Retro-Spectives on Today
I have been dead since 1910, which has given me a great deal of leisure and very little news. So you will understand my excitement when word reached me this week that the Secretary of Defense of the United States had stood before an assembly of the military at Quantico and made a theological discovery.
The federal government, in my day, weighed a great many things. The Department of Agriculture weighed hogs. The Bureau of Standards weighed the pound itself, and kept a copy under glass. The Treasury weighed gold, and the Congress weighed nothing at all, which was its chief qualification. But no bureau, however swollen, ever proposed to weigh the soul. That honor has been reserved for the present age.
“I see be th’ pa-apers,” said Mr. Dooley, “that th’ Sicrety iv War — or iv Defense, I can’t keep up with what they’re callin’ it this week — has opened an Office iv Religious Affairs.”
There is, in the long and undistinguished history of American statecraft, no spectacle quite so restorative to the soul of the confirmed cynic as a politician caught red-handed disagreeing with himself. It is a small pleasure, but a pure one, rather like watching a pickpocket lift his own wallet. And so it was, the other evening, in the marble sanctum of the Speaker's office, that the House Republican conference treated itself to just such a show — free of charge, though not, evidently, free of consequence.
A three-time Olympian, a canoeist, a man who has represented his country honorably in international competition, went for a bicycle ride in our nation's capital this past summer. He stopped, as curious citizens have done since the republic's founding, to look at a public monument — the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, recently renovated at public expense.
I have known men to sue their neighbors, their wives, their business partners, and on one memorable occasion in Hannibal, a mule. But I never expected to live long enough — dead as I am — to see a man sue himself, and stand a fair chance of collecting.
"I have," said Mr. Dooley, polishin' a glass that didn't need it. "He says it's costin' th' counthry billions iv dollars to keep th' shops closed. He said it on th' nineteenth iv June, which if ye don't know th' history iv it, Hennessy, is th' day they cillybrate th' end iv slavery in this counthry. Th' man has a gift f'r timin' that I niver seen ekalled outside iv a vaudeville house."
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... Continue Reading →
"Well, sir," said Mr. Dooley, setting down a glass and taking up a rag for no particular reason except that a man likes to have somethin' in his hands when he's about to say somethin' important, "th' United Nations has voted to fix th' map iv th' wurruld, an' this counthry has voted against it."
The General Assembly of the United Nations has voted, 164 to 1, to encourage the wider use of a map that shows the continents in their true relative proportions. The lone dissenting vote was cast by the United States, whose representative described the measure as a "radical ideological project." In the interest of clarifying the terms under dispute, the following entries are offered.