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 un-distracted 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.
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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