peristaltic action of their pituitary bodies. You and I, for all our amazing acumen, would be in the same boat if some footpad were to sneak up behind us when we were in our cups, and dent our trapeziuses with a blunt weapon. In brief, our infallibility resides chiefly in a purely physical accident, or, at any rate, in a physical immunity, and so we should be no more uppish about it than we are about our bulk or our loveliness. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Some are born virtuous and some are born cunning. [4 January 1915]
MENCKEN ATTACKED
The Hon. John Stonewall J. Healy’s pious ranting in today’s Forum is pathetically typical of the new “Americanism”—that fantastic compound of cheap bullying and cheaper moralizing. It is a first principle of this tin-pot “Americanism” that any man who dissents from the prevailing platitudes is a hireling of the devil; it is a second principle that he should be silenced and destroyed forthwith. Down with free speech; up with the uplift! Because I presume to believe, along with such men as Prof. Drs. John W. Burgess, William M. Sloane, Herbert C. Sanborn and Henry Wood, that Germany is right in this war and England wrong, I am a foe to the true, the good and the beautiful. Because I presume to argue, along with the Hon. William J. Stone, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States Senate, that the Lusitania was a belligerent ship and that her passengers knowingly risked their lives in boarding her, I commit an offense against the United States. And because the Editor of THE EVENING SUN, despite his open partiality for the Allies, is still fair enough and courageous enough to let me present my contrary views in this place, he is a low scoundrel, selling his honor for a few miserable dollars.
What puerile buncombe! What a vain making of faces! What a deadly exposure of the true dignity and manliness of the new “Americanism,” by Judge Lynch out of Chautauqua! And how beautifully the Hon. Mr. Healy, with his virtuous bluster and empty charges, serves as an exponent and example of it! Consider his logic: THE EVENING SUN, eager for profit, outrages and alienates the overwhelming majority of its readers in order to tickle a small minority! What a syllogism is here, Messieurs! What an Aristotle performs upon the tragic bassoon! And consider again his plain allegation that I have “gloated over the suffering” of the Lusitania victims (When? Where?) and his allegation that I have denounced Dr. Wilson “in language so foul and indecent that at times it was unfit for publication in a decent family journal” (Examples, I prithee!), and his allegation that I am employed “for the special purpose” of signing my name to “the inspired and prepared stuff sent out by the German propagandists” (Am I, then, incapable of writing my stuff myself?), and his allegation that “the German papers published in this country are subsidized by the German Government” (Why subsidize them? How long would they last if they opposed Germany?). What ludicrous yawping, indeed! What a feeble and childish rattling!
I do not offer the Hon. Mr. Healy the affront of assuming that he actually believes these allegations to be true. On the contrary, I assume that he knows very well that they are false. That he makes them at all is sufficient evidence of the lamentable state of mind into which he has fallen, and with him a vast number of other such highfalutin’ and hysterical moralists. England has long rung with these frenzied charges and hollow threats; they are now heard fortissimo in the United States. Let the Hon. Mr. Healy cast his eye toward the Germans, observing them studiously through his pious tears. He will find that they are not moralizing, but fighting; that they make steady progress against the enormous hordes of their foes; that they draw tighter and tighter the rope around John Bull’s neck; that they face the future resolutely, bravely, confidently, paying no heed to the moral slobber-gobble of their enemies, whether open or disguised. Let him ask himself which race is better fitted to prevail in the world—the Germans with their homeric strength and daring, or the English with their white livers and their womanish screams for help.
As for the hon. gentleman’s impatience with my own heterodoxy, I regret that I can offer him no assurances of reform. Strange as it may seem to him, I am a good American (only partly, by the way, of German blood) and eager to serve my country. Unfitted by fastidious prejudices for that petty job-seeking which has been the hon. gentleman’s avenue of service, I devote myself