Retro-Spectives on Today
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.
There comes, now and again, a moment so ripe with the comic possibilities of the human animal that a philosopher could weep from laughing. Such a moment arrived last week at the United Nations, that vast and windy parliament of nations, where the General Assembly voted 164 to 1, with six timid abstentions, to encourage — mark the word, for it carries no more legal force than a bishop's blessing — the wider use of a map.
There is a kind of tyranny that does not announce itself with a crown. It arrives instead in a uniform, in a memorandum, in a designation signed by a single hand and enforced by ten thousand others who never troubled themselves to ask by what right. I have written before of the difference between a government of laws and a government of men. I write again because that difference is, at this hour, being tested on American soil, and in American waters, and the outcome is not yet settled.
It has been my method, in examining the conduct of large concerns, to set down the facts in the order in which they occurred and to let the reader draw his own conclusions from the sequence. I do not accuse. I assemble the record. Let us begin with the calendar.
The lexicographer's labor is never finished. Language, like the republic it describes, corrupts by increments too small for any single citizen to notice, until one morning he wakes to find that self-defense means something his grandfather would not have recognized, and that a man may be murdered by an adjective. I offer the following supplement to my dictionary, compiled from the public statements of officials who, I am assured, mean every euphemism they utter.