Word: menckenism
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mencken poured his scorn on U.S. life, its culture and its government. Presidents consorted with "rogues and ignoramuses"; the Senate was "perhaps the windiest and most tedious group of men in Christendom." He decided that "democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage," that a pastor is "one employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay." His targets ranged from the ancient Greeks ("Greek tragedy, that unparalleled bore, is confined almost wholly to actresses who have grown too fat for Ibsen") to chiropractors ("heroic pummeling...
...Mencken, with practiced cynicism, once tried to figure himself out. In a piece called Sabbath Meditation he said: "My essential trouble, I sometimes suspect, is that I am quite devoid of what are called spiritual gifts. That is to say, I am incapable of religious experience, in any true sense ... I dislike any man who is pious, and all such men that I know dislike me." The Chrestomathy is liberally sprinkled with his truculent gibes at all faiths, but none feel his unsparing rod more often than the Methodists and Baptists ("As for the Methodists, the Baptists and other such...
Having waved aside the prospect of immortality, Writer Mencken laid about him with such relish that it finally settled into a kind of smugness. His iconoclasm became a trademark and an act; the Paris-green-covered American Mercury that he edited became an undergraduate bible for the bright boys of the '20s and early '30s. He scorned marriage ("Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they'd be married, too"). But he shook the faith of many an admirer when he married at 50 and said: "I have often imagined that...
They usually did. Although Mencken tore great holes in the fabric of U.S. manners & morals, he almost always let in more air than light. His job, at a time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain...
...Mencken has been a prodigious workman with a fine regard for the craft of writing. Even the "professors" he loved to pummel had to cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications...