Word: menckenism
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...MENCKEN: A STUDY OF HIS THOUGHT by Charles A. Fecher Knopf; 391 pages...
When H.L. Mencken was asked, "Why, if you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, do you continue to live here?" he countered, "Why do people visit zoos...
...implication was clear: the speaker resided on top of the evolutionary scale; what better way to spend a life than laughing at the lower orders? Such was Mencken's amusement during the '20s and early '30s. It was a resentful, mocking epoch; Americans, disillusioned by World War I, were anxious to smash icons and uncover clay feet. In newspapers, magazines -the Smart Set and the American Mercury-and some 40 books, Mencken merrily blasted Christianity in general and the Bible Belt in particular. He satirized professors, savaged politicians and labeled the majority of Americans-i.e., anyone...
Anxious to be on the right side of the bars, his readers joined the tirade. The newspaperman was elevated to social arbiter, literary critic and political savant. Even today, 22 years after his death, Mencken is remembered as the Sage of Baltimore, a pantheon figure in American letters. It is time for someone else to play the iconoclast. Charles Fecher, himself a Baltimore journalist, performs the task unwittingly in his amusing literary biography, Mencken: A Study of His Thought...
...descendant of cultured Germans, Henry Louis was raised in a complacent atmosphere. But he was born with sand under his skin, and the works of Nietzsche exerted an irresistible appeal. Mencken became a believer in the Übermensch, a scoffer at the great unwashed. Like Oscar Wilde, he made a success by reversing traditions. To believers, he played the village atheist. To prohibitionists, he was a beery provocateur. To the U.S. at large, he was an intellectual who saw culture only in Europe. "The average citizen of a democracy," he announced, "is a goose-stepping ignoramus ... The average democratic politician...