Nowadays Prohibition seems rather quaint.  It conjures flickering, grainy black-and-white images of silent movie stars, flappers, and Tommy gun-brandishing gangsters.  Even Prohibition’s goal—a sober, righteous America—has a decidedly outdated smack to all but the most militant teetotaler. 

But don’t mistake the Volstead Act for a mere historical curiosity.  It was a prolonged, destructive violation of personal freedoms.  Ironically, the law fostered chaos.  As Deborah Blum explains in “The Chemist’s War,” an article last February for Slate,

But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade’s end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country’s defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior.

(Incidentally, for a firsthand account of fun and games under Prohibition, including rum-running, tending bar in a speakeasy, and shootouts with rival bootleggers, turn to Don’t Call Me a Crook! by Bob Moore.  As obnoxious as Moore is, one reason I like him so much is his utter refusal to be controlled, whether by oppressive bosses, rich women, or Prohibitionists.)

Despite the law, Americans continued to pursue the forbidden pleasure.  Sound familiar?  Make no mistake, Prohibition exists today.

And as with yesterday’s Prohibition, it’s not just that there’s laws proscribing pot and other narcotics.  They’re enforced with a vast security apparatus, paid for with billions of our tax dollars.  The Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free has more citizens in its prisons than any other nation, largely because of its Jihad on Narcotics.  It’s not enough that statutes are on the books: they must be enforced with the zeal of true believers and people jealous of their government salaries.

Of course, the effects are never, ever what were intended.  Just as Al Capone and his peers grew rich and powerful through bootlegging, we’ve seen the rise of well-armed gangs, narco-terrorists, and the Taliban, all flush with lucre from drug sales.

Then and now, lawmakers’ response to proscription’s unexpected consequences is the same: full steam ahead.  Indeed, the effort must be intensified.  Harass citizens?  Jail offenders?  No, that’s not enough.  Poison the juice and its imbibers.

Blum explains that when Uncle Sam stemmed the flow of smuggled Canadian hooch, gangsters stole industrial alcohol and redistilled it to make it palatable.  Industrial alcohol is essentially grain alcohol with some disagreeable additives to render it distasteful.  As crooks slaked America’s thirst with redistilled firewater, the government reacted by telling producers to pump chemicals into industrial alcohol.

Gangsters met the challenge by recruiting chemists to “renature” the purloined rotgut and render it consumable.  Washington, in all its infinite wisdom and compassion, in turn demanded manufacturers pump more poisons into the mix.

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

It wasn’t long until the inevitable results came in:

In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes,” proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

Readers of Notes on Democracy will recall H. L. Mencken’s words of praise for Reed.  “Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified,” the Chicago Tribune observed in 1927.

That’s right.  Fanaticism.  It’s the driver then and now.  Two passages from Notes on Democracy sum it up:

Our laws are invented, in the main, by frauds and fanatics, and put upon the statute books by poltroons and scoundrels.

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel.  In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

Incidentally, if you think official deliberate tainting of illegal substances is the stuff of nearly a century ago, think again.  In the 1970s the U.S. sprayed Mexican marijuana fields with an herbicide named Paraquat.  Blum relates that its

use was primarily intended to destroy crops, but government officials also insisted that awareness of the toxin would deter marijuana smokers. They echoed the official position of the 1920s—if some citizens ended up poisoned, well, they’d brought it upon themselves. Although Paraquat wasn’t really all that toxic, the outcry forced the government to drop the plan. Still, the incident created an unsurprising lack of trust in government motives, which reveals itself in the occasional rumors circulating today that federal agencies, such as the CIA, mix poison into the illegal drug supply.

I’m not the only one who sees a parallel between the yesterday’s and today’s crusades against intoxication and finds Notes on Democracy a valuable commentary on both.  Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know, writes this week that

Prohibition is a comfortable 80 years in our past, of course, so we can read [Notes on Democracy's] passionate denunciation of it with equanimity, even smugness. A terrible idea, based on false premises and conducted ruthlessly, that left the country far worse off than it was to begin with. Yet simply substitute “War on Drugs” for “Prohibition,” and see what you think.

McHenry says that Mencken in Notes ”performed vivisection on the dogma underlying the American political system and revealed the offal within.”

As Mencken loathed Prohibition, he would’ve detested the War on Drugs, and not just for its infringement on liberty.  Mencken would’ve perceived democracy’s stunting influence at work:  Because addicts can’t handle wine or cocaine responsibly, the healthy are barred from enjoying them.  The same force was at work when the FCC went after Howard Stern. 

The censor wields her red pen, defending the weak’s delicate ears from profane words.  But what of those of us who don’t take offense at Stern’s ramblings?  How truly free are you when you can’t partake of simple pleasures like smoking a joint or listening to uncensored talk on the radio?

