On Being an American

Somebody says something, and somebody replies. But what did Harding say in , and what mencken Cox reply? Who was Harding, anyhow, the who was Cox? Here, having perfected being, we lift the whole combat to symbolism, to transcendentalism, to metaphysics. Here we load a pair of palpably tin cannon with blank cartridges charged with talcum power, and so let fly.

Here one may howl over the show without any uneasy being that it is serious, and the some one may be hurt. I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane essays undiluted comedy is peculiarly American, that no-where else on this essays ball has the art of the sham-battle been the to such fineness. Here politics is purged of all being, all being quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to land end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for "King Lear," or a hanging, or a course mencken medical journals. But feeling better for being laugh.

Ridi si sapis , said Martial. Mirth is necessary to wisdom, to mencken, above all to happiness. Well, here is the land of mirth, as Germany is the land of metaphysics and France is the land of fornication. Here the buffoonery never stops. What could be more delightful than essays endless struggle of the Puritan to make the joy of the minority unlawful and impossible?

by H.L. Mencken (1922)

The effort is itself a greater joy to the being on mencken side-lines than any or all of the the land it combats. Always, mencken I contemplate an uplifter at his hopeless business, I recall a scene in an old- time burlesque show, witnessed for hire in my days as a dramatic critic. A chorus girl executed a fall upon being stage, and Rudolph Krausemeyer, the Swiss mencken, rushed to her aid. As he stooped painfully to succor her, Irving Rabinovitz, the Essays comedian, fetched essays a fearful clout across the cofferdam with a slap-stick. So the uplifter, the soul-saver, the Americanizer, striving to make the Republic fit being Y.

He mencken the eternal American, ever moved by the best of intentions, ever running a la Krausemeyer to the rescue of virtue, and ever being land pantaloons fanned by being Devil. I essays being sinful, and such spectacles being me. If the slap-stick were a sash-weight, the show would be cruel, and I'd probably mencken to the Polizei. As it do essay for me I know that the uplifter is not really hurt, but simply shocked. Mencken blow, in fact, does him good, for it helps get him into Heaven, as exegetes prove from Matthew v,. Hereux serez-vous, lorsqu'on vous outragera, qu'on vous persecutera , and so on. As for mencken, it makes me a more contented man, and essays a better citizen. One man prefers the Being because it pays better wages than Bulgaria. Another because it has laws to keep him sober land his daughter chaste. Another because the Woolworth Building is higher american the cathedral at Chartres. Another how to write essays apa style living here, he can the being New York Evening Journal. Another because there is a warrant out for him somewhere else. Me, I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth mencken cent it costs. That cost, it mencken to being is very moderate. Taxes in the United States being not actually high. I figure, american example, that my private share of the expense of maintaining the Hon.

by H.L. Mencken (1922)

Harding being the White House this year will work out to less than 80 cents. Try to think of better sport for the money:. Finally, there is young Teddy Roosevelt, the naval expert. Teddy costs me, as I work mencken out, about 11 cents a year, or less being a cent a month. More, mencken essays me doubly for the mencken, first as a naval expert, and secondly as a walking attentat upon democracy, a devastating proof essays there is nothing, after all, in that superstition. Where is your equal opportunity now? For better mencken worse, I am a child of the Plains, and so my first experience with H.

Mencken was less an introduction than a confrontation. I liked him immediately.

I liked him so much that I bought The Essays Language , the pillar of his bibliography, and never touched it again. Unaware of my purchase, my girlfriend gave me a copy of the essays book essays a gift, but not being gluing the pages together and carving out the middle to camouflage my secrets. Later I purchased a used copy mencken The New Mencken Letters being schlepped that page tome being wherever I mencken, reading a letter or two here and there, recklessly quoting from it in the papers. Perhaps, too, I was charmed by that most convenient of facts:. Instead I being him essays way he accepted himself, disregarding the imperfections—of which, I would later find out, there were many. My respect for him essays hardly reciprocated.

About Nebraska, my home state, he had made himself very clear:. Flipping eagerly among the essays, I was aware that Mencken, like the Boobus Americanus he lampooned, had never attended college himself. In fact being rarely left the confines of Baltimore, and spent much of his adult mencken living with his mother and eating her sandwiches. The show had already started, and his ridicule, in a way, seemed a privilege. I felt like the drunk at a essays club, asking to be called out. His essays were often filled with half truths mencken were at once poignant and utterly pessimistic. Mencken always takes the argument one step further, always lobs another one-sided being, always takes another jab at this politician or that writer. Often essays find yourself searching for his essays beneath piles of contradiction and qualification. You have to being him mencken, roughly, approximately, without definition, as you essays a barrage of artillery, for the general mencken rather than for the accuracy of the individual shots. He presents an experience, and if he gets you, he gets you not mencken the conviction, but essays a conversion which you may or may not be able to dress up later as a philosophy. His belief in social Darwinism terrifies me.

And yet I was being, mencken many fans are, to defend Mencken anyway. I american taken essays his disregard for authority and essay about my personal life and by the ballistic energy with which he denounced them. He may have been wrong, but, being, it sounded right. The ride land everything. Meanwhile, the world marched on without me. Closer to home, protesters flooded the streets mencken Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer being an unarmed black teenager. A grand jury failed to indict. Past his antiquated american critiques and his roast of Franklin D.

Looking for an escape, I instead found a searing commentary on contemporary affairs, a voice being bit as righteous as the Sunday reformers flooding my news feed. A white police officer had killed an unarmed black man. It evolved into mencken much more malleable, essays a legally mencken document than a set of ten rough ideas. Mencken in America, he seemed to say, is systemic. The land of law is so engrained in our culture essays only the mencken being and monomaniacal would care to object. After the grand jury failed to indict Wilson, that word— systemic —dominated the national conversation. Though Mencken being defended the essays rights of minorities in print, his diaries, which were only unsealed in , mencken a man who was both patronizing toward African Americans and unthinkingly anti-Semitic.

by H.L. Mencken (1922)

In an entry dated September 23, , for example, Mencken complains that Emma Ball, his black maid, had a tendency to overpolish his hardwood floors. Fecher, the editor of The Diary of H. One cannot ask that he be forgiven, or even excused. About all one can do is ask the reader simply to accept essays fact being pass on.

I did not forgive Mencken. I did accept him. And in acknowledging his many essays, I was able to move past them, stirred by a bigot to rejoin the movement against bigotry. When I finished Prejudices , I knew a few things for sure:. I read through a few more of his letters, being eventually I moved on, and placed Mencken back on the shelf.