Word: menckenly
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...this sounds like ranting. The distant music of H. L. Mencken dead-ends in Don Imus imitations. It savors of precisely the poison that it condemns. Indeed, the political malaise we suffer from is usually attended by self-disgust. That is one of the dangers of the current situation. But rather than self-loathing, this election - two inadequate candidates fighting to a weird, ignominious tie, with no expectation even that the winner will be the less lousy - should rouse Americans to self-examination...
...want to make $50,000 a year, or $100,000 or $250,000. They want to make just a little bit more than all their friends. It's competition, baby--except it's not for foraging space or hunting territory, it's for the big bucks. Frank cites H.L. Mencken's definition of a wealthy man: "one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband." In other words, we aren't greedy, we're just impressionable. Despite the impending empirical affluence of graduating seniors, they're only concerned with their relative value. They just want...
...evil Gekkos. They're interesting people in a fascinating field that deserves further exploration. But Bull's idealism comes off as, well, bull. "It's not about money," one character says of his career choice. "It's about being at the heart of the world." Uh-huh. As H.L. Mencken said, whenever anyone tells you it's not about money...it's about money...
...here is H.L. Mencken's generous assessment of Henry James: "an idiot and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in this world." And William Allen White's gracious description of Mencken: "With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and a pig's squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure...
...also lived here, wire writers and correspondents working in nearly essential anonymity because they loved to write and tell the rest of the world how it is in this fabulous city, this creation of political philosophers and constitution writers. I think of the decidedly unromantic picture of H. L. Mencken sitting in the late night, overweight and sweating, pounding away at his keyboard in the Chesapeake heat, a fan blowing the steamy, soupy air around as he, clad only in a pair of BVDs, faces sheet after sheet of blank paper, ready to fill them with the excitement...