It all fairness to democracy, everyone knows other systems are often repressive.  Actually, they tend to be even more restrictive.  But what’s particularly galling about democracy is that by its very nature it allows and encourages small but focused groups—Prohibitionists, for example— to direct the nation.  As Mencken observes in Notes on Democracy

Some of these minorities have developed a highly efficient technique of intimidation.  They not only know how to arouse the fears of the mob; they also know how to awaken its envy, its dislike of privilege, its hatred of its betters.  How formidable they may become is shown by the example of the Anti-Saloon League in the United States—a minority body in the strictest sense, however skillful its mustering of popular support, for it nowhere includes a majority of the voters among its subscribing members, and its leaders are nowhere chosen by democratic methods.  And how such minorities may intimidate the whole class of place-seeking politicians has been demonstrated brilliantly and obscenely by the same corrupt and unconscionable organization.  It has filled all the law-making bodies of the nation with men who have got into office by submitting cravenly to its dictation, and it has filled thousands of administrative posts, and not a few judicial posts, with vermin of the same sort.

Certainly it’s possible for a determined minority to persuade a king or dictator, but it’s got just one shot, so to speak.  The potentate either approves or dismisses the petition: end of story.  But in a democracy, if the minority is driven and well-funded enough, chances are it’ll succeed, no matter how insane its goal.  Politicians need money and votes.  If a lobby offers them, it’s got your representatives’ ears more than you can ever hope.

This is not a libertarian rant.  I don’t see government as inherently evil.  Living in a community means making compromises.  But something is very wrong when there’s more attention paid to forbidding adults from indulging in whatever pleasures they choose than fostering science and culture.  As Mencken points out elsewhere in Notes, although liberty is “the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic,” democracy “always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves.”

Erin of the blog “Do I have to have a title?” reports that among her birthday gifts was a copy of Notes on Democracy: A New Edition.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, says “joyeux anniversaire” like a delightful package of iconoclasm and heresy.  Heck, Notes on Democracy is the perfect gift for any occasion.  Gentlemen, remember, St. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner: tell your true love you care with Mencken’s savage attack on universal suffrage!

Justin Logan, associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute today called Notes on Democracy: A New Edition “the best for-pleasure book I read (so far!) in 2009.”

Mr. Logan, we at Dissident Books congratulate you on your superb taste.  You are a gentleman and a scholar.  We thank you, and Mr. Mencken thanks you!

City Journal this week published an outstanding piece on World War I and its aftermath in America.  In “1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism”, Fred Siegel, a City Journal contributing editor and a visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, challenges the notion that liberalism is a direct descendant of 19th and early 20th century reformers.  “Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism….  After the unfortunate Republican interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, this progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.”

However, it’s not as simple as that.  Siegel writes that

But a central strand of modern liberalism was born of a sense of betrayal, of a rejection of progressivism, of a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone wrong between Wilson and a liberal Left unable to grapple with the realities of Prussian power. Initially embraced by many leftists as a thaumaturgical leader of near-messianic promise, Wilson came to be seen—in the wake of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, repression at home, revolution abroad, and a country wracked by a “Red Scare”—as a Judas. His numinous rhetoric, it was concluded, was mere mummery.

One strand of progressives grew contemptuous not only of Wilson but of American society. For the once-ardent progressive Frederick Howe, formerly Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the prewar promise of a benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.”

Like John Emerson’s great piece on the Bourbon Democrats and H. L. Mencken, Siegel reveals fascinating historical tidbits.  Almost 500,000 million Germans left America to join the ranks of the Kaiser’s army.  He details the era’s paranoia over all things Teutonic.  Little did I know that there was some justification for the fear:

Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, insisted that Germans needed to maintain their separate identity and not “descend to the level of an inferior culture.” Germans even began attacking that inferior culture. The most important instance of German domestic sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey. The man-made peninsula in New York Harbor was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sold to the British and French. The bombing sank the peninsula into the sea, killed seven, and damaged the Statue of Liberty. Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America: “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”

The war, with its jingoism and repression of dissent, together with Prohibition and the Red Scare, soured many forward-minded thinkers on American “progress.” 

What followed was not so much protest as simmering scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H. L. Mencken, writing in The New Republic, called sarcastically for honoring the civilian heroes who had suppressed Beethoven by bedizening them with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken ridiculed the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War,” branding them a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob”; a great admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm, he denigrated American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses.” Taking its cues from Mencken, the liberalism that emerged from 1919 was contemptuous of American culture and politics. For liberals, the war years had shown that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.

Siegel leaves out that Mencken himself was scornful of liberals.  His unleashes his wrath on them throughout Notes on Democracy.  Moreover, I don’t think liberals are alone in the their contempt of American society.  It would be more accurate to say they, like conservatives, hold a contempt for those stretches of the nation’s landscape that don’t adhere to their principals and values.  For some, gay marriage, atheism, and war resistance are vitally American.

To his credit, Siegel identifies one of liberalism’s best qualities:

The new liberal ethos was not without its virtues. In picking their fights with Prohibition and their former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the sense of tolerance and appreciation of differences that would, over time, mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” wrote [Harold] Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Though not always observed by liberals themselves, the call for an urbane temper would come to mark liberalism at its best.

This is no small point.  In Notes, Mencken himself contrasts repressive America with “more liberal and enlightened countries.”  Mencken’s “philosophy, stated one critic, was ‘thoroughly American,’ the remnants of nineteenth-century liberal thought,” Marion Elizabeth Rodgers explains in her introduction to Notes.

