New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
In Ohio, James Blaesing, the grandson of long-forgotten U.S. President Warren G. Harding (Blaesing's mother was presumed as the "love child" of Harding and his mistress), has gone to court to exhume Harding's body so all of this can be proven scientifically through DNA testing.
Officially, Harding and his wife had no children, and oddly, a surviving branch of the family does not contest Blaesing's assertion. Rather, it is surmised that the grandson is angling for enhanced recognition of his mother at a museum in the president's home (an historic site) as well as his presidential center, neither of which can be imagined as prime tourist destinations even before the pandemic.
However, perhaps some day we can include Harding on a road trip itinerary. After all, I've been to my hero H.L. Mencken's house in Baltimore, and Mencken detested Harding. This sounds like a circle in need of closing.
Following is a brief excerpt from the Sage of Baltimore. The whole work is here.
Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
But I grow lyrical. More scientifically, what is the matter with it? Why does it seem so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense? If you had first read the inaugural address and then heard it intoned, as I did (at least in part), then you will perhaps arrive at an answer. That answer is very simple. When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.
Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.
H.L. Mencken, "Alcohol", Damn! A Book of Calumny, 1918
Concurrently there's nothing surprising about the rise of the teetotal student, and I've no criticism to make of it. Abstinence absent compulsion (for the rest of us to do the same) is just fine, and those who choose to drink should so so responsibly. Cohabitation is good.
Universities are seeing an increase in teetotal clubs and alcohol-free accommodation. Why are students drinking less?
... A rising number of young people are abstaining from booze, with 36% of 16-24 year-olds in full-time eduction not touching alcohol, according to a survey by University College London. Dr Linda Ng Fat, lead author of the study, believes that an overall decline in drinking has made it more acceptable for young people to shun alcohol. “It seems that non-drinking is becoming more normative, which could make it easier for more and more young people not to drink, should they choose to.”
The newspaperman, polemicist, linguist and all-around controversialist H. L. Mencken has been perhaps the single greatest influence on me in terms of writing style, and as we conclude a brief getaway to Baltimore, let it be known that the city and the man are virtually inseparable.
... A curmudgeon with an acidic writing style, Mencken gained national recognition as one of the most influential critics of American culture, politics, education and life, coining the word "booboisie" to describe the American public. His influence was unmistakable as the foremost authority on the American language through his multi-volumed The American Language.
During my very first visit to Baltimore in 1996, I walked from the Inner Harbor to Mencken's house, just shy of two miles each way, in order to take a photo; the house wasn't open that particular day, and now it is closed to the public.
I can't find the photo.
Memory fails me, but it's safe to assume I was at the Wharf Rat shortly after concluding this trek, draining cask-conditioned ale and recalling the choicest words of the Sage of Baltimore, as here, the first section of an article written amid Mencken's coverage of the Scope Monkey Trial.
Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.
On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
Although to this very day, I've no idea why Mencken pops into my head so often as I'm strolling around Nawbany.
It is imperative for the future health and well-being of the municipality that we embrace historical consciousness, hence my contention that the victims of the savage and deranged social experiment known as Prohibition -- surely America's second-worst idea ever, albeit well behind human slavery in terms of ramifications -- be memorialized, preferably adjacent to a watering hole that reminds us of what the heinous teetotalers tried to take away.
This effort may well become the focus of the rest of my life. Less than a year ago, I surveyed the background:
“In a house once standing here, New Albany’s chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union advocated for Prohibition and abstinence from ‘Demon Alcohol.’ But Prohibition proved to be a disaster, and so it is vitally important that we remember the WCTU’s efforts favoring Prohibition, all the better for us to reject Prohibition, now and forever.”
Of course, my permanent departure from the New Albanian Brewing Company precludes the realization of the Prohibition memorial at the precise spot where the WCTU's headquarters once operated; currently, this square footage serves as Bank Street Brewhouse's outdoor seating area.
Perhaps a plaque might eventually be erected there as part of a walking tour incorporating too many vital historical insights to enumerate here. The central point remains: Prohibition was absurd, and every aspect of remembering its lessons is factually verifiable. It is non-fiction.
