s-t-t at juno.com wrote:
> I'd wager that the last, however, did well-equip
> him to skewer popular lunacies.
>
Precisely. He treated the "boobocracy" (his term) as strictly the sum of its "members" -- i.e. he operated by Margaret Thatcher's principle that there is no society, only individuals. Throughout the modern period there have been a rather large number of first-rate satirists & humorists operating from reactionary political positions. And quite a few of them (e.g., Swift) stand rather head and shoulders above Mencken.
After a while I get very bored with endless well-done humor built around an utterly detestable core. Good writers are a dime-a-dozen. I see nothing wrong with private pleasure from jerks, or even in sharing that pleasure with others, but I get sick & tired of having liveliness in the abstract held up as such a big deal politically.
I would never dream of doing an nth paraphrase of Wordsworth with "Swift thou shouldst be living," "Pound thou shouldst be living," etc etc etc. Mencken is essentially cotton candy for snobs.
Carrol