Regardless of Siegel’s views on liberalism, his piece is fascinating.  Anyone who’d like a backgrounder on the political and intellectual climate that fostered Mencken’s dark, cynical position on democracy and America should read it.

I discovered an excellent post on “Open Left” about H. L. Mencken the other day.  The author, John Emerson, puts Mencken’s both elitism and allegiance to the Democrats in the context of a wing of the party I’d never heard of: the Bourbon Democrats:

…Mencken was a Bourbon Democrat. The Bourbon Democrats ruled the South and most of the big cities of the North. They (and their “stand-pat” Republican frenemies) were uniformly corrupt, cynical, elitist, anti-labor, and segregationist. During the 1890s they succeeded in destroying the Populist Party, and in the succeeding era they were under continual attack by progressives within the party, and they and the stand-pat Republicans fought to the death against reform. The Bourbons didn’t lose their power within the party until 1965 or so, and during the New Deal they supported FDR only grudgingly, if at all.

Emerson cites Mencken’s encomium to Grover Cleveland, “the most famous and most successful Bourbon Democrat.”  Cleveland, students of American history will recall, sent troops to Chicago to put down the Pullman Strike.

Surveying today’s political landscape, Emerson remarks that

[T]oo many of the Democratic rank and file – what I call the “wonk demographic” — have bought into the anti-populism, cultural elitism, and administrative liberalism of the machine Democrats, and this cripples the party. In many contexts, becoming a liberal is a way of making yourself a better class of person, the same as buying a nicer pair of shoes or a better kind of cheese.

There’s truth to the that, but there’s another truth that’s even uglier to consider.  Most of the American masses don’t want to hear about progress.  They despise uplift.  Anything that opposes their masters–the corporations, the State (especially the military), and the church–is evil and unpatriotic.  Look at the response to health care reform.  Look at how “socialist” has become a pejorative word.  (Actually it’s been pejorative for decades, but now it’s on a level of “Satanist.”)  Look at the cults of creeps like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh.

It’s hard, very hard, to fight for people who don’t want to be liberated.  To quote a passage from Notes on Democracy, what the common man mistakes liberty for, “nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upons his oppressors.  He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.” 

Bring back the Wobblies, I say.

Let’s make something clear: H.L. Mencken wasn’t a liberal.  He wasn’t a left-winger.  He wasn’t a progressive.  Although personally he could be kind and charitable, politically speaking, he wasn’t an egalitarian.  He was an unmitigated and unapologetic elitist.  He called Marx “a philosopher out of the gutter.”  (Notes on Democracy: A New Edition, New York: Dissident Books, 2008, p. 31.)  Later he softened the epithet somewhat to “out of the ghetto.”  (A Mencken Chrestomathy, New York: Vintage Books, 1982, p. 156.)  Liberals, he wrote, always “cling to some shred of illusion, as if the whole truth were too harsh to be borne…”   (Notes, p. 159.)  So was Mencken a conservative?

That’s what I asked myself last week at an event named after the Sage of Baltimore.  The H.L. Mencken Club Annual Meeting was held October 30 through November 1 in Linthicum, Maryland, just outside of Hank’s hometown.  It attracted 113 attendees, which is fairly respectable given that it was only the Club’s second gathering.  The conference’s theme this year was “The West: Is It Dead Yet?” Among the speakers were Richard Spencer of Taki’s Magazine, John Derbyshire, author of the recently released We are Doomed: Rediscovering Conservative Pessimism, and the Grand Dinosaur of Paleoconservatives, Pat Buchanan. 

I initially mistook the Club for the H.L. Mencken Society: big mistake.  My contacts at the Society and Mencken’s estate knew nothing of the Club.  Curiously, I found some of the attendees knew little-to-nothing of Mencken.  “He was a humorist, wasn’t he?” one fellow asked me. “And Jewish?”  I joked to another man who confessed he never read Mencken that the cigar-maker’s son is the Lydia Lunch of American letters: people know his name and importance, but are often unfamiliar with his oeuvre. That said, copies of Notes on Democracy: A New Edition sold well.  Someone even bought a copy of Don’t Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman’s Tale of World Travel, Whisky, and Crime. 

Paul Gottfried, the H.L. Mencken Club’s president, outlined the group’s worldview in his opening address.  “We are distinct from movement conservatives,” he explained, speaking of The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the G.O.P.  “We are more different than neocons than liberals are,” he said.  “We raise questions that are anathemas to” both wings of the mainstream.  To the Club and those who share its vision, “democracy and freedom are on a collision course…  Heredity largely determines character and intelligence.” 

As an example of how “alternative conservatives” split with Republicans, Gottfried cited academic diversity training.  Although Beltway conservatives might scoff at liberal rationale for recruiting minority students, they will press to teach them “the American Experience” and “democratic values” and to integrate them into the greater society. “Our side would say not every adolescent can do college work,” Gottfried said.  The present “egalitarian managerial consensus moves in one direction: left.”