To return yet again to the words of Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." There needs to be a memorial to the idiocy, because it must not be forgotten.
I suspect the major problem with using the concrete plinth (circled in the photo above) as the base of a memorial art installation is that it belongs to the alley, and hence to the city. However, everything's negotiable, and it costs nothing to ask questions. If the project is deemed feasible, then I'll pursue it.
Until then, savor these words by H.L. Mencken.
The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria, gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease. They preached a millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of thousands of naive and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans, nor even democrats. That millennium, as everyone knows, has failed to come in. Not only are crime, poverty and disease undiminished, but drunkenness itself, if the police statistics are to be believed, has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal. Prohibition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so vastly augmented the number of users. The young of both sexes, mainly innocent of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously. In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its proponents promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not. On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement statutes — that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.
Pity poor ersatz. In its native German, ersatz started out as a harmless word, connoting a simple substitute or replacement — a new part for something worn out. But two world wars and a whole lot of not-enough-food changed that forever, particularly on the lips of returning POWs who brought the word into English.
In a roundabout way, Ford's well-considered (not ersatz at all) thoughts lead to corn, American style. Click through to see how.
It takes a certain way of thinking to break open a spiffy packet labeled “ersatz pepper” and filled with a teaspoon of ash — and scatter it over your meal, however ersatz it may already be. Food, that most corporeal foundation of society, was becoming notional, the site of sustenance moving from the belly to the mind.
Not that this came without some cost. There was ersatzkrankheit, “substitute sickness,” which came from eating too many foods that weren’t really what they should have been or weren’t even food at all. But there was another, more telling, neologism that emerged. This was ersatzmenchen — “substitute people,” a uncomfortably sinister term that reflected the front line’s endless appetite for its own kind of substitutes.
Ersatzkrankheit seems tailor-made to describe the result of ingesting too much fake (ersatz) news.
Tying together "ersatz" and the Great War, and adding the opportunity to make mention of my hero H.L. Mencken, I conclude with a quote from Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South, by Hal Crowther
... It made Mencken a contrarian, a libertarian, and a political lone wolf. Do you have any idea how much courage – how much arrogance – it took for a 35-year-old newspaperman to sit in Baltimore and cheer for Germany in World War I, a minority of one flying in the teeth of one of the most poisonous spasms of jingoism America ever produced? It’s a true miracle he wasn’t lynched.
Risk life, limb and livelihood for a principle, for a prejudice? It’s impossible to place Mencken in a context the twenty-first century can understand, in our cultural cul-de-sac where the eloquent knights-errant of the editorial pages have been replaced by TV “news” shows geared to the depth and dignity of professional wrestling—tag teams of predictable hacks and eunuchs squealing in ersatz fury and quacking partisan platitudes. Seating Mencken on Crossfire would be like releasing a wolverine among neutered cats.
The whole life of the inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider.
-- H. L. Mencken
It is said that the fabled American journalist, writer and social commentator H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.
H.L. Mencken, in full Henry Louis Mencken … controversialist, humorous journalist, and pungent critic of American life who powerfully influenced U.S. fiction through the 1920s … Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses.
A person who disputes; who is good at or enjoys controversy.
Mencken’s written output of curmudgeonly feistiness verifies his mastery of the polemical arts, and as such, you can count him among my most prominent role models.
In addition, as a militant German-American enduring a “dry” era brought about by the same religious zealots, health fascists, cultural terrorists and bubble-headed activists now inhabiting local health departments nationwide, Mencken was not averse to the merits of the tall, cool one.
Mencken was one of the earliest advocates of unrestricted bile as a means of equal opportunity, and understood that common sense is remarkably uncommon.
Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.
In short, Mencken was an iconoclast of the highest order, and so the word itself is worth revisiting.
1. A person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition. 2. A breaker or destroyer of images, especially those set up for religious veneration.
