Mencken

[Enrique Diaz-Alvarez]

I was reading the excerpt from the National Letters by Mencken in
W.Kiernan's site (yank lefties love to refer to him, so I thought I'd
see what the fuss was all about). Lemme get this straight - the great
problem with America is...(drum roll)... that it lacks a properly
careless, decadent, idle aristocracy!? Give me a break. Hey, all you
had to do was ask Spain, and we would have been happy to send you ours,
free of charge. As is, no returns allowed, though. Problem solved, two
of them, in fact.

I mean, unless one is pissed because wasn't promoted to Count of the
Entrenched Fold himself, how can anybody read this gem without throwing
up?

"All progress goes on at the higher levels. It is there that salient
personalities, made secure by artificial immunities, may oscillate most
widely from the normal track. It is within that entrenched fold, out of
reach of the immortal certainties of the mob, that extraordinary men of
the lower orders may find their city of refuge, and breathe the clean
air. This, indeed, is at once the hall-mark and the justification of an
aristocracy - that it is beyond responsibility to the general masses of
men, and hence superior to both their degraded longings and their no
less degraded aversions"

Didn't this Mencken dude turn out to be quite the Tory in the 30's, when
FDR dared (gasp!) raise his taxes to feed the "nether nine tenths of
humanity" (as he charmingly puts it) that washed his shirts and catered
his parties? Why the cult, then?

The pictures were great, though. Thanks!

Enrique