Mencken would’ve agreed with much of what Gottfried said.  Mencken absolutely believed liberty and universal suffrage were incompatible, and saw inherent inequality among humans, largely determined by heredity.  Consider this take on inter-caste copulation: “Adultery, in brief, is one of nature’s devices for keeping the lowest orders of men from sinking to the level of downright simians: sometimes for a few brief years in youth, their wives and daughters are comely—and now and then the baron drinks more than he ought.”  (Chrestomathy, page 63.)

RACE TO THE EDGE

But Gottfried spoke of differences between races.  Indeed, that was a recurring theme at the conference.  One session was entitled “Debt, Demographics, and Disaster.”  On the same table where I offered Notes on Democracy: A New Edition, another publisher sold books with titles like IQ and Global Inequality and Race Differences in Intelligence.  Nearby were flyers for a conference next year sponsored by a group named the American Renaissance.  (“Virtually no whites are willing to break taboos about racial differences in IQ, the costs of ‘diversity,’ or the challenges of non-white immigration.  We are different.  We believe these are vital questions.”)  Among the speakers at the gathering will be Nick Griffin of the British National Party.

Mencken, like many men of the early twentieth century, was racist.  But his racism was complex, imbued with fascinations and skepticisms that took it beyond mere tribalism.  In his American Mercury he published African American authors Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois.  “He made disparaging remarks about blacks and Jews in his diary, yet crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan, lobbied with the NAACP for an anti-lynching bill, and urged the Roosevelt administration to open America’s doors to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany,” Marion Elizabeth Rodgers explains in her introduction to Notes‘ new edition.  (Notes, p. 8.)  Mencken’s take on race and the West was more nuanced than those expressed at the H.L. Mencken Club meeting.  Here’s another Mencken mediation on “extra-legal crosses”:

As a result of this preference of the Southern gentry for mulatto mistresses there was created a series of mixed strains containing the best white blood of the South, and perhaps of the whole country.  As another result the poor whites went unfertilized from above, and so missed the improvement that so constantly shows itself in the peasant stocks of other countries…  The Southern Mulatto … is an unhappy man, with disquieting tendencies toward anti-social habits of thought, but he is intrinsically a better animal than the pure-blooded descendant of the old poor whites, and he not infrequently demonstrates it.  (Chrestomathy, page 192)

The much above passage’s charm comes from its offense to multiple readerships: white racists, black nationalists, prudes, feminists, Southerners.  Dinner is served and all are invited!

“It is perfectly possible that the superior mental development of the white races may be due to the fact that they have suffered from tuberculosis for many centuries,” Mencken posited, probably with winked eye.  (Chrestomathy, p. 369.)

One of the Mencken club speakers spoke wistfully of America’s “founding stock.”  What did Mencken have to say about the highflying, mighty WASP?

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man?… One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence…  The other is… his hereditary cowardice…  Consider, for example, the events attending the extension of the two great empires, English and American.  Did either movement evoke any genuine courage and resolution?  The answer is plainly no.  Both empires were built up primarily by swindling and butchering unarmed savages, and after that by robbing weak and friendless nations.  (Chrestomathy, pp. 173-174.)

This Anglo-Saxon of the great herd is, in many important respects, the least civilized of the white men and the least capable of true civilization.  His political ideas are crude and shallow. . . .  His blood, I believe, is running thin; perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start. . .  (Chrestomathy, page 177.)

CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?

Another thing I found in conflict with Mencken’s spirit was the Club’s secrecy, and frankly speaking, paranoia.  Attendees were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement barring them from releasing the names of Club members, guests, and speakers and from reporting on the lectures without the Club’s permission.  Incredibly, the agreement explained that these “privacy provisions are intended to stimulate the free flow of opinions, comments and conversation.”

What would Mencken, a man who fought all his life against censorship and for greater openness, say about that?  He ruthlessly took Mark Twain to task for “his profound intellectual timorousness” in not publishing his darker, more pessimistic writings for fear of public outcry.  (Chrestomathy, pp. 486-487.)  I was told that last year there had been trouble with disruptions by people unfriendly to the Club’s agenda.  No doubt the Club was also unhappy with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on its 2008 gathering.  Click here for the SPLC’s piece.

Mencken wasn’t afraid to make enemies by unequivocally stating his views.  It’s a drag to be condemned for your opinions, but Mencken and those like him would agree that’s the price one pays for voicing heterodox thoughts. 

I explained to one of the organizers that I planned to cover the event for this blog. We spoke briefly, and she agreed to my terms: I assured her I wouldn’t disrupt any of the proceedings, but that I would ask the speakers provocative questions.  I also said I’d write precisely what I saw and heard at the meeting, and that I would make no assurances about my post’s content.  She didn’t have to be accommodating.  She could’ve told me those were the rules, like them or not.  I appreciated her cooperation.

GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

Even more perplexing than the Club’s racial attitudes and guardedness was its Godliness.  Grace was said at the two meals I attended.  Grace?!  At a conference whose namesake is H.L. Mencken?!  The same journalist who railed against Fundamentalists?  The same editor who a Boston reverend sought to silence?  The same freethinker who wrote a praiseful introduction to and translated Nietzsche’s The Antichrist?  It was like something from a comic novel: mind-blowingly hypocritical and disrespectful to his memory.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees a disconnect.  Here’s a post from Secular Right on last year’s proceedings.