To hell with Walt Disney. My heroes have always been iconoclasts. From Socrates through Tom Paine, and Mencken through Hunter S. Thompson, there’s nothing as thrilling to me as an iconoclast taking a headlong swipe at cherished, unexamined assumptions. Better yet, given my own career as a tippler ...
tippler(noun) A person who is habitually drunk: drunk, drunkard, inebriate, sot. Slang: boozehound, boozer, lush, rummy, soak, souse, sponge, stiff.
... the most wonderful aspect of iconoclasm is that rampant personal dissipation does not pre-empt the message.
It actually may enhance it.
My current personal reading selection is The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, by Lisa McGirr. This sad history documents what can go wrong when abstinence from alcoholic beverages is legislated by government, and of course Mencken well understood the implications of this habit of mind.
Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.
The richness of Mencken’s writing reached well beyond newspapers, magazine essays and polemics to history and etymology.
In particular, he was a scholar of the American tongue, documenting the “old” English language’s transformation into something new, vital and distinctly ours. Here is a brief excerpt from Mencken’s seminal The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (Fourth Edition, 1937):
"An English saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the bucket, can, growler, shell, seidel, stein or schooner, but by the pint, half-pint or glass. He and his brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade, or simply the trade. He may divide his establishment into a public-bar, a saloon-bar and a private-bar, the last being the toniest, or he may call his back room a parlour, snug or tap-room. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he may call it a lounge. He employs no bartenders. Barmaids do the work, with maybe a barman, potman or cellarman to help. "Beer, in most parts of Great Britain, means only the thinnest and cheapest form of malt liquor; better stuff is commonly called bitter. When an Englishman speaks of booze he means only ale or beer; for our hard liquor (a term he never uses) he prefers spirits. He uses boozer to indicate a drinking-place as well as a drinker. What we call hard cider is rough cider to him. He never uses rum in the generic sense that is has acquired in the United States, and knows nothing of rum-hounds, rum-dumbs, rum-dealers, the rum-trade, and the rum-evil, or of the Demon Rum. "The American bung-starter is a beer-mallet in England, and, as in this country, it is frequently used for assault and homicide."
Closing note: Today's thoughts have been adapted from previous columns.
I awoke to the word "farrago" as it fought for release from my tortured conscience, no doubt an inevitable side effect of watching Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening.
Another hour of my life, wasted without strong drink.
Flashing like motel neon just adjacent to "farrago" was the name "Mencken." It's tempting to take the easy way out and extract all of Shane's excellent future words from Mencken's writings. Typically I must consult the dictionary several times per Mencken essay, as with "sempiternal" (eternal and unchanging; everlasting).
Of course, the word "everlasting" takes me directly to the Manic Street Preachers.
But I digress.
Mencken's famous observation that the Book of Genesis is a "farrago of nonsense" is included herein, in an essay embracing a general theme that will be painfully familiar to New Albanians who've watched the unfolding Chronicles of New Gahania. "The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear."
---
Forgotten Men, by H. L. Mencken (American Mercury, March, 1928, pp. 280-282)
Happy nations, said Cesare Bonesano Beccaria, have no history. Nor, it appears, have intelligent men; at all events, they are seldom remembered generally, and almost never with respect. All the great heroes of the human race have preached things palpably not true, and practised things palpably full of folly. Their imbecilities, surviving, constitute the massed wisdom of Homo sapiens, lord of the lion and the whale, the elephant and the wolf, though not, as yet, of the gnat and the fly, the cockroach and the rat. So surviving, these august imbecilities conceal the high probability that, when they were new, they must have been challenged sharply by doubting and dare-devil men—that sober reason must have revolted against them contemporaneously, as it does today. But of that revolt, in most cases, nothing is known. The penalty of intelligence is oblivion.
Consider, for example, the case of those ancient Jews whose banal speculations about the origin of things still afflict the whole of Christendom, to say nothing of Islam. Is it possible to believe that, in the glorious Eighth and Ninth Centuries B.C., all Jews swallowed that preposterous rubbish — that the race was completely devoid of intelligent men, and new nothing of an enlightened public opinion? I find it hard to go so far. The Jews, at that time, had already proved that they were the best of the desert tribes, and by long odds, and they were fast moving to the front as city folks, i.e., as civilized men. Yet the only Jewish document that comes down to us from that great day is part of the Book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it. The kind of mind it reveals is the kind one encounters today among New York wash-room attendants, Mississippi newspaper editors, and Tennessee judges. It is barely above the level of observation and ratiocination of a bright young jackass.
