Prejudices, fourth seriesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
History
Prejudices, fourth series
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
American essays -- 20th century; American literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- History and criticism
The effects of this holy war, alas, have differed greatly from those
intended. Far from alarming and stampeding the non-Anglo-Saxons upon
whom it has been waged, it has actually forced them, despite their
differences, into a certain common action, and so made them far more
formidable than they were when it began. And far from establishing
any superiority in the Anglo-Saxon, it has only spread the suspicion
that, for all his pretensions, he must be a very inferior fellow at
bottom, else he would not be so eager to call in the mob to help him
in a purely literary feud. As one who has stood on the battlements for
years, and smelt the powder of every salvo, I can only report that I
have come to believe in this inferiority thoroughly, and that it seems
to me to be most obvious in those who most vociferously uphold the
so-called American tradition. They are, in the main, extremely stupid
men, and their onslaughts are seldom supported by any formidable weight
of metal. What they ask the rest of us to do, in brief, is simply to
come down voluntarily and irrationally to their own cultural level--the
level of a class that easily dominated the country when it was a
series of frontier settlements, but that has gradually lost leadership
as civilization has crept in. The rest of us naturally refuse, and
they thereupon try to make acquiescence a patriotic matter, and to
alarm the refractory with all sorts of fantastic penalties. But it
must be obvious that they fail far more often than they succeed--and
their failure is a melancholy proof of their intrinsic inferiority.
The current of thought in the United States, at least among the
relatively civilized minority, is not actually toward the abject
colonialism that they advocate; it is against that colonialism. We are
further from sweetness and light today than we ever were before, and
we are further from cultural slavery to the harassed and care-worn
Motherland. With overwhelming numbers on their side, and every form of
external authority, and all the prevailing shibboleths, the spokesmen
of Anglo-Saxon domination come to grief every time they tackle the
minority, or even any minority within the minority, and at no time do
they come to grief more dramatically than when they prepare for battle,
in the traditional Anglo-Saxon manner, by first trying to tie their
opponents’ hands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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