Mencken vs. the Mainstream Media
by Joseph C. Krupnick

Eighty-five years ago, Woodrow Wilson deployed cantishly ethnocentric rhetoric to shield the West from the threat of anarchism, communism and other ideological evils. Yet after the Great War and the subsequent failure of The League of Nations, the greater part of Europe collapsed. The continent balanced on the brink of bankruptcy, famine and pestilence.

Today, the Bush administration's crusade for democratic justice in the Middle East is impregnated with the same opportunistic and disingenuous rhetoric. Its policies have already caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and drained America's seemingly bottomless coffers. It is no exaggeration to say that in the long run, our very way of life may be at stake.

In the face of such monstrous short-sightedness, today's political and cultural critics are strangely impotent. Unlike the barrage that Wilson faced, current political commentaries are tedious and tendentious. They are alternately dashed off by cranky academics and by mountebankish ideologues spewing partisan policies on behalf of glad-handing politicians. Only an unusual soul — such as Frank Rich, Christopher Hitchens or Louis Menand — has the sound mind, satirical range and linguistic flair that today's political unraveling demands.

Previous generations did not have such a problem. In the 1920s and '30s, essayists penned explosive and widely-circulated screeds in publications such as the Smart Set and The American Mercury, both edited by drama critic George Jean Nathan and journalist H.L. Mencken. They were written by men with broader minds, greater range of experience, deeper passion and an unfailing desire to infuse their writing with biting irony and satire. Today we'd be lucky if we had even a third-rate equivalent of John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway or Ambrose Bierce.

What separated Mencken, for example, from today's men of letters is that he was not an academic. The most incisive critics of his time weren't Ph.D.s, and many, like Mencken, didn't even possess college degrees. And they were not ideological zealots playing the metaphorical trumpet to Jazz Age politicians. The best stylists of the '20s were just freewheeling intellectuals, and they rarely mixed their metaphors or garbled their rhetoric.

Mencken was an uneducated son of a cigar man. He got his break working for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the age of 18. He read everything in sight, talked to everyone and by a friend's estimation, wrote no fewer than 75,000 letters to politicians, journalists, novelists and ordinary people such as police officers. In the process, he produced some of the liveliest polemics to date against American culture. His "On Being an American," while not as concise as what Paul Krugman might write in an Op-Ed for the Times, was more engaging than any criticism today. It makes high jumps over stilted academic bars in favor of what people really wanted to read. About the Great War, Mencken writes:

The American share in that struggle, in fact, was marked by poltroonery almost as conspicuously as it was marked by knavery. Let us consider briefly what the nation did. For a few months it viewed the struggle idly and unintelligently, as a yokel might stare at a sword-swallower at a county fair. Then, seeing a chance to profit, it undertook with sudden alacrity the ghoulish office of Kriegsliefarant.

What makes Mencken's language effective — aside from its aesthetic beauty — is style, punch and blazing intelligence. Compare Mencken's writing with what passes for political criticism in today's world. Tom Friedman, the American exemplar of popular political culture and progenitor of middlebrow homages to international trade, immediately comes to mind.

In his new book, "The World is Flat," which has garnered favorable reviews, even in lefty publications such as The American Prospect, Friedman devotes 400 and some odd pages to a simple-minded notion that could be summed up in an aphoristic sentence by the bastard descendants of Adam Smith. The basic idea: Free trade is good for the world because it opens up jobs and, a la Robert Putnam, because it transforms the world into a friendly international fraternity where we all get to know each other and profit from each other's hard work.

Pretty simple stuff, which Friedman turns into mixed metaphors of chicken soup references that even Pat Buchanan couldn't understand:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been — but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

A cogent criticism of "The World is Flat" was published in the New York Press, in which Matt Taibbi exposes some of what he mockingly calls "Friedmanese." Friedman writes:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

These are expressions that could be replaced with actual English words like "big" for "ubersteroid," "young Indians" for "zippies," and "revolution" for "globalution." Even Friedman's use of the word "flat" in the book's title, as Taibbi observes, is misplaced. What Friedman is looking for is "equalizing" or "leveling" inequities, not "flattening" them. "Flattening" is a physical, geographical word, not an ideology.

