The Need for a Literary Iconoclast
Upon reviewing a handful of essays penned by the incorrigible and irrepressible H.L. Mencken I realized that literary fluidity is the hallmark of the bygone era when typeset held court and linguistic legerdemain both in oration and on the page were pursued with the passion of Houdini’s groupies seeking an audience with the sleight of hand artist.
Even when spinning a yarn about his ill-spent youth in semi-urban Maryland our Mr. Mencken tinted his descriptions with a blend of the idealistic highlight of a child looking out on a world of opportunity and the sardonic shadows of a man approaching his twilight years. Every sentence and every word was another necessary stroke, carefully chosen to have a careless air and yet still impact the reader like a runaway locomotive.
I could stop there, but he was more than a mere wordsmith and enchanting storyteller. Mencken was a first class newspaperman, a daring hero exposing lecherous clerics and skiving social workers, shedding light on the road to perdition engineered by well-intentioned promise-makers while jeering the ideologues among the effete intellectual elite who came down from their Olympian towers of learning to grace the masses with their policies and politicking.
He saw no honor inherent to the statesman and no virtue among those leading puritanical Yankee causes. He had a synonym in the term misanthrope, finding no redemption in mankind, but it appears some demon of frustrated optimism drove him to continue to write the wrongs of those who wronged the rights of his fellow men.
As I considered this legendary gladiator of liberty I wondered aloud. Where is the Mencken of this post-postmodern period? Is he reincarnated in some able if angstile and ill-received newsblogger whose hit-count never will exceed 200? Is he the streaming-documentarian whose masterpieces languish in obscurity or worse still sit buried among the mugging and babbling Yoo-toobois-ies pursuing their quarter-hours of notoriety?
Is it possible that, in this age when all rough-edgies must be smoothed to fit in their proper archetypes before being pushed by the punditry as extreme even though the moves have been carefully composed and orchestrated among focus-groups to promote the maximum fecundity from the facile throng, there is no place for the brilliant if the assertions they make don’t fit the prefabricated parameters of the mass press? Perish the pondering.
Is it coincidence that the town crier of freedom in this age when the principle is now viewed as archaic and a relic of the past is Ron Paul, a man so advanced of years that he is seen as a doddering irrelevant nobody by a body politic trained for thirty years by those over fifty to not trust anyone over forty?
Instead those currently seen as viable are a well-toothed leading-man looking empty resume, a stately iron-lady who has already ascended the throne as queen, an affable, doughy south-mid-westerner with an endorsement from an eighties tough guy, another grin-gunner with powdered sidewalls giving him an air of Reed Richards, and a grizzled veteran itching for another enemy upon which to avenge our young.
Anyone who can hang on between the sound bites and artful dodging would realize that the lot of these micro cephalic, macro icons are different skins applied to the same iPod. All hold the same data, all perform the same functions, all will provide for you the same services. Instead, though, they bicker among themselves over whether raspberry red or leopard print would look better with a fetching hot-pink halter dress. Nobody wants to discuss the machinations at their common core for fear of revealing the whole shell game.
This is an era of flash and glitz and the thesaurus sits crumbling on the shelf side-by-side with the history book. Now, more than ever, exists a need for a sober philosopher to cut through commonly held deceptions with a katana of cruel wit, eviscerating the elites with expertly elected expressions.
We need no pale imitations by polysyllabic ramblers like Miller and Maher, whose ideas are lodged along with their crania in the dank recesses of Hobbesian patriarchy, ceding authority over war, peace, ecology and economy to those winning our state-sponsored beauty contests.
Real thinking requires more than mere literacy, but that of a certain type – referential reading and source seeking. It takes not just alliteration and a Roget’s to ascend to Mencken’s abandoned post, but sound ideas and a fearless nature, and a humor about the whole mess into which humans moving as a group now find themselves when they wouldn’t have gone here as individuals.
