Freedom of Speech and H.L. Mencken

The Right to be Wrong

Kathleen Spaltro

(c) Copyright (2017).  All Rights Reserved.

Gore Vidal, like his friend-enemy Christopher Hitchens, was a poet of contempt. So was their great predecessor, the newspaper columnist and magazine editor H.L. Mencken. Declaring "I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud,” Mencken championed freedom and exposed fraud with gusto and happy venom. The waterfall of Mencken's amazingly gorgeous, unbelievably vivid prose cascades over the sputtering reader. Because he attacked everybody and everything, I wonder how Mencken escaped being strung from a streetlamp.

Despite actual threats against his life, Mencken persisted in scorning what he named the Boobus americancus (yes, you and me). He declined to assent to the prevailing belief in democracy, terming it  "the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." If the governed are of poor quality, those who seek to govern are even worse: "A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground." Mencken advocated not being taken in by either prevailing orthodoxies or aspiring reformers: "The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."

Did Mencken's lifelong, bone-deep cynicism about his fellow citizens and their rulers cause him to despair? Far from despairing, Mencken feasted on what he saw as their inherent absurdity: "here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."

The Uses of Cynicism

Certainly, Mencken's deep cynicism controlled his perceptions and judgments. He believed in freedom but not in people, in reason but not in "a geyser of pishposh." Judging the inaugural address delivered by President Warren G. Harding, Mencken crowed, "he writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." Contemptuous of Harding, Mencken wrote not much more kindly of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. An admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, I nevertheless read with great interest and amusement Mencken's evisceration of TR in an "autopsy." He slightly preferred TR to Wilson, whom he deemed a charlatan and a cad. He preferred FDR to no one.

Why do I read these heresies? While I very often disagree with Mencken's assessments and assumptions, the bracing astringency of his prose forces me to think, to defend what I believe with better reasons, or even to change my mind. The resident cynic of the United States, our self-appointed and unofficial Scourgeon General,  Mencken served as our national scold. Although reading him feels like falling into a briar patch, he provides a useful antidote to our prevalent mental, moral, intellectual, and ideological flabbiness. After emerging from the sauna of his prose, his reader is then whipped with birches. Reading Mencken is good for the health of our brains.

Insulting? Certainly. Entertaining? Immensely. Useful? I believe so, especially given our proclivities toward passionate agreements with those who already agree with us and uncivil exchanges with those who dare to disagree. Although he asserted that few of us are capable of thinking, Mencken upheld freedom of thought and speech. I myself have felt sadly disturbed by how many Americans do not seem to appreciate the principle of freedom of speech.

Free to Disagree

I find it perplexing that so many people apparently restrict freedom of speech to those with whom they already agree. Respecting freedom of speech has absolutely nothing to do with agreeing with others' views. People have the right to be wrong. (Speech that evolves into overt actions, such as violence, is a different matter.) Too many of us, both left and right, fail to see that others have the right to voice their opinions, however "incorrect" these opinions may seem to us. Freedom of speech is an uncomfortable liberty. But it means nothing to be for freedom of speech or belief unless you defend the freedom of people whose beliefs and speech you deplore.

Protest by all means. Argue, certainly. But preventing a person with whom you disagree from speaking crosses a line. Inevitably, others will cross that line by keeping you from speaking your mind. Nothing protects your own freedom of speech unless that protection also extends to those with whom you disagree.

Moreover, there is no need for freedom of speech at all unless people disagree. The very basis for insisting on people's freedom to speak their minds consists of the reality of pervasive human disagreement. If people agreed, freedom of speech would be unnecessary.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Something Wicked This Way Comes

(c) Copyright (2017) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Fargo ranks up there with my very favorite movies, with Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, and Steve Buscemi all giving great performances. The key to the film is in the scene when Chief of Police Marge Gunderson, driving back with the murderer she has captured, says, "So, that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money? There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don'tcha know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well. I just don't understand it."

Everyone is capable of doing wrong, but relatively few people commit really evil actions, and the film contrasts many simple acts of kindness by good, if fallible, people with the self-absorbed's indifference to the grave harm they inflict. The snaggle-toothed, "funny-looking" gunman and his sleepwalking-except-when-murdering accomplice kill without remorse and seemingly without thought. For them, killing is a mere reflex.

Marge Gunderson "just doesn't understand it," and most good people really find it difficult to comprehend evil--not ordinary, everyday badness, but real evil. This incomprehension of evil is a major theme in Fargo, in Broadchurch, and certainly in Longford, which depicts the infamous "moors murderers," Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, during their prolonged imprisonments as they manipulate the kindly Lord Longford, who seeks to rehabilitate Myra Hindley. Does Longford ever really comprehend Myra Hindley's depravity? Is Longford correct or self-deluded in detecting her capacity for redemption?

Evildoers seem different in kind, not merely in degree. How would we respond to someone we had once known but then discovered was guilty of a really terrible crime? I was shocked to read in the newspaper about a man I had known who was later convicted of sexual abuse and procurement of child prostitutes, a disgusting crime. He didn't seem sorry, really, just sorry he was caught. What draws the line between ordinary badness and true evil? Perhaps the criteria include callousness, lack of remorse, unshakable self-absorption?

Shaken by the evil we sometimes encounter, we can retreat into corrosive and pervasive cynicism. Certainly, we must never forget the evil that human beings are capable of doing to one another. The appalling Armenian genocide, for instance, happened 100 years ago. But note that kind enemies saved the lives of some Armenians. Goodness always flowers in the sidewalk cracks. Goodness is as real as evil, only less powerful only too often.

Some characterizations of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird sneer at it as just a children's book. However, the genius of the story actually stems from its depiction of the central tragedy from the children's perspective. There is so much menace depicted--crazy neighbors, a rabid dog, cynically perjured testimony, the threat of lynching of an untried and innocent accused, attempted vindictive murder of children--yet the setting is a seemingly idyllic childhood in a small country town during the Great Depression, when neighbors look out for each other and children roam at will, even at night. Underneath all of the real innocence and pretended innocence lies all of this evil, yet while the good does not triumph exactly, it makes itself felt.

Gregory Peck's indelible performance in the film as Atticus Finch portrays the great moral courage needed to stand up against an unjust majority view. Atticus fails to secure the acquittal of Tom Robinson, and he is shaken by Bob Ewell's attempted murder of Atticus's children, yet he still stands fast as a symbol of what we would like to be and know we should be. His children learn to understand that, and so do we. The story would be far less effective if it were not a children's story.

However, the would-be lynchers and the jurors who disregard the impeccable logic of Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson, although not evil like Bob Ewell, are good people doing bad things, and they are part of the reason that evil can prevail as a norm of a society. Ordinary people become complicit in extreme societal evil when they forsake their moral obligation for the safety of not being different, of not challenging monstrous actions. Disturbed by the realization of the suffering inflicted by evil, we deceive ourselves by denying what we realize. We are capable of better, but we often do not do better.

Many decades ago, W.E.B. DuBois depicted the moral struggle of a good man choosing not to remain complicit in a great evil:  "The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln .… personally I revere him the more because up out of his contradictions and inconsistencies he fought his way to the pinnacles of earth and his fight was within as well as without …. I glory in that crucified humanity that can push itself up out of the mud of a miserable, dirty ancestry; who despite the clinging smirch of low tastes and shifty political methods, rose to be a great and good man and the noblest friend of the slave." 

first published in The Woodstock Independent