Editor’s Note: This piece is satire written in the voice of a historical author, produced with AI assistance for Echoes of the Inkwell. H.L. Mencken is not the actual author and did not write these words — the voice is used to comment on verified, present-day events. All factual claims referenced below have been checked against contemporary news reporting prior to publication.
By H.L. Mencken, for Echoes of the Inkwell
On the nineteenth day of June, in the year of our uncertain Lord 2025, the President of the United States rose from whatever leisure had occupied him and delivered unto the nation, via the medium of Truth Social, a communiqué of towering moral seriousness: America, he informed us, suffers from “too many non-working holidays,” a plague costing the Republic “$BILLIONS OF DOLLARS” in shuttered enterprise. The workers, he assured us — speaking, as is his custom, on behalf of wages he has never drawn by the hour — “don’t want it either.”
It was, by no small coincidence, Juneteenth.
I confess a certain admiration for the purity of the hypocrisy on display. Here was a man who has spent no small portion of two terms at his own golf courses on the public dime, denouncing his countrymen for taking a day off, on the one day set aside to commemorate the end of slavery. It takes a rare specimen of American manhood to complain about idleness while standing, as he generally is, on a green.
And what, pray, of the men who share his party and his convictions? In September of this year, having returned from a five-week summer recess, the House of Representatives discovered it had scheduled itself for two more weeks of actual labor before the midterm elections. Speaker Johnson’s office, with the gravity of men announcing a national emergency, canceled them. The chamber will not trouble itself with votes again until after the ballots are counted in November — a full six and a half weeks of undisturbed campaigning, granted to men who, twelve months before, had been solemnly informed by their President that their countrymen work too little.
Meanwhile, in the upper chamber, Senator Mitch McConnell — eighty-four years of age, hospitalized in June, unseen and unheard by the public for the better part of three months — continues, so far as anyone can determine, to draw his Senate salary. Nobody begrudges a sick old man his recovery. But it is a fine thing to consider: a nation instructed by its executive that holidays are a luxury it cannot afford, governed in the meantime by a legislature that gave itself six weeks off and a senator who has not been seen since the last one began.
I do not say this to defend the holiday. Juneteenth will survive Mr. Trump’s disapproval, as it survived worse things for a hundred and fifty-nine years before he noticed it. I say it only to observe, with the detachment of a man who has made a career of observing such things, that in the entire history of American political theater, I have rarely seen so many men lecture a nation on the sin of not working, while personally demonstrating, with such thoroughness and at such length, exactly how it is done.
— History Connected to Today’s Issues, Echoes of the Inkwell
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