From the shelves of the Paco library

On a recent trip to my favorite used book store, I finally bagged the illusive Prejudices: Sixth Series, by H.L. Mencken. The Prejudices series was published in the 1920s, and the sixth volume, like its predecessors, represents collections of essays that range far afield: music, literary criticism, religion, culture - even chiropractic and a suggestion for an appropriate burial rite for agnostics.

But it is Mencken’s writings on American politics that I have always found most fetching, and there is plenty here to engage the mind on that topic, much of which is timeless and all of it laid out in the most unique prose style that ever blossomed in the garden of American journalism. One cannot adequately provide a mere explication of the author’s themes; quotation is vital. So here are a couple of examples.

In the first, Mencken proposes a new model for choosing legislators:

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency…

A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against their will, instead of by fraud and against the will of all the rest of us…

The disadvantages of the plan are very few, and most of them, I believe, yield readily to analysis. Do I hear argument that a miscellaneous gang of tin-roofers, delicatessen dealers and retired bookkeepers, chosen by hazard, would lack the vast knowledge of public affairs needed by lawmakers? Then I can only answer (a) that no such knowledge is actually necessary, and (b) that few, if any of the existing legislators possess it…

My scheme would have the capital merit, if it had no other, of barring the professionals from the game. They would lose their present enormous advantages as a class, and so their class would tend to disappear. Would that be a disservice to the state? Certainly not. On the contrary, it would be a service of the first magnitude, for the worst curse of democracy, as we suffer under it to-day, is that it makes public office a monopoly of a palpably inferior and ignoble group of men.

And here is Mencken on the subject of bureaucracy:

As the bureaucracy under which we all sweat and suffer gradually swells and proliferates in the Republic, life will become intolerable to every man save the one who has what is called influence, i.e., the one who has access to the very privilege which the Fathers of the Republic hoped to abolish…The obscure and friendless man can exist unmolested in the United States only by being so obscure and friendless that the bureaucracy is quite unaware of him. The moment he emerges from complete anonymity its agents have at him with all the complex and insane laws and regulations that crowd the statute-books, and unless he can find some more powerful person to aid him, either for cash in hand or in return for his vote, he may as well surrender himself at once to ruin and infamy. For if the job-holders don’t fetch him with one law they will fetch him with another. Their one permanent purpose in life is to fetch him – by the heels if possible, and if not by the heels then at least by the ears.

Marvelous stuff, and not the less true for being so drolly expressed. A delightful read.