Just deserts

This month marks the birthday, in 1880, of the great American polemicist H.L. Mencken. Mencken was born in Baltimore, and in the 1920s and 1930s was the most feared and admired writer in the United States. He spared no one his caustic honesty; politicians, church leaders, academics, quack doctors, puritans, fanatics and other species he referred to as ‘boobus Americanus’.

A few years ago, having mentioned Mencken in a column in this magazine, I was deeply honoured when the Mencken Society in Baltimore asked me to deliver its annual lecture. At the party afterwards, we sat around and asked ourselves why there were no men of his stature and courage today. We concluded that it was partly because the dumbing-down of society had caused a sort of dull, uniform mediocrity, and that its increasing hypocrisy, combined with insincere pieties, had infected every section of public life. How Mencken would have lampooned this government whose only interest in the electorate is in securing its votes.