The American right wing has waged war on American democracy on many fronts —the schools, the independent judiciary, the way we draw up congressional districts. Their most stunning victory is the most insidious: they've screwed up our language.

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Were he alive today, H.L. Mencken would have blown the whistle on the GOP. Mencken is properly a conservative but because he was not a disingenuous liar or advocated a hidden agenda, he would be vilified today as a liberal.

The media would excoriate him for daring to use the word ignoramus to denote ignoramuses. One wonders: what else should an ignoramus be called? Mencken has not only come to symbolize how present-day conservatives have succeeded in turning liberal into a bad word, Mencken, himself, would have wittily, scathingly denounced the process by which they pulled it all off.

If anyone had a right to write as he did about American life, politics, and language it was Mencken. He was unique in that he could right about it all objectively from the inside. He was, himself, as American as apple pie:

Henry Louis Mencken came into this world in the age of horses, before Buffalo Bill organized his Wild West Show and when settlers were still staking out territory in the West. He left it when military jets were crossing the breadth of the United States in three hours. When he was a child, typewriters were a novelty. He lived to see the beginnings of television, though he thought its future uncertain, and he would not have imagined (but would not have been surprised) that "video verbiage" would replace reading. When he was a boy, Civil War veterans still marched in parades; by the time Mencken departed this earth, men had returned from the Korean War.

—Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, Mencken: The American Iconoclast

Dr. John Lienhard, whose Engines of Our Ingenuity is a nationally syndicated radio program, called Mencken a brilliant iconoclast "...who knew language and who wielded it like a surgical laser." To be honest, I wish I had that gift. I would turn it upon what appears to be a deliberate attempt to water down the language, rob it of its power, and reframe debates to right wing advantage.

Terms like "pro-life" and "death tax" are conservative inventions designed to tilt the debate. Progressives lose by merely using those terms. Doing so legitimizes them; liberals lose. Pro-life is deliberately intended to disguise conservative hypocrisy with respect to partial-birth abortions —itself a misnomer designed to reframe the debate. [See: About "partial birth abortion" (a total misnomer)]. The term pro-life tends also to restrict the debate; those opposed to conservatives must, therefore, be opposed to life. It is easier to get away with non-sequitur logic if the very terminology seems to compel it. The modern right wing uses language like Edward I used the archer's fussilade into melees in which his own soldiers were embattled. He was willing to sustain the loss of life for the ultimate victory on the field.

In fairness, anyone claiming to be "pro-life" must also be anti-aggressive war especially when that war causes the violent deaths of thousands of civilians —many just kids and infants. But, perhaps for the pro-life crowd, life is only sacred when it's still inside the womb but fair game once birthed.

In his day, Mencken towered above his peers. But because Mencken would not countenance or buy into the sloppy use of language today, he would be hard pressed to get published in the corporate media which would subject it to focus groups, tedious research, and the gospel of PC. It is our loss.

Sadly, Mencken seems all but forgotten among the general populace, and, among those who know his name, he is often thought to be liberal. Mencken was, in fact, a libertarian and an "individualist".

Mencken's audience was not one of poltroonish ignoramuses; rather, he wrote for the intelligent few. Clearly, his intention was to make a difference by making a point among those who could make a difference with the mere public expression of an informed decision. Surely, he hopes to help shape that opinion. There is no way of knowing whether or not he succeeded.

It is for that reason, obviously, that Mencken wrote more about the American Language than anyone. He would be angered by the meaningless platitudes that often parade as literate speech or political debate; he would snort at puffed up slogans like family values and compassionate conservatism; he would slice and dice pure bunkum like supply side economics.

The best example is still the word liberal —the successful debasement of which spelled doom for the liberal movement. Now liberals feel obliged to change the name of their movement to progressive.

Liberal once meant "free" but that predates Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove and the current occupant of the Oval Office. In each case and many more, language itself is attacked, exploited, degraded and debased by those motivated to cloak a disingenuous agenda.

The word liberal derives from the latin "liberalis", meaning "pertaining to a free man". Other words from that root are "liberty," "liberation," and libertarian, and, of course Liberal. It is the "liberte" in the French rallying cry: "Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite." To be "Liberal," therefore, is to be free, to believe in freedom. Those opposed to Liberal are therefore opposed to "freedom". That describes the American right wing, it's recent bent toward totalitarianism, its successful attempts to link liberal with waste, communism, Keynesian economics, and big government. It is ironic that both big government (under Reagan) and Keynesian economics (under Bush) have ostensibly been embraced by the Republican rank and file even as they denounce the "liberals" who presumably espouse it. I think the word for that is hypocrisy —a word not found in the modern conservative lexicon.

The epithet "big government Liberal" in the mouth of a Republican is ludicrous. Nixon said "...we are all Keynesians now"! It was Nixon, of course, who is known for the very un-conservative imposition of wage and price controls, a draconian measure of big government if there ever was one. The biggest U.S. governments since World War II have all been of GOP creation. It was the Democrats who were tarred with the label "tax and spend", but, in reality, it is the GOP that presided over the largest military build up in the world and it has done so upon the backs of those who can least afford it.

Proportionally, the biggest tax burdens have fallen upon lower and middle income earners —the very groups who lost ground over a period of some 30 years. It was over that period of time that the incomes of the upper one percent of the U.S. population increased exponentially. Only the upper quintile prospered; everyone else lost ground.

Bush doesn't do nuance. And that is a shame; someone, somewhere feels pain everytime Bush fails to do a nuance. Can you imagine explaining Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, or Keynes to G. W. Bush—a man who claims to be conservative but would be hard pressed to tell you why?

What is to be said of someone who refuses to be informed? Is this the root of Bush antipathy to the Constitution —or is his ignorance a disingenuous act to conceal the genuine reasons that he would work to subvert the underpinnings of American democracy? I am, admittedly, overly fond of quoting Bertolt Brecht on this point but no one makes that point more succinctly:

A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!

—Bertolt Brecht

Iconoclasts are always misunderstood. Truth telling has become un-patriotic. Were he alive and writing today, Mencken would be assailed for telling the truth. But Mencken had the verbal ammunition to take them on. As Mencken himself said, "One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms." Mencken would dispatch Bill Frist with a single phrase: "Puritanism —The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy."

But what did Mencken himself believe? He left us a list from which I have chosen my favorites:

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious . I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie . I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

In other words, Mencken believed in everything Bush and the present day GOP hates. Mencken is timeless if not prescient:

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

—H.L. Mencken

Mencken could well have written that in November, 2000 rather than some 50 years earlier.

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."

A summation of modern politics?

Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

—H.L. Mencken

As a ruthless social critic, Mencken summed up the American justice system in three sentences:

Courtroom --A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with the betting odds favoring Judas.
Lawyer--One who protects us from robbers by taking away the temptation.
Jury--A group of 12 people who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

Mencken was a most prolific writer about the American language. His six volumes of essays and critiques he called Prejudices and, in them, he sneered at 19th-century nationalism and characterized Americans as "the most sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag."

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.

To bring him up to date, one need only substitute the name "Bush" for "Harding".

Mencken lives!

Authors Website: http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/

Authors Bio:

Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy