Word: menckens
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Street or the latest Government goof are laced with vinegar and lightened with pixie dust. "I follow the Mencken rule of never saying anything good about a sitting President," he laughs. His standard advice to worriers: "It's just your money, not your life." Rukeyser is addicted to puns and one-liners (sample: "One more week like this and we'll have to call this program Wall Street Wake...
...even Mrs. Manningham can't be all that ridiculous. The way these two work themselves up over misplaced painting and lost grocery bills is really silly. Indeed, she is so neurotic and he so didactic that the couple resembles an unlikely marriage of Diane Keaton and H.L. Mencken...
...government, 'Screw you!' " Jarvis, 75, the man behind Proposition 13, calls himself "a rugged bastard who's had his head kicked in a thousand times by the government." In a state known for its smooth-talking, image-conscious politicians, he is a gruff, rumpled throwback to Mencken's soap box demagogues. The face is bulldoggish, the figure dumpy, the voice a throaty croak. There are no silken buzz words in Jarvis' earthy speeches. In his repertory of epithets, Republicans are "the stupidest people in the world except for businessmen, who have a genius for stupidity...
...master of invective, Mencken never failed to beguile his audience. Even Southerners were amused when he labeled Dixie the Sahara of the Bozart. And his classic encyclopedia, The American Language, brilliantly traced the wellsprings of slang and ethnic argot. But in larger matters he was more naive than the booboisie. When real goose-steppers came along, Mencken failed to perceive the German danger and, as Fecher notes, "brushed off Nazi treatment of the Jews." His literary criticism was sometimes blind to contemporary talent: he thought Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was "full of pink hooey" and found...
These rough judgments cannot wholly condemn their maker. H.L. Mencken was above and below all an entertainer who liked to shock. In the process of making errors, he freed the language from cant and proved a tonic influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even...