April 9, 2009
MISANTHROPY IS THE PRESERVE OF THE SECULARS:
Mencken and Me (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 4.9.09, American Spectator)
Can you believe it? In the public prints, I have been called a "pipsqueak" and a "self-important pipsqueak" at that. The scene of the crime is the current Forbes magazine. The felon is Jonathan Yardley, an elderly book critic at the Washington Post. Yardley was asked by Forbes if any of the "current crop of right-wing pundits" is comparable to H.L. Mencken, the editor and critic best known for his work in the 1920s. I was referred to along with Ann Coulter (who apparently told CNN in 2006 that she is "the right-wing Mencken"), Mark Steyn, and P.J. O'Rourke. Yardley went on to say, "I don't respect a single one of them, much less think that a single one of them deserves to be compared to H.L.M." [...]In The American Spectator I reviewed a couple of convincing biographies of "the Sage" and concluded that he was a very amusing, albeit wrong-headed, writer of brilliant prose, who by the 1930s "had become an anti-Semite, a racist, and a reactionary crank." Yet, he was also a fine philologist and editor. The American Mercury, which he founded in 1924 with George Jean Nathan and Alfred A. Knopf, was an exhilarating departure from the musty magazines that preceded it, and the Mercury allowed him to become America's first celebrity intellectual. [...]
He was a very funny writer until his anti-democratic and anti-religious jokes overwhelmed his other jokes and lost the capacity to make readers laugh.
As Friend Driscoll rightly pointed out, imagine the well-warranted indignation with which a new Mencken would be met today. Mr. Yardley is basically acknowledging that even the sharpest andmost-biting conservative pundits today are devoid of the sort of hatreds that all too often drove the Sage of Baltimore, which is, not coincidentally, why they're funny.