A master of sarcasm writes on U.S. elections
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken had a low opinion of voters and politicians. I was reminded of this when a friend forwarded this quote from one of Mencken’s more famous columns, and whether we agree with it or not, it seems interesting in this time of presidential campaigning:
“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand.
“So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
“The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts’ desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Mencken, who died in 1956, wrote that for the Baltimore Sun on July 26, 1920. He had a great following, although people seldom took him seriously. They got a chuckle from his being unafraid to express publicly what they sometimes thought privately — that politics in many cases is a fraud perpetrated on the stupid by the venal.
Of course, politics had its uses. It gave him something to write about.
