By Bill Frezza
It’s been a week of sober reflection,
accompanied by a self-imposed news fast, during which I’ve struggled to
understand the deeper meaning of our recent electoral catastrophe. Doing so
undistracted by a thousand voices required strict electronic disengagement. I
recommend this as one would take a purgative after eating a batch of bad
oysters.
Many of us of the libertarian persuasion
who had never previously voted Republican made an exception this time because
the stakes were so high. In a purposeful departure from our usual “pox on both their houses” approach, we waded
into the partisan fray naively believing we could make a difference, ignoring
the stink on those with whom we made common cause simply because the alternative
was so much worse.
All for naught. After approaching it for
decades, America has now hurtled past the dependency tipping point. We have
scrapped the last vestiges of our constitutionally limited republic of strictly
enumerated powers and replaced it with an unconstrained entitlement democracy
neither better nor worse than any of the others whose failures have dotted the
course of history—all over weighty issues such as who should pay for condoms.
Heeding the
cry, Forward!, an
electoral majority happily voted for itself unlimited benefits that will
supposedly be paid for by a productive minority—even as the nation careens
toward bankruptcy and said productive minority starts eyeing the exits. With
demographic changes reinforcing a permanent ethnic tribalism that abjures the melting
pot, the likelihood that our country will ever recover its founding values has
vanished as thoroughly as our respect for the dead white men who pledged their
lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to make our way of life possible.
So be it.
Mourn, if you choose. But when you’re done you still have to pay the rent.
Making one’s
way in a country increasingly falling under the spell of slogans used so effectively by Vladimir
Lenin and his fellow travelers requires a new strategy, lest one fall into
chronic despair. This is necessary because nothing is worse than becoming that
one species of ideologue that no one can abide—a bore.
What should
that new strategy be?
I searched
for the answer as I reassessed my own mission as an opinion columnist. Today,
that is a calling, not a true profession. The going rate for opinion pieces has
dropped from $1.50 per word—eagerly paid by hungry editors back when magazines
had business models that actually worked—to zero in today’s content-glutted,
balkanized blogosphere. Let’s face it, as traditional publishing slowly
perishes and is replaced by an electronically enabled mediocrity made possible
by the removal of all barriers to entry, those of us who write do so solely to
entertain what micro-audiences we can gather—a sorry business to be sure, yet
one with deep cultural roots.
Examining
those roots led me to the brink of enlightenment. Crossing its threshold required
abandoning all pretenses that the legacy of Jefferson, Adams, Madison,
Franklin, and Washington has any relevance to our modern world—acknowledging
the judgment of our fellow citizens that the Constitution as written is no
longer a guiding document, but an outmoded relic of an age gone by. In its
stead we have the virtues of unlimited empathy, fairness, solidarity, and the
surrender of ever bigger slices of our take-home pay. Acknowledging these
painful truths and in a token of my conversion, I have burned my voter
registration card so as to never be patsy or party to another damn fool
election.
I have thus
liberated myself from all responsibility to stand athwart history, yelling Stop. What a blessed relief! With the bulk of
my productive years behind me (not that it matters since I’m told I didn’t
build that anyway), I pledge what is left of my life, my misfortune, and my
abandoned honor to become a chronicler of the decline and fall of entitlement
democracy.
Does this
philosophy of cynical detachment have a name, a patron saint, a body of writing
that seekers of truth can study? Where can one find not a sour nihilism, not a
Galt’s Gulch heroism, not a next-life religiosity, but a joyful celebration of
the here and now that revels in the madness of crowds and the charlatans that
lead them, even as the deluge threatens to engulf us all? That
last-days-of-Pompeii, enjoy-it-while-it-lasts, don’t-expect-anything-to-get-better
philosophy has been well elucidated, and it goes by the name Menckenism.
The credo of
American man of letters H. L. Mencken is based on the tenet that politics as
practiced by boobus Americanus should be viewed as an act of
nature, to be dealt with as one would a stormy day. Only a fool tries to reason
with the wind hoping to persuade it to blow in another direction. Mocking those
who insist on going into the rain without an umbrella or who claim that night
is day, cold is hot, snow makes for a good time at the beach, money printing
generates wealth, and nations can tax and spend their way to prosperity may not
solve any problems. But it sure can dish up some compensating amusement while
we wait for the roof to fall in.
The joy of
Menckenism is that it frees practitioners to lampoon the folly of everything
without ever having to defend anything. Not even their own behavior, criticism
of which can be dispatched with a simple phrase understandable even by those
equipped with no more than the basic vocabulary provided by a public education:
If you don’t like it, lump it.
H. L.
Mencken did not write to inform, educate, and improve his fellow man, a project
he would have deemed insane. His complex prose was not designed to penetrate
the intellectual fog in which most people spend their lives. He did not chuckle
good naturedly at man’s foibles, as did Will Rogers, the likable everyman.
Mencken embraced his elitism and used his perch to laugh heartily and acidly at
the knaves who called themselves public servants and the fools who repeatedly
voted them into office.
The key to
understanding how one can go on living in this country after being delivered
into economic bondage by fellow citizens who believe rights resemble shopping
lists is that Mencken always laughed, never cried. He wrote for those who
understood the joke and had the courage to laugh along with him, even as they
careened toward destruction. Along the way, he devoted his energies first and
foremost to making sure that his own life was comfortable and full for as long
as it lasted—and to hell with anyone who resented it and everyone that came
afterwards.
Perhaps the
best example of Menckenism is the approach he took to Prohibition. When it
became clear that voters, in their wisdom, were going to ban the manufacture,
importation, and sale of alcohol, did he mount a political campaign to avert
this self-inflicted calamity? Did he use the power of his pen to explain the futility
of such a policy, pointing out the unintended consequences that would surely
ensue? Did he exhaust himself swimming against the tide of public opinion?
No. He
rented a fortified warehouse and stocked it with a decades’ worth of beer,
wine, whiskey, and champagne. This allowed him to entertain his friends in
style while chortling his way through the rise of bootlegging, rum running,
organized crime, and the accumulation of the Kennedy fortune that plagues us to
this day.
Mencken
understood the American people better than they understood themselves, and he
eloquently shared his understanding with unsparing wit. “If x is the population
of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American,
then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y.” Amen.
Where does
the path lead once one truly gives up on democracy? I don’t know. Join me in a
cocktail and let’s find out.
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