Retro-Spectives on Today
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.
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.
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 →
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, in the character of the American statesman, a hunger that no election, no adulation, no gilded ceiling can ever quite satisfy — the hunger to be carved in stone before the worms get at him. Kings used to settle for it with a tomb.
There has always been, in the annals of statecraft, a certain grandeur to the leader who faces peril alongside his men — who stands, however foolishly, on the same deck, breathes the same smoke, and takes his chances with the ranks he commands.