Cover of The Vintage Mencken, published by Knopf in 1991 – one of the Mencken collections (along with A Mencken Chrestomathy) I own (fair use)

(7) H.L. MENCKEN –

“THE ANGLO-SAXON” (1923)

“No one in this world…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby”

The “Sage of Baltimore” and the “American Nietzsche” – writer, journalist, essayist, critic, satirist, “acerbic critic of government, religion, and popular culture”, “one of the most influential American writers and stylists of the early 20th century as well as one of its leading cynics and sceptics”.

In other words, one of those great gadflies whom I like so much – and for whom sacred cows make the best hamburger.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

There’s a certain art to being a provocateur like Mencken – one has to be a consummate prose stylist. Prose style counts for a lot with me. I always admire a good prose stylist, even when I don’t agree with them – and Mencken was one of the best, famous for his “caustic wit and bitingly sardonic prose”, or in other words, mastery of snark.

“The term Menckenian has entered multiple dictionaries to describe anything of or pertaining to Mencken, including his combative rhetorical and prose styles”.

If that wasn’t enough to endear him to you, “Mencken viewed the freedom to drink as critical liberty and considered alcohol as one of humanity’s greatest inventions” – of which, I add, margarita is the pinnacle of human achievement.

“His humor and satire owed much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain”, with turns of phrase that “evoked the erudite cynicism and rapier sharpness of language displayed by Ambrose Bierce in his darkly satiric The Devil’s Dictionary”.

There’s much to choose from for Mencken but if anything was the peak of his provocations and prose stylings, it was his essay “The Anglo-Saxon” skewering the contemporary pretensions of the Anglophone nations, notably Britain and the United States. It takes a certain skill to take all three of Britain, the United States and the Confederate States of America in their various wars on opposing sides where at least one of them fought their way to victory – and still lambast them all for their cowardice and military inferiority.