Are we to assume that this appalling mind was the best Jewish mind of the time—that Genesis represents the finest flowering of the Jewish national genius? To ask the question is to answer it. The Jews, you may rest assured, were not unanimously of such low mental visibility. There were enlightened men among them as well as sorcerers and theologians. They had shrewd and sophisticated fellows who were to Moses and the other patriarchs as Thomas Henry Huxley was to Gladstone. They had lost and happy souls who laughed at Genesis quite as loudly the day it was released as it is laughed at today by the current damned. But of these illuminati not a word survives in the records of the Jews. Of their animadversions upon Moses’s highfalutin tosh—and no doubt those animadversions were searching and devastating—we lack even so much as the report of a report. Thus all we know today of the probably brilliant and enterprising intellectual life of the ante-Exile Jews is contained in a compilation of balderdash by certain of their politicians and ecclesiastics. It is as if their descendants of our own time were to be measured by the sonorous rumble-bumble of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Otto H. Kahn. It is as if the American civilization we sweat and prosper under were to go down into history in terms of Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford and Arthur Brisbane.
Well, why not? Those, perhaps, are the precise terms in which it is to go down. On second thought, I change perhaps into no doubt. What has happened invariably in the past will keep on happening to the end of the chapter. Certainly we can’t expect to escape the fate of Greece and Rome—and both Greece and Rome are chiefly remembered today (and venerated by the learned and unintelligent) by the records of their second- and third-rate men. Is it seriously argued that Plato was the most enlightened Greek of his age? Then it may be argued with equal plausibility that Upton Sinclair has been the most enlightened American of this one. Item by item the two match: as political scientists, as professors of esthetics, as experts on the natural processes. In some ways, true enough, Plato was clearly superior to Sinclair: for one thing, he was better versed in the jargon of metaphysics, heavenly maid—which is to say, in the jargon of organized nonsense. But I think that no one will undertake to deny that Sinclair beats him on the pharmacology of alcohol, on the evils of voluptuousness, and on the electronic vibrations of the late Dr. Albert Abrams.
Plato survives today as one of the major glories of Greece. Put upon oath in a court of law, more specialists in dead ideas would probably rate him as the greatest Greek of them all. But you may be sure that there were Athenians in his own day who, dropping in to hear his Message, carried away a different notion. Some of them were very bright fellows, and privy to the philosophical arcana. They had heard all the champions, and had their private views. I suggest somewhat diffidently that there were ideas in the Republic and the Laws that made them retire to the nearby wine-shops to snigger. But no one remembers those immune Athenians today, nor the hard-boiled fellows who guffawed at the court of Philip of Macedon. The world recalls only Plato.
Here, I sincerely hope, I shall not be mistaken for one who seeks to cry that great man down. On the contrary, I venerate him. There is implicit in his writings, though not often explicit, the operation of an intellect of a superior order. Whatever may be said against him, he at least refrained from ratifying the political, theological and epistemelogical notions that were current in his time. He was no Athenian Rotarian, but his very intelligence made him remember, when he got up before his customers, that it was necessary to adapt his speculations to their capacities and prejudices. Like Woodrow Wilson in a later age, he had a weakness for oratory, and got himself enmeshed in its snares. Some of his principal works are no more than reports of his harangues, and the heat in them singes the sense. He suffered, as all reflective men must suffer, from the fact that what is put into words for the general ear can never come within even the remotest reach of what is pondered in the privacy of the study or praying-room.
The case of Abraham Lincoln immediately recalls itself. He was, I believe, one of the most intelligent men ever heard of in his realm—but he was also a politican, and, in his last years, President of the Federal Union. The fact worked an immemorial cruelty upon him when he visited the battlefield of Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863. One may easily imagine the reflections that the scene and the occasion must have inspired in so sagacious and unconventional a man—at all events, one may imagine the more obvious of them. They were, it is highly probable, of an extremely acrid and unpleasant nature. Before him stretched row upon row of new-made graves; around him ranged the gaunt cinders of a witless and abominable war. The thought must have occurred to him at once that --
But before him there also stretched an acre or two of faces—the faces of dull Pennsylvania peasants from the adjacent farms, with here and there the jowls of a Philadelphia politician gleaming in the pale Winter sunlight. It was too cold that day to his badly-cushioned bones for a long speech, and the audience would have been mortally offended by a good one. So old Abe put away his reflections, and launched into the tried and sure-fire stuff. Once started, the furor loquendi dragged him on. Abandoning the simple and crystal-clear English of his considered utterance, he stood a sentence on its head, and made a pretty parlor ornament of it. Proceeding, he described the causes and nature of war in terms of the current army press bureau. Finally, he launched a sonorous, meaningless epigram, and sat down. There was immense applause. The Pennsylvania oafs were delighted. And the speech remains in all the shool-books to this day.
Lincoln had too much humor in him to leave a diary, and so we do not know what he thought of it the day following, or a month later, or a year. But it is safe to assume, I believe, that he vacillated often between laughing at it sourly and hanging himself. For he was far too intelligent to believe in any such Kiwanian bombast. He could no more have taken it seriously than he took the strutting of Mr. Secretary Seward seriously, or the cerebral steam-pressure of General Grant. He knew it, you may be sure, for what it was. He was simply doomed, like many another good man before and after him, to keep his soundest and loftiest thoughts to himself. Just as Plato had to adapt his most penetrating and revolutionary thoughts to the tastes and comprehension of the sophomores assembled to hear him, so Lincoln had to content himself, on a great occasion, with ideas comprehensible to Pennsylvania Dunkards, which is to say, to persons to whom genuine ideas were not comprehensible at all. Knowing their theological principles, he knew that, in the political field, they grazed only on pansies.
Nor is this all. The highest flights of human intellect are not only inordinately offensive to the overwhelming majority of men; they are also, at least in large part, incapable of reduction to words. Thus the best thought of the human race does not appear in its written records. What is set down in orderly and seemly sentences, even today, always has some flavor in it of the stilted rubbish that the Sumerian kings used to engrave upon their tombs. The current cliches get into it inevitably; it is never quite honest. Complete honesty, intellectually, seldom expresses itself in formal words: its agents of notification are rather winks and sniggers, hip flasks and dead cats. The language was not made for it. Reading Shakespeare, a man of penetrating intelligence, one frequently observes him trying to put a really novel and apposite thought into words—and falling helplessly into mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. The groundlings pulled him and the deficiencies of human speech pushed him. The result is many a magnificent salvo of nonsense, vastly esteemed by the persons who esteem that sort of thing.
I propose no remedy. In fact, I am convinced that no remedy is possible, or even imaginable. The human race seems doomed to run, intellectually, on its lowest gear. Sound ideas, when by chance they become articulate, annoy it and terrify it; it prefers the sempiternal slobber.
Rejoice, because 2016 provides Americans with the chance to prove wrong the Sage of Baltimore.
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Yes, you're right; in the case of Trump v. Clinton, Mencken's observation is a nasty trick! After all, one of them has to win ... well, unless Gary Johnson comes through.
... Trump watches a lot of cable and listens to a lot of right-wing news. He inhabits the same bubble as the Republican voters who eat this stuff up, without a scintilla of awareness of how toxic it is in other precincts. He’s a man who has no idea what has happened to him. He has completely lost the plot.
No matter what I will forever stand against evil. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are evil. And I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils: Hilary Clinton. Hilary Clinton is what was once upon a time known as a Moderate Republican. Even though Clinton has the lead Sanders is still in the race. If Sanders loses I refuse to vote for Clinton, the lesser of two evils. But by God I'm not leaving America. I'll continue to proclaim resistance poetry on the streets, in the valleys and from the mountain tops!!
Ron Whitehead, Kentucky Poet
Perhaps ninety years ago, H. L. Mencken.
Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun.
When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.
Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year.
Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.
But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded
as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and
Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and
Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons.
The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests,
bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake.
Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.
What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:
Resheph
Anath
Ashtoreth
El
Nergal
Nebo
Ninib
Melek
Ahijah
Isis
Ptah
Anubis
Baal
Astarte
Hadad
Addu
Shalem
Dagon
Sharaab
Yau
Amon-Re
Osiris
Sebek
Molech?
All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:
Bilé
Ler
Arianrhod
Morrigu
Govannon
Gunfled
Sokk-mimi
Nemetona
Dagda
Robigus
Pluto
Ops
Meditrina
Vesta
You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.
ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
Last autumn an American wrote to the Queen of England, requesting that she take back the colonies in the event of a Donald Trump presidency.
The office of Elizabeth II actually made a reply, politely noting that it isn’t her habit to interfere in the affairs of sovereign states, something that might come as a shock to Argentina and Iraq, to name just two.
Inevitably, this real-life exchange morphed into a satirical Internet rendering of the Queen’s earnest promise to intervene, which immediately metastasized into widespread on-line gullibility, necessitating a rebuttal by Snopes.
By the time Snopes was finished snooping, hundreds of thousands of Americans were equating Englishness with ISIS-ness, and rushing fully armed (and uninsured) to our border with Canada, since almost none of them grasp that one cannot drive to London from Mississippi.
Perhaps I’m the only observer who made a cup of black tea with milk, inserted Oasis’ “Definitely Maybe” into the CD player, sat on my divan, and started thinking about what a fine idea it would be for the United States to resume colonial status.
Knowing this action is unlikely does not diminish the pleasure of daydreaming, and after all, there’s another way.
This occurred to me last week, while watching an old BBC documentary about the life of the poet T. S. Eliot, who was born into a factory-owning family in St. Louis, but got better.
(Eliot) immigrated to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalized as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.
My knowledge of Eliot’s life is far too scant to venture an opinion as to why being a mere expatriate was insufficient. However, this passage from his poem “Little Gidding” resonates.
What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
As non-native Americans, we came to the United States from a variety of places, reflecting myriad circumstances. Obviously, the journey of an African slave was far different from that of my German ancestors.
Still, it can be asserted that as violent, incomplete and messy as the American experiment has been, and in spite of the utterances of the many under-educated dullards currently dotting our degraded landscape, the ultimate point remains: We, as Americans, agree to a contract stipulating our citizenship not through ethnic, religious or financial litmus tests, but by acceptance of certain points of governmental order, as expressed in the Constitution.
In turn, whatever their merits, these points of governmental order arose as post-traumatic manifestations of our colonial experience. Many of them were borrowed from the British. Others were intended as revolutionary improvements. Some were smudged and fudged, requiring adjustments further down the line – as with the American Civil War.
In my view, there has tended to be a measure of hypocrisy with regard to American citizenship. Almost from the beginning, those already established here have tended to divide the planet’s human population into reputable and unsavory potential arrivals, seeking to welcome the former and prohibit the latter.
As it pertains to those fortunate enough to be accepted, we see nothing unusual about their renunciation of citizenship, and in fact celebrate their good taste in domiciles.
However, I suspect an American like Eliot, who chose to reject Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill and become a citizen of the former colonial overlord, was regarded as a turncoat or traitor.
It has been 240 years, but to me this notion of an American choosing to be British is the most profound conversion of all, far outweighing “born again” religious embraces, precisely because it symbolizes the discarding of a rote pledge of allegiance to a cloth flag, in favor of kneeling at the feet of pestiferous royalty.
In the end, or in the beginning, I suppose it depends on what the piece of cloth really stands for. At times these days, I wonder.
My wife’s mother was born in Plymouth, England. She married a man from Maine, and became an American citizen. If British law allowed her to reclaim a slice of citizenship, would she take it? If so, as her husband, would I? Could I abandon New Gahania for Yorkshire?
Our decision-making process would not be restricted to the glories of access to the European Union and the extended Commonwealth, although these factors are significant. Rather, it would address the opportunity to look Americanism squarely in the eye, and see who blinks first.