“The plutocracy is comprehensible to the mob because its aspirations are essentially those of inferior men: it is not by accident that Christianity, a mob religion, paves heaven with gold and precious stones, i.e., with money,” Mencken sneers (Notes, p. 152).  Indeed, you can see the dollar sign/crucifix on Notes’ cover as an allusion to this passage.  You can also read it as an ideogram for the two deciding factors in a presidential election: what’s the candidate’s economic stance and the zeal of his/her devotion.  Again, a few selections from the soi-disant ombibulous guzzler’s writings go a long way in illustrating my point:

I can no more understand a man praying than I can understand him carrying a rabbit’s foot to bring him luck.  This lack of understanding is a cause of enmities, and I believe that they are sound ones.  I dislike any man who is pious, and all such men that I know dislike me.  (Chrestomathy, pp. 84-85.)

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.  Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone.  All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine.  No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world.  The minute a new one is launched, in whatever fields, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down.  (Chrestomathy, p. 80.)

Hymn of Hate, with Coda—If I hate any class of men in this world, it is evangelical Christians, with their bellicose stupidity, their childish belief in devils, their barbarous hoofing of all beauty, dignity and decency.  But even evangelical Christians I do not hate when I see their wives.  (Chrestomathy, p. 624.)

On Saturday morning I attended a talk on “Radical Traditionalism.”  The night before I chatted with two of its presenters, Patrick J. Deneen, director of Georgetown University’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, and E. Christian Kopff, director of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Western Civilization.  I found both men charming, erudite, and ready to listen to opposing viewpoints.  Deneen opined on the Catholic Church’s place in resisting modernity, while Kopff spoke on Julius Evola, the Italian reactionary mystic.  Evola, Kopff explained, sought a return to a society of clearly delineated roles, ruled by warrior and priest classes.  Evola rejected the Enlightenment and had little use for the Renaissance.  Again, some familiarity with Mencken prompts one to scratch one’s scalp in confusion:

[The Eighteenth Century was] when human existence, according to my notion, was pleasanter and more spacious than ever before or since.  The Eighteenth Century, of course, had its defects, but they were vastly overshadowed by its merits.  It got rid of religion.  (Chrestomathy, pp. 557-558.) 

[How did Western Europeans during the Renaissance] manage to convert themselves into highly civilized men—perhaps the most civilized ever seen on earth; certainly vastly more civilized then the grossly overrated Greeks…?  (Chrestomathy, p. 377.) 

During the question session I asked how the speakers could reconcile a discussion on religion—conservative-minded religion at that—at an event named after America’s most irreligious writer?  “We hope we’re in his spirit,” responded Kopff.  “We’re standing up for religion and being as obnoxious as Mencken was in his day.  We’re not the H.L. Mencken Society; we don’t study him.  Like Mencken, we’re in opposition to the FDR regime that’s still ruling this country.”

In other words, if I understand Kopff correctly, the Club identifies with Mencken’s plainspoken attacks on liberalism.  That’s understandable up to a point.  To reiterate what I asserted above, Mencken cannot be mistaken as a liberal.  But was he a conservative, whether movement or alternative?

EAST IS THE NEW WEST

The answer is no.  As I’ve written elsewhere, he was a “Medieval, Pessimistic Dissident.”  Put another way, he was a monarchist in search of a new aristocracy.  His ideology was thoroughly un-American.  Like Marxists and anarchists, he rejected God, the church, and morality.  (But not, it’s essential to note, honor.)  Unlike the left, he had no time for the proletariat and the peasantry.  He had little time for their masters—businessmen, politicians, and the clergy—as well.  “The capital defect in the culture of These States is the lack of a civilized aristocracy,” Mencken bemoaned, “secure in its position, animated by an intelligent curiosity, skeptical of all facile generalizations, superior to the sentimentality of the mob, and delighting in the battle of ideas for its own sake.”  (Chrestomathy, p. 178.) 

From my readings of Mencken, I don’t perceive an allegiance to an ideology or institution.  There were certainly ones he rejected—liberalism and religion, for example—but he wasn’t wedded to a particular order.  If it advanced liberty, reason, and science, or simply made life more pleasant, then it was good.  If it furthered superstition, irrationality, and intolerance, it was bad.

To the question, “The West: Is It Dead Yet?” Mencken would’ve replied, “If it is, so what?  If other peoples are ready to carry on the hard work of science and art, so be it.  Let the white man gorge himself on cheeseburgers, growing fatter and fatter, slowly sinking into a quicksand of consumption, mindless entertainment, and war.”  Mencken was a Germanophile, but I think his high regard for Teutons would’ve slipped away if they weren’t living up to his high standards.  Remember, the columnist was as unsentimental a thinker as this country has ever produced.  “A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly has he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.”  (Chrestomathy, p. 16)  If he felt that way about buddies, I think it’s fair to say he’d harbor no race loyalty.

