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. (I exclude from this David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who has proved brave enough to tackle unpopular issues and take the resulting criticism on the chin.)

How Mencken would have derided the Tory party, too. He would have seen the current debate between the family-values faction and social liberals like Michael Portillo as not one between genuinely concerned men and women but one brought about through fear of alienating various groups of voters. Nor would he have spared our media. He would have written that half consisted of misinformed joyless puritans who cannot bear to see others happy.