As with life itself, I wasn’t involved with the process of coming into existence. Leaving it is different. I have no plans to die or emigrate any time soon. But being an American can be very, very tiring.
Must we be so consistently proud to be enduringly stupid?
---
With the horror of a presidential election year about to be unleashed, the fabled American journalist, writer and social commentator H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) needs to be reincarnated.
The whole life of the inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider.
Mencken is said to have celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.
“My first in 13 years,” he succinctly explained.
H.L. Mencken, in full Henry Louis Mencken … controversialist, humorous journalist, and pungent critic of American life who powerfully influenced U.S. fiction through the 1920s … Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses.
Controversialist … now there’s a wonderful word, indeed. It may need to appear on my post-NABC business cards.
As a militant American of German ancestry, enduring a “dry” era brought about by the same religious zealots, health fascists, cultural terrorists and bubble-headed activists now inhabiting social media (and local health departments) nationwide, Mencken was not averse to the merits of the tall, cool one, and I could not agree more strongly.
Surely Mencken would take great delight in skewering a petty Hoosier politician by the name of Bill Davis, who until his providential resignation in 2014, habitually used his sinecure as chairman of the House’s public policy committee like a bully pulpit to denounce beverage alcohol, often “bottling” up sensible reforms by preventing their passage through committee to a full reading and vote.
Davis does not drink, and Mencken well understood the fatal implications of this bizarre condition.
Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.
Mencken was one of the earliest advocates of unrestricted bile as a means of ensuring equal opportunity, and he understood that common sense is remarkably uncommon.
All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non-sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.
Hardly a week goes past without my pulling down a Mencken volume from the bookshelf in my home library and seeking brief consolation in a paragraph or three. The required dosage increases during times of jaundice.
Like now.
I keep reminding myself: History’s lessons provide as many reasons to be sanguine as depressed. Life is cyclical. The pendulum swings forever, first out, then back. One merely needs to be patient, and wait.
In point of fact, I’m perfectly content to bide my time.
Whether or not Trump wins, would the cottage in Cornwall be a better venue for heel-cooling than my present view of a moronic one-way street?
Those of us who were not among the Gipper's ideological brethren have found it all too easy to blithely shrug and say we knew it all along. Of course, it's far deeper than that, and Donne's "no man is an island" hits closest to home.
As one enamored of words and writing, HL Mencken always has served as a sad and cautionary tale. The Sage of Baltimore suffered a stroke in 1948, leaving him (eventually) able to speak and communicate, but unable to write. A man who wrote millions of words lived eight years this way, often referring to himself in the past tense as dead already.
Pick a terror -- any terror: Mine is Mencken's fate, or Ronald Reagan's. Alzheimer's is nasty business indeed, and the thought that alterations in speaking patterns might serve as early warning is fascinating.
... Now a clever new analysis has found that during his two terms in office, subtle changes in Mr. Reagan’s speaking patterns linked to the onset of dementia were apparent years before doctors diagnosed his Alzheimer’s disease in 1994.
The findings, published in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease by researchers at Arizona State University, do not prove that Mr. Reagan exhibited signs of dementia that would have adversely affected his judgment and ability to make decisions in office.
But the research does suggest that alterations in speech one day might be used to predict development of Alzheimer’s and other neurological conditions years before symptoms are clinically perceptible.
Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.
H.L. Mencken, "Alcohol", Damn! A book of Calumny, 1918
Why am I thinking about the Sage of Baltimore, a longtime personal hero? Because a hardback set of Prejudices 1 through 6 was a Christmas gift from the missus, that's why.
H. L. Mencken on William Jennings Bryan, hero of the creationists, and lawyer for the prosecution in Dayton, Tennessee, at the Scopes Monkey Trial. I'd compare Bryan to certain local luminaries, except that they're not luminous.