Mencken wrote admiringly of Japan on the eve of World War II.  It had become a modern, confident nation, and no longer looked to whites as models.  (Gore Vidal’s introduction to The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, New York: Anchor, 1991.)  He would’ve been intrigued by twenty-first century Asia.  He’d see India and China as nations on the rise, driven by science and “resolution.”  The fact that many classical musicians today hail from Asia wouldn’t have been lost on Mencken, a lover of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.  He’d be quick to note how many students of Asian descent matriculate at America’s finest colleges and universities.  As always, Mencken would’ve found things to not to his liking in and of the East: even of his beloved Germania he spoke of a “curious reverence for authority.” (Notes, p. 15).

Similarly, I think he would’ve approved of today’s wave of immigration.  After all, he wrote that

[I]n order that [the Anglo-Saxon] may exercise any functions above those of a trader, a pedagogue, or a mob orator, [his blood] needs the stimulus of other and less exhausted strains.  The fact that they increase is the best hope of civilization in America.  They shake the old race out of its spiritual lethargy, and introduce it to disquiet and experiment.  They make for a free play of ideas.  In opposing the process, whether in politics, in letters, or in the ages-long struggle toward the truth, the prophets of Anglo-Saxon purity and tradition only make themselves ridiculous.  (Chrestomathy, p. 177.)

Mencken would turn his eyes east without a second thought if he sensed that’s where Wissenscaft flourishes.  “If the next Bach is born in Bombay, I will present unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh,” I can hear him exclaim.  “Should Fujian produce a new Frederick the Great, I’ll come and adore him.  If the future Nietzsche arrives unto the world in Ningbo, two other wise men and I will make the pilgrimage to greet him.”

I don’t think his attitude would be any different as far as U.S. demographics.  “If tomorrow’s Poe is the daughter of Mexican field-hands, splendid!  Should a Somali couple conceive this century’s Twain, I’ll be overjoyed.  When a Pakistani husband and wife bestow unto our fair land the new Whitman, I’ll be the first at the maternity ward to congratulate them.  And why should it be otherwise?  Are the nation’s Anglo-Saxons rearing any children of great promise?”

It’s not my intention to denigrate the H.L. Mencken Club.  The speakers were all articulate and provocative.  Everyone I met—attendees, lecturers, and organizers—were very courteous, even when it when I made it clear that my views were at odds with theirs.  I left with a lot to think about, and I’m grateful for that.

A NEW CLUB, A NEW CASTE

But with all due respect to the Club, with its religiosity, racial obsessions, and defensive secrecy, it simply doesn’t share the spirit of America’s greatest journalist.  If the Club wants to advance a conservatism of heredity and the holy, one that spurns multiculturalism and the dictatorship of the dollar, I suggest it rename itself after a more appropriate figure.  What about The Yukio Mishima League?  Or The Marcus Garvey Institute?   Or The Order of Crazy Horse?  “The H.L. Mencken Club” could then be claimed by a group truly attuned with the maverick newspaperman’s weltanschauung.

How do I envision such an association?  What does it concern itself with?  What drives it?  For one thing, it’s as irreverent and curious as the Marylander himself.  It esteems learning, honor, and most of all, freedom.  It studies and discusses science, art, and nearly anything else in a spirit of skepticism and open-mindedness.  It examines religion only as a product of the human imagination: an inestimable influence on every facet of existence, the fertilizer of some of the most exquisite architecture, music, and literature ever, but not a guide for life, at least not one the fellowship espouses.  (Individual members may follow whatever spiritual path they like, but don’t evangelize to their peers.) 

The same would hold for morality.  I imagine a group that studies issues like same-sex marriage in a spirit of Wertfreiheit.  The question is whether laws allowing such matrimonies enhance the nation’s liberty and general health, not if they’re immoral.  As a researcher dispassionately examines water samples, fossils, or statistical data, so my fantasy association dissects ideas.  Whether a concept or a work smacks of one ideological bent or another is immaterial. The question is whether it makes sense or if it’s simply beautiful.

The sodality encourages and fosters debate both within its circle and beyond it, but not ad hominem attacks or the incessant, indecent harassment Mencken loathed.  Aside from liberty, dignity, and enlightenment, the group holds nothing sacred, not even the Sun god himself.  I picture a fellowship that has no time for jingoism, piety, and sentimentality.  It would reject both the blind worship of the past practiced by conservatives and the call for brave new worlds by radicals.

Like Mencken, the organization admires the great aristocracies of the past.  However, its membership rolls are open to anyone of whatever gender, sexual orientation, race, class, religion, or ideology, with a history of accomplishment, hard work, and inquisitiveness.  Indeed, the group’s goal—perhaps a pipe dream—would be to nurture a future nobility.  As H.L.M. wrote,

Thus politics, under democracy, resolves itself into impossible alternatives.  Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.  One must either follow the New York Times, or one must be prepared to swallow Bryan and the Bolsheviki.  It is a pity that this is so.  For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system.  What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. . .  It will never have a party of [libertarians] until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them. (Notes, p. 153.)

Will Durst, the political humorist, really got it right today with his “Poking the cobra” post:

[President Obama] is taking it straight to his perceived enemy, calling both Fox News and Rush Limbaugh radical and out of the mainstream, making the two crazier than a preacher at a whorehouse with a parishioner working the door. Because that is exactly what they say about him. [Emphasis mine.]  Methinks there may be a bad case of “can dish it out but not take it” going around.

