[lbo-talk] Katha Pollit on college football

[cgreen7223 at aol.com]

Yes, there is a side to Mencken's opinions that are revolting. In the 
book I quoted from he also argued that Native Americans are racially 
inferior; that if the dust bowl farmers and southern sharecroppers were 
all killed then it would be of benefit to humanity; that people who 
have more children than they can afford should be sterilized;that 
something should be done to limit the offspring of the "unfit" i.e. the 
different classes of poor people, etc. In the months before he suffered 
a massive stroke that sent him into dementia in November 1948,  he 
fervently supported the red scare then underway and argued for a 
pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union. He was a fanatical 
anti-communist and anti-socialist. He seemed to have bigoted things to 
say about most ethnic groups. He attacked unions as tending to be full 
of workers who wanted to do less work for more money.

But as Henwood has said before, there might be a few things in his 
writings that leftists can learn from. He was very funny and some 
leftists need more of a sense of humor. Ze'ev Chaffets, in his recent 
biography of Limbaugh, compares Mencken to Limbaugh. That is, of 
course, idiotic. I doubt limbaugh, if he were alive in the 1920's and 
30's would have, as Mencken did, refer to the US occupation of Haiti as 
murderous and conducted for the benefit of US businessmen making an 
"unfair and excessive" income from Haitian resources. I doubt Limbaugh 
would have contributed to the Sacco and Vanzetti defense fund and 
lobbied for Emma Goldman's readmission to the US or paid Goldman's 
hospital and funeral bills. I doubt Limbaugh would have protested 
against the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other leftist radicals or 
testified before congress in support of federal legislation against 
lynching.

He was certainly a very independent minded and intelligent, within the 
limitations of his conservative and social darwinist ideology.  Most 
people  admire him for the way he wrote not the substance of what he 
said. They enjoy reading him denounce people as morons but they don't 
really comprehend his most important ideas, such as on the role of 
conformity in society, his attacks on patriotism and moral rage, etc. 
They think of as a comedian before anything else, which is probably 
what he was to a significant extent. Alexander Berkman, in a letter to 
Emma Goldman in the early 30's refered to Mencken as a "superficial 
clown." He probably was that to an extent. Goldman replied that Mencken 
had some significant flaws but that he had done a great deal for civil 
liberties and for pushing down barriers to dissent in the US. Mencken 
wrote an article on Berkman and Goldman in the mid-20's, portraying 
them in a friendly light, calling their anarchist beliefs nonsense but 
praising their writing style and intelligence and their criticisms of 
the Soviet Union. He paid Goldman's hospital and funeral bills after 
she died and wrote government officials arguing for her re-admission to 
the country.

Chris Green

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=44901401