Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and Puddinhead Wilson
are profoundly progressive, especially on the particularly difficult issue of
race in the U.S.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Wojtek Sokolowski
> Sent: 09/18/08 09:02 am
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Mencken
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: "sawicky at verizon.net" <sawicky at verizon.net>
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 2:28:00 PM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Mencken
> I've read Mencken plus a biography of him by Terry Teachout.
> He's a lot of fun by intellectually very shallow when it comes to
> politics and economics, which he seemed to think he knew something
> about. Very sharp on the KKK and the roots of what we now know
> as the G.O.P.
>
> [WS:] I have mixed feeling about his shallowness. Some of his
> socio-economic analyses indeed look simplistic attributions to individual
> character, seemingly missing the influence of social context and
> interaction. But many more reuptable thinkers, including Karl Marx
> (not to mention scores of economists) made simplistic arguments, so
> this is hardly a valid refutation of Mencken's influence.
>
> I think his main contribution is the clarity of his writing. He
> avoided the obscure mumbo jumbo of intellectual jargon that obscures more
> than it can explain, and provided a rather clearly written and
> intellectually stimulating portrait of what for the lack of better term
> can be caled "the American psyche." A good thought provoking
> journalistic account is worth more than volumes of obscure
> philosophical mumbo jumbo. As Mencken's hero Nietsche once said "The
> errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than
> the truths of little men."
>
> If we were to place Mencken on a political map, he would be definitely
> more on the Left than on the Right (especially the American Right.) I
> think he was disowned by the Left because he refused to jump on the
> Left's bandwagon of the 1930s - the (misguided) populism and the
> reverence for FDR. During WW2 he fell into further disrepute because of
> his unabashed Germanophilia. For these reasons, I think he was
> politically banished or exiled, rather than his views being
> intellectually refuted.
>
> As far as comparison to Mark Twain is concerned, they share some common
> traits, notably criticicm of the petit bourgeois bigotry that
> dominated "the American psyche," but there is aone major difference,
> imho. Twain was fundamentally a defender of America and its values (cf.
> Innocents Abroad), he merely repudiated certain aspects of it (cf.
> parochial bigotry). Mencken, otoh, was an unabashed Europhile and a
> critic of Amerca and its core values - of which "boobois" bigotry was
> a central part.
>
> In that respect I am more with Mencken than with Twain. Petit bouregois
> bigotry (manifested in multiple forms ranging from racism to elite and
> foreigner bashing), anti-intellectualism, parochialism, knee-jerk
> conformism and group-think (thinly disguised by individualistic
> rhetoric), faux religiosity (i.e. concern with church politics rather
> than theology and spirituality) and blown out of proprtion delusions of
> grandeur and self-righteousness seem to be the core elements of the
> American collective consciousness, rather thna accidental deviations
> from it. It is liberalism (i.e. progressive political views)
> that seems to be a deviation from that core. There are, of course,
> socio-historical reasons for that, but that is another story.
> Wojtek
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men
> of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the
> fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of
> comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is
> done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what
> they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark
> with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is,
> intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most
> adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The
> Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken
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