Conservative commentators are retaliating by lobbing charges of extreme partisanship at the President. Claiming he totally ignored his campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” Oh wait, that wasn’t him. That was the other guy. Sorry. You remember the last guy. Now there was someone who reeked of non- partisanship. At least I think that’s what it was.

Look, let me me make something clear: this isn’t a case of worshipping Obama.  I don’t worship him, much less any mortal on this lugubrious ball.  I’m just applauding Durst’s, and yes, Obama’s too, common-sense.  The Bush administration and its apologists were opposed to the point of lunacy against any and all criticism.  Now Republicans are upset when a president speaks back to the press?  Would it kill them them to simply say, “Of course he says we’re wretched!  No surprise there.  We say the same thing about him.  That’s just good business.”  The haters of Obama are so full of loathing for the man I wonder if they’d say it was a Communist/Socialist/Islamofascist/feminist/gay liberation plot if he found a cure for AIDS.

This is why I find the U.S. news commentary for the most part so dull.   It takes predictability and stodginess to almost Soviet levels.  The right condemns the left.  The left condemns the right.  For the love of God, can’t you once, just once say something surprising?  Do you have to follow the party line like a rabbi adheres to kosher dietary laws?  Is it possible that an approach or initiative not within your ideological scope might have some validity?  Even if you don’t agree with it, can you perceive at least some charm?  And why does everything have to be “right/wrong,” “good/bad”?  Could it be that they are instances were neither side has an answer?  Where the situation is hopeless?

None of today’s pundits are fit to wear H. L. Mencken’s mantle.  They’re not intellectuals; they’re yelping, whining sports fans, fanatically devoted to their teams at the cost of all reason and critical thinking.

Last week I also read Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid and Max Allan Collins’ Deadly Beloved, both published by Hard Case Crime.  Honestly, neither really blew me away, and perhaps that’s not the point.  Hard Case books provide quick, diverting reads: they’re first and foremost entertainment.  That’s fine, and I’ll be quick to say both had me compulsively turning their pages.  They’re competently written and executed.  But they’re both one-dimensional.  I wasn’t surprised that Deadly Beloved was originally a comic strip—it had that simplistic quality of comics that never translates well into books or film (and that’s coming from someone who loves the offerings of Marvel and DC, not to mention Hergé).

I want more from my noir.  I like crime literature that reveals and ponders on the sordid details of life, particularly life beyond the respectable and the law.  That’s why I like Jim Thompson’s books.  Frankly, the plots themselves don’t knock me out.  (I haven’t yet read The Killer Inside Me yet; I understand that’s great on all counts, including story.)  But I’m drawn in by Thompson’s descriptions of people, places, and mood; his artistry of language and imagery; and the subtle yet deliberate way he conveys his worldview.  I didn’t get that from either Deadly Beloved or The Colorado Kid. Contrary to what you might think, I have found it Mickey Spillane’s words.  And not to constantly blow Dissident Books’ horn (that sounds obscene), but Don’t Call Me a Crook! delivers it too.

But all that said, there are two things I appreciated about The Colorado Kid.  It commits the delicious sin of breaking that most holy of compacts with the reader: it leaves the mystery unresolved.  I like that.  I like that a lot.  As the two crusty newspaper editors in Kid intimate, that’s life—an unresolved mystery. 

Stephen King also writes something outstanding in his afterword:

I ask you to consider the fact that we live in web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being reality.  Where do we come from?  Where were we before we were here?  Don’t know.  Where are we going?  Don’t know.  A lot of churches have what they assure us are the answers, but most of us have a sneaking suspicion all that might be a con-job laid down to fill the collection plates.  In the meantime, we’re in a kind of compulsory dodgeball game as we free-fall from Wherever to Ain’t Got A Clue.  Sometimes bombs go off and sometimes the planes land okay and sometimes the blood tests come back clean and sometimes the biopsies come back positive.  Most times the bad telephone call doesn’t come in the middle of the night but sometimes it does, and either way we know we’re going to drive pedal-to-the-metal into the mystery eventually.

I would add to King’s rhetorical questions “What’s it all for?”  And again, the answer is “Don’t know.”  It brings to mind a wonderful passage from Mencken’s Chrestomathy:

Yet we cling to [life] in a muddled physiological sort of way—or, perhaps more accurately, in a pathological way—and even try to fill it with a gaudy, hocus-pocus . . . .   Why?  If I knew, I’d certainly not be writing books in this infernal American climate; I’d be sitting in state in a hall of crystal and gold, and people would be paying $10 a head to gape at me through peep-holes . . . .

 Man cannot sit still, contemplating his destiny in this world, without going frantic.  So he invents ways to take his mind off the horror.  He works. He plays.  He accumulates the preposterous nothing called property.  He strives for the coy eyewink called fame.  He founds a family, and spreads his curse over others.  All the while the thing that moves him is simply the yearning to lose himself, to escape the tragic-comedy that is himself.  Life, fundamentally, is not worth living.  So he confects artificialities to make it so.  So he erects a gaudy structure to conceal the fact that it is not so.

