My hero, regardless...........

 

He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed.

-Mencken on Washington

Unhampered.........................

      He was out to get all the soft-heads, and he got them triumphantly.  Unhampered by anything resembling a coherent body of ideas, he was ready to believe up to the extreme limits of human credulity.  If he did not come out for spiritualism, chiropractic, psychotherapy, and extra sensory perception it was only because not one demanded that he do so.  If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayers' expense.

     So we now have him for four years more—four years that will see the country confronted by the most difficult and dangerous problems presented to it since 1861.  We can only hope that he will improve as he goes on.  Unhappily, experience teaches that no man improves much after 60, and after 65 most of them deteriorate in a really alarming manner.  I could give an autobiographical example, but refrain on the advice of counsel.  Thus we seem to be in for it.  I can only say in conclusion that the country jolly well deserves it.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 11/7/48 piece in The Baltimore Sun, in which he opines on Harry Truman's election

On moral questions......................

     There has never been any question before the American public, whether political or economic, religious or military, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a moral question.  Even so dull a row as that over the currency produced its vast crop of saints and succubi, of martyrs and Pontius Pilates, of crimes, heathenries and crowns of thorns.  Nor has there ever been any surcease of that spiritual eagerness which lay at the bottom of the original Puritan's moral obsession; the American has remained, from the very beginning, a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. 

-H. L. Mencken, from his July 19, 1916 column in the Baltimore Evening Sun

an eminent man.......................

Most of the rewards of the Presidency, in these degenerate days, have come to be very trashy.  The President continues, of course, to be an eminent man, but only in the sense that Jack Dempsey, Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Henry Ford are eminent men.  He sees little of the really intelligent and amusing people of the country, most of them, in fact, make it a sort of point of honor to scorn him and avoid him.  His time is put in mainly with shabby politicians and other such designing fellows—in brief, with rogues and ignoramuses.  When he takes a little holiday his customary companions are vermin that no fastidious man would consort with—dry Senators with panting thirsts, the proprietors of bad newspapers in worse towns, grafter praying on the suffering farmers, pawer and movie magnates, prehensile labor leaders, the more pliable sort of journalists, and so on.

-Henry Louis Mencken, from his 8/17/1931 essay, Imperial Purple