Well, 'common sense' is something which the best among us have, and usually in such levels of rich abundance that it becomes quite clear the total supply must be limited, as the others possess so frustratingly little of it.
"i'm not a member of any organized political party, i'm a democrat"
Mencken is just about everyone's favorite curmudgeon (any doubt why my signature quote is by ole H.L.?)
Ambrose Bierce is another favorite of mine:
Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a liberal who wants to replace them with others.
lightwizard, the book talks about Bierce as well.
Lightwizard -- I somehow knew that we had more in common than just a love of good movies. H.L. and Ambrose are two of my all-time heroes. Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises has one of the main characters describe Mencken as a "garter-snapper." Coming from the humorless Hemingway this sounds almost like a wistful left-handed compliment, as though ol' Ernie 'Emorroid wished that he, too, could snap a garter with some panache.
Garter-snapper - absolutely!
The third on that list is Fran Leibowitz.
"Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness."
These belong, of course, in the quotation section, but another one on democracy:
"The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment of the corrupt few."
-George Bernard Shaw
I feel left out because I've never read Mencken. Can either of you recommend a single 'must read'?
A good little paperback on Mencken's political views:
H. L. Mencken: On Politics
If you enter "Mencken" on Amazon, there's a lot to choose from including a new biography.
LW et al, Do you think Mencken was a bigot? c.i.
I've never read anything that would leave me to believe he was a bigot -- at least not any more than Mark Twain who wrote some scathing denunciations of politics and religion later in his life.
I guess Mencken lambasted everybody including whites, so we really can't tag him as a bigot. Here's a prettygood link that explains it.
http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/secondmencken.html
c.i.
I am and have always been a registered Democrat. However, my vote goes to the candidate with whom I most closely identify. Be they Democrat or Republican.
c.i. -- Mencken, from time to time, has been accused of being an anti-Semite. Some of his pronouncements on the Jews have led sensitive people to this conclusion. But Alistair Cooke, in his memoir Four Men points out that almost all of Mencken's closest friends were Jewish. Apparently he could write negatively about certain aspects of Judaism that did not appeal to him, yet never let this carry over into his personal relationships. I have not heard of his being accused of bias towards any other ethnic group in particular.
Mencken was not a bigot, he had the same distain for all men(women)
Mencken had no distain for men or women as individuals, only in their thoughts and actions which produced hypocrisy and other evils. Aiming his criticism at religion, it was at all of organized religion (still an oxymoron for me), not just the Hebrew religion -- especially the human egomania that this world and its reality was created especially for us.
Here is an article on Mencken's diary. Appears he might have been more of a bigot than people knew, he just toned it down in his columns. Been an interesting discussion on this man that I have just now learn a lot about. Seems he was a libertarian in the truest sense of the description!
I forgot to add the article:
http://www.io.com/~gibbonsb/mencken.html
Merry Andrew, But it's my understanding that Mencken was one of the first to speak out against the mistreatment of Jews in Germany. With so many inconsistencies, it's hard to conclude he was an anti-Semite or a bigot. c.i.
I quite agree, c.i. I don't think Mecken was a bigot in any meaningful sense of the word. He said and wrote what he believed to be true and had no reticence about stepping on people's toes, if those toes were in his way. He was definitely not 'politically correct.' Mercifully, the phrase had not yet been coined.
For those who are interested, the biographer William Manchester spent most of his days in Mencken's company in the last days of Mencken's life. His observations on the man are well worth reading, although i'm sad to say i have no copy of what i read many years ago, so i might have to hunt around for a citation.
Merry Andrew
Don't know much about Mecken however I do know that every bigot believes what he says.