 Perhaps my talk of agonies and tragi-comedies may be a bit misleading.  The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.  The objection to it is not that is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking sense.  What is ahead for the race?  Even theologians can see nothing but a gray emptiness, with a burst of irrational fireworks at the end.  But there is such a thing as human progress.  True.  It is the progress that a felon makes from the watch-house to the jail, and from the jail to the death-house.  Every generation faces the same intolerable boredom.

Final thought:  It was Mencken together with George Jean Nathan who started The Black Mask, the famed detective magazine.  True, Mencken and Nathan began it as a means to subsidize The Smart Set, their prestigious literary magazine, and sold it after eight issues.  And yes, it was the subsequent editor, Joseph Shaw, who recruited great hardboiled writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner.  And Mencken even wrote in his preface to his collection that those who criticized his use of Chrestomathy were “ignoramuses” who “recreate themselves with whodunits.”  But I like to think (keywords “like to think”: not “know” or “certain” or even “have reason to believe”) that Mencken had a soft spot for noir.  Consider his repeated use of criminal and prison imagery, as in the passage above.  I bet noir’s lack of sentiment and harsh view of life on “this lugubrious ball” spoke to the Sage of Baltimore.

That’s not only allusion to cryptocracy.  Another Lord, the cabal’s chief, tells his fellow mind-manipulators:

The media controls behavior.  Do you know what that means?  We control how people act.  If we want the masses excited about something, all we have to do is tell stories.  These stories feed into popular beliefs.  You know, if people believe the end of the world is near, then we can help them to continue to believe that, for years to come.  If we want to preserve our way of life, it is simple.  We must retain control.  Symbolically, we test our control methods now and then in sacred acts.  And through such acts, we remind those around us that to be sacred is to be secret.  Let this tape be a symbol of our power, that we are truly to be feared, and that we are truly untouched, and that the minds of this city are easily and forever broken.

Elsewhere, the same Lord says:

The people always have great fear!  We just remind them of it.  We must always find ways to keep the Southern Valley simpletons on the edge of hysteria, Stevens.  And always, we must mythologize and demonize.

I’m reminded of this passage from Mencken’s Notes on Democracy: “Public Opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob’s fears.  It is piped to central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.”

There’s something interesting about Lords’ locale.  When it’s not subjected to torrential rain, Bakersfield is a dusty, dry place.  Civilization began in a desert, or more accurately, near one.  It might be a stretch to say that it was there the divisions of lord/slave, powerful/weak, leader/follower began, but they must’ve deepen there, became more rigid, more insurmountable.  And while myths and demons weren’t born in Mesopotamia and subsequent desert settlements, it’s there they were recorded and canonized, and where their fascination and fear drove the construction of temples and the rise of priest classes.

And the Lords’ predilection for boys and sadistic sex is no less primeval.  I read somewhere that the act of circumcision was an ancient reminder to young males of who the boss is.  What more effective and intimate channel to intimidate and co-opt potential rivals than sex?  Sex plays can play another role in powerful cults.  It binds the members together.  The bonds can be intimate, and also darker: photographs of debauchery can yield material for keeping the brethren in line and unified.  Consider Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

I’m looking forward to reading Lords: Part Two and learning more about the Lords of Bakersfield from Nick Belardes.

Libertarian Nation: The Call for a New Agenda by James Walsh, Silver Lake Publishing, $19.95

I’m really looking forward to reading this.  I like this extract from the book featured on the front flap:

The current political debate that you see on TV and online is not a real exchange of ideas. [Emphasis mine]  It’s bread and circuses.  They say that generals are always fighting the last war…   well, the same is true for TV producers and newspapers editors.  This nation has spent and borrowed its way to a crisis point.  We’re losing our position as a world leader.  And we need to get back to the philosophical roots on which the nation was founded.  This won’t be good news for the smirking neo-cons… or self-righteous liberals.  They’re both yesterday’s partisans.”

Six years ago I organized a talk co-sponsored by the New York alumni clubs of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.  It was entitled “Monotone Media and Voices on the Margins,” and it examined the lack of true diversity and vigorous political discourse in the mass news media.  Rather than bringing the usual talking heads, I invited journalists from “fringe” backgrounds: a neo-pagan, a conspiracy researcher, and a Marxist.  There was also a business reporter and an analyst from the media watch group FAIR.  I wish I knew Jim back then so he could’ve sat on the panel. 

It’s interesting that Jim mentions “bread and circuses”:  Mencken repeatedly uses that phrase throughout Notes on Democracy.  According to HLM, the masses don’t want real freedom: they want a safe, secure prison, with regular servings of Wonder Bread and “Gilligan’s Island.”  Or Sour Dough and “Lost,” if you prefer.  Jim also talks about the “philosophical roots” upon which America was founded.  I don’t know his position, but Mencken argues that the founders were not at all in favor of universal suffrage, and had a real fear of the mob.  I’ll be curious to know what Libertarian Nation says on this. 

One last thing…  Why should it be surprising that the people Jim condemns as “yesterday’s partisans” be TV producers and newspaper editors?  They’re men and women knee-deep in technology and modes of communication from the last century, indeed, in the case of newspapers, the 19th century.  If the media is the message, then what else could their message be except for yesterday’s news? 

See http://www.silverlakepub.com/