This old buzzard, having failed to raise the mob against its rulers, now prepares to raise it against its teachers. He can never be the peasants' President, but there is still a chance to be the peasants' Pope. He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening, his face streaming with sweat, his chest heaving beneath his rumpled alpaca coat. One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities. It is a tragedy, indeed, to begin life as a hero and to end it as a buffoon. But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us can shake and inflame them, and he is desperately eager to order the charge.
I've been cleaning "favorites" and discarding old, unused and broken links. It's been a while since I'd visited the humorous realms of LBC and Jeeebus:
You just never know when a Mencken phrase will pop into your head.
It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous ... The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
In his preface to “Bertrand Russell on God and Religion,” the book’s editor, Al Seckel, writes:
There is a marvelous anecdote from the occasion of Russell's ninetieth birthday that best serves to summarize his attitude toward God and religion. A London lady sat next to him at this party, and over the soup she suggested to him that he was not only the world's most famous atheist but, by this time, very probably the world's oldest atheist. "What will you do, Bertie, if it turns out you're wrong?" she asked. "I mean, what if -- uh -- when the time comes, you should meet Him? What will you say?" Russell was delighted with the question. His bright, birdlike eyes grew even brighter as he contemplated this possible future dialogue, and then he pointed a finger upward and cried, "Why, I should say, 'God, you gave us insufficient evidence.'"
Earlier in the week Barack Obama eloquently spoke of intolerance, and the predictable result was a backlash of … well, intolerance, with a sizeable proportion of the bile emanating from the very same people who see themselves as religious, and who embrace the mission of reminding us of it on a daily basis, and of course it is hypocrisy of this magnitude that lies as much at the heart of America as those noble ideals we prefer to enshrine as our national myth. Forgive me then for celebrating today’s decidedly non-secular holiday with H. L. Mencken:
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. -- From “Treatise on the Gods”
From a purely psychological standpoint, even I can’t deny the efficacy of Easter’s promise of hope and comfort, both in the universal sense of human uncertainty when it comes to ultimate meanings, and specifically for those who are at a point of loneliness and despair. Bleak is not a place that lends itself to hope, but concepts like Easter hold out the promise of redemption.
If you’re a believer, I do sincerely hope you find solace, inspiration and comfort from Easter. As an unbeliever, I promise to make good use of the day, beginning with the overdue search for that long-lost bonnet.
After reading today's comments, especially Jon's ( at long last, recognition), I've come to an epiphany.
I realize that it isn't a perfect analogy, but in large measure, the smoking ban ordinance debate has been to me what the Scopes Monkey Trial was to H. L. Mencken.
It may be good, and it may be bad, but it is what it is. I plan on speaking tomorrow night, something I haven't done since Dan Coffey attacked reading and education back in '05.
You'll see a list to the right of matters crucial to the city of New Albany. You'll note that workplace smoking is not among these topics. Readers, if you will, please let me know what I've missed on this list. I'll read the list aloud ... and see if maybe -- just maybe -- council president Gahan blushes.
H.L. Mencken -- the Sage of Baltimore -- wrote the following in the run-up to what came to be known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, and it is undoubtedly the single most influential essay that I have read during a lifetime of reading, hands down ... no contest.
Insofar as I am a polemicist, Mencken is the reason. Just the other day, during the course of a long discussion about the myriad inadequacies and terminal shortsightedness of local politicians like Dan Coffey and Steve Price, I asked an acquaintance whether he'd ever read Mencken. The answer was no.
Well, let this be the place he starts, because in this essay, Mencken -- who wrote the piece in 1925 and died thirty years later -- addresses the city of New Albany in the year 2008, and does so with such uncanny accuracy that I defy any educated person herein to suppress a broad smile ... and a sad, knowing nod.
I've underlined a few passages that continue to resonate with me through the years.
---
Homo Neanderthalensis. By H. L. Mencken. The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925.
I
Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized - though I should not like to be put to giving names - but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer - that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.
On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
II
The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders - that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous - by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.
Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can't understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.
This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive - and a few are enough to carry on.
III
The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex - because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged - and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple - and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.
The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.
Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth - a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! The arts, like the sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.
IV
What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera - a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that at least 108,000,000 have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.
The fact saves good Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.
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