The old gods…who pays their respects anymore?

In his book Prejudices: A Selection (also here in an older edition), in the chapter “Memorial Service”), H. L. Mencken asks…

“Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year…50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest.”

And as far as dead gods go, that’s just for starters. After all, Mencken asks, whatever happened to Resheph, Anath, Ashtoreth, Baal, Astarte, Hsdad, El, Nergal, Nebo, Ninib, Melek, Ahijah, Isis, Ptah, Anubis, Addu, Shalem, Dagon, Sharrab, Yau, Amon-Re, Osiris, Sebek, Molech? Mencken goes on to list a few dozen more. Remember too, that these gods were once held in the highest esteem. “Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Jahveh himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute…”

Hopefully, some Mencken writing in the future will add the sky lords of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the graveyard of gods.

Old Mencken, new Mencken

The venerated Mencken of yesteryear. According to the Youtube poster this is an excerpt from the  only extant audio of HL (the rest of the recording is available on this channel).

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An example of Christopher Hitchens’ acerbic wit; he is, after all, the new Mencken (and according to what I’ve read he could drink old H. L. under the table).

H. L. Mencken

Did you know that the Arkansas legislature passed a motion back in 1931 to pray for H. L. Mencken’s soul? Yes, they did and it was damn nice of them (do legislatures still do this anymore?) Surely, they thought, if anyone were destined for Hell it was Mencken. If you’re looking for some quick and condensed info on Mencken this page is pretty good.

It’s downright astonishing just how much of H.L. Mencken’s writings hold up today.  It just goes to show that the cynical mind, when put to paper, stays crisp and clear through the ages. Of course some allowances have to be made, especially in the way of long forgotten place names. But names, as they represent characters (politicians, celebrities, writers…) are interchangeable. The witty and cynical Mencken knew that human nature has held pretty steady, all the way back to, say when Cro-Magnon man tossed his first spear at a fish. Yes, the politicians of ancient Rome were as tricky-dicky as they are today, and will be tomorrow.

Menken had a superb analytic tool at his disposal. It was a tool that penetrated the fog of idealism and the stifling stickiness of social tradition and religion. It was the great scoffing tool itself. Let’s call it the cynical scythe. He made mincemeat of boldfaced idealistic human intention, commonly called human engineering, and turned Quixotism to jaundice in just a few well turned phrases. He exposed the high sounding words of politicians and religious kingpins into the cheap platitudes they were.

He uprooted the assertions and claims of the moral swindlers, the political charlatans, the confidence tricksters and quacks, the confidence men, the religious frauds, the intellectual impostors, the social tricksters, the educational racketeers, the philosophical hoaxers, the ideological rogues, the judicial villains, and of course the groupies do-gooderism.

Here’s an example of Mencken’s style, from In Defense of Women, in which he mocked the folly of those superior pretensions held by men (a revolutionary concept at the time).

“A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doing seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence, or, as the common phrase makes it, feminine intuition. The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality, an habitual immunity to emotional enchantment, a relentless capacity for distinguishing clearly between the appearance and the substance. The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, a magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank”

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Note: Speaking of souls did you also know that H. L. Mencken is a Saint in the Church of the Sub Genius? Well, it’s true.

Presidential cortex

I wonder if this opinion of H.L.  Mencken’s, about the worthiness of President Grant’s intelligence, would be something like what he would’ve written about Bush:

“Intelligence has been commoner among American Presidents than high character, but Grant ran against the stream by having a sort of character without any visible intelligence whatever…dogged, devoted and dumb. In the White House he displayed an almost inconceivable stupidity. Whatever was palpably untrue convinced him instantly, and whatever was crooked seemed to him to be noble. If the American people could have kept him out of the presidency by prolonging the Civil War until 1877, it would have been an excellent investment…bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup.” Baltimore Evening Sun, 9/30/1931, quoted from A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

About nine or ten years ago I was in a used book shop near Rutger’s University (over in New Brunswick, NJ) and came across an old green cloth two-volume set of The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, probably from the late 19th century. I read them over the next couple of weeks in my spare time. Grant’s generalship was appalling, at least as I remember it. He used men as canon fodder. I don’t remember much in particular but it seemed in every battle he just threw men into the slaughter. It reminded me of when my brothers and I used to play army soldiers outside in the dirt. We had maybe a thousand plastic soldiers and hundreds of artillery pieces and tanks and stuff. We’d set them up in their positions and then throw stones at each other’s forces. They died by the hundreds. Sometimes we’d fire across each other’s lines with bb or cork guns; one time we even used cherry bombs. We threw burning wood onto the battle field. We ignited cans of hair spray like flame throwers. Fires engulfed the plastic pieces. Once, after a battle, one of our bike tires caught fire but, as the smoke cleared,  I still had all of two or three figures standing; the other side was completely down;–100% annihilated. Canons were turned upside down; many of the tanks were mere globs. A lot of the toy soldiers were melted from the intense heat. The whole yard smelled of plastic. So OK, mine was a Pyrrhic victory, granted, but it was still a victory . While I was reading I thought back to these wars we had. They reminded me of Grant’s generalship.