And once we decipher the gobbledygook, there's not much substance in Friedman's prose either. He arrives at the platitudinous fable that the world is "a level playing field" — a conception which he returns to so repetitiously we get the feeling Friedman thinks this is a new idea. At any rate, it's a patently false notion; anyone who has ever spent time in a developing country knows that opportunities are not equal, and he knows this the minute he exits the KLM aircraft.

Inequality even in America has grown to new proportions, and the developing world, saddled with inequities of wealth and power, possesses bifurcations of Medieval proportions. However, as we draw closer and closer to apocalyptic possibilities in the face of outsourcing and Third World debt, Friedman maintains Panglossian optimism that we are all doing just great.

All well and moronic, but Friedman becomes even more unrealistic — and Wilsonian — when he argues that all regimes in the world could and should adopt American-styled, democratic social structures. He writes particularly badly in a February 3, 2005 article in the Times,

When any Iranian reform candidate who wants to run can be vetoed by unelected ayatollahs, and any Iranian newspaper can be shut by the same theocrats, that is not democracy. You can call that whatever you want, but not democracy. They don't allow bikinis at nudist colonies and they don't serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, and theocrats don't veto candidates in real democracies.

"Bikinis in nudist colonies?" "Steak at vegetarian restaurants?" Flagrantly mixing his metaphors, Friedman likes to think he's a serious political critic, but the odds are not great that we will see democracies pop up all over the tyrannical worldly world, as he argues in other places in the Feb. 3 piece.

Yet Tom Friedman is lauded in the popular press. He writes foreign affairs editorials for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and now teaches a class at Harvard with fellow egomaniacs Larry Summers and Michael Sandel. Which compels another Mencken missive, published in the Smart Set in 1922 about the level of intellect of popular American critics:

The United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men — that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgment... is so low... this dominance of mob ways of thinking, this pollution of the whole intellectual life of the country by the prejudices and emotions of the rabble, goes unchallenged.

If Mencken was convinced of this in the midst of Thorstein Veblen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot, what would he think of the Friedmanese toilet reading that passes for intelligent criticism today?

Mencken was equally hostile toward the academic elite — the self-ordained ministers of wisdom at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — but not because they were troglodytic club-swingers. On the whole they espoused metaphysical irrelevancies and cowered before the sacred cows of conventionality. He wrote in a 1923 essay for the Baltimore Sun, entitled "Bearers of the Torch":

The central aim of the teacher is often obscured by pedagogical pretension and bombast. The pedagogue, discussing himself, tries to make it appear that he is a sort of scientist. He is actually a sort of barber, and just as responsive to changing fashions. On all hands he is told mainly by his masters that his fundamental function in America is to manufacture an endless corps of sound Americans. A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no matter how often it may change.

Mencken shows almost messianic prescience for the jargoned, horse-fed academic fads of the 21st century — post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post-feminist deconstructionism, etc. English departments these days are so obsessed with the "culture wars" that nobody seems to have time anymore to simply read good books.

Nor do they have time to think about the way their ideas can have real political ramifications. Not so for Mencken. Mencken spent his time with police officers and firemen, and he cavorted with great minds, such as Theodore Dreiser and Joseph Conrad. He devoted essays to significant trials, notable cops, the plight of the libertine and other things that are more familiar to Americans and certainly of greater significance in the outside world. All this goes some way to explaining why Mencken generated an audience that drew from ranks as diverse as the American population itself.

Times of crisis call for subtle but pragmatic solutions, humorous satire and rebel yells. As yet, all we are getting are pine-tarred Ivy-leaguers whose tedious, simple-minded prose inspires nothing but boredom in all but the most boring and simple-minded people.

E-mail Joseph C. Krupnick at joekrupnick at gmail dot com.