Commentary: At this writing, the Republican National Convention is bumbling along, veering off script and exposing the seething divisions of the national party while the Democratic Party prepares to steal the news cycle with Hillary Clinton's running mate and their own convention. Throughout the week, many of us who are tasked with writing about politics have remembered H.L. Mencken.
For the uninitiated, Henry Louis Mencken was the twentieth century Baltimore journalist and scholar who covered the Scopes Trial in 1925 and numerous party conventions. His reports from the floor of Republican and Democratic conventions, often wry and always jaundiced, outlasted the author and the presidents nominated. Even in those days before party conventions were broadcast into living rooms, they were highly scripted spectacles with much of the actual business arranged offstage. Mencken enjoyed the pomp as well as the humbug, and at the conclusion he made a running joke of packing up his typewriter and telling other reporters that the end of the Republic was nigh.
If the Deming Headlight had the resources to send Desert Sage to Cleveland for the convention, it would be a tough assignment but not for the reason you might think. As Ernest J. Corrigan wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "The whole design of conventions is to script them so completely that to actually cover one gavel-to-gavel would be about as interesting as predicting the weather every day in San Diego."
Compounding the banality, cable news coverage likes to assemble panels of people to keep each other awake, shouting over the music from the conventional hall to exchange vapid observations about the predictable proceedings, seizing on the smallest mishap to analyze so as to keep viewers from migrating to Netflix. Don't think I am putting on airs, however: if I were being paid half what these entertainers are netting, I would be there with a thermos full of piñon coffee.
Mencken was able to make vivid and provocative reading out of these dull circuses. This was not only due to his prowess as a writer, but also his enthusiastic break from DC positivism: the fundamental view that the two traditional political parties are essentially legitimate and competent, that we are in more or less good hands letting the established elites transfer power back and forth among themselves, and that we have a healthy and durable republican democracy. Mencken openly mocked such sentiments, raking both parties' rascals over the coals and skewering the whole enterprise and its contradictions. "Democracy," he wrote, "is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." He frequently described it as a failed experiment.
Ideologically, the iconic "Baltimore Sage" and your humble Desert Sage are not on the same bench. Mencken was anti-populist and felt that letting "paupers" elect their leaders resulted in disaster. He did, however, pierce the membrane of fantasy wrapping the United States, if only to laugh at it. He understood that those who yell pieties about democracy are often those who hate it the most. He was no socialist, but he acknowledged the antagonism between capitalism and democracy, something the current generation of talking heads could not utter for fear of their jobs. As spokespeople for DC Positivism, they must chatter without questioning the premises of DC logic. Mencken thought and spoke freely.
For all my disagreements with Mencken's ideology, I know that he would knock us off our memorized scripts, and make us laugh, think, and argue, if he or someone cut from his cloth could get a job in 21st century media.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and the Sun News papers. Write to him atDesertSageMail@gmail.com.