The Irreverent Mr. Mencken - Taki's Magazine
by Jared Taylor December 02, 2012
Why do we still read Henry Louis Mencken? He was mostly a columnist, and columns are usually forgotten the day after they are published. One of the main reasons we still read Mencken is that he was enormously funny. The ability to write humorously about serious things is one of the rarest gifts an author can have.
Mencken also wrote about his own times with great detachment. In the 1930s, he had Freud pegged for a quack and predicted that the Soviet Union would run out of gas and collapse. People also still read Mencken because he wrote—in the bluntest possible way—that men are not equal and that it was insane to pretend that they were. He was a eugenicist and he ridiculed democracy. In our era of “sensitivity,” reading Mencken is almost a guilty pleasure.
INEQUALITY
This is what Mencken said about ordinary people:
The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it is dragged or driven….A geological epoch is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it receives, every lift upon its slow journey upward, must come to it as a free gift from its betters—as a gift not only free but forced.
—Men Versus the Man
http://takimag.com/article/the_irreverent_mr_mencken_jared_taylor/print#ixzz2F4HZ6wRB—Men Versus the Man
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