A Gang of Pecksniffs

...At bottom, the business is quite simple...

...It is just as creditable to hate injustice and dishonesty as it is to love the truth...

...Indeed, it is self-righteousness carried to its most dangerous extreme for it constrains our ability to change, a characteristic essential for the survival of any government (or society...

...Congressmen are good guys, because Congress is the most representative national institution...

...And meantime, the journalists will have provided orgiastic entertainment to all the baccalaureated boobs who feel they should salivate at every revelation of governmental secrecy, snoopery, and trickery as if such were not the norm among governments grand and petty...

...It is the conflict between the Grand Inquisitor, offering bread and miracles (i.e., technological breakthroughs) and the man or woman willing to accept the terrifying, but exhilarating, burden of freedom...

...So should Mencken's recommendations on news policy: "In controversial matters the news can never be one side only...

...We should bring] the power of sound information and impartial honesty against the immense effects of government propaganda, with its constant appeals to the lowest credulities of the people, and its playing on their tendency to believe in and even to worship conspicuous public officials...

...In an effort to let everyone be heard they have given all the advantage to the most vocal and enterprising side...

...they are all off baying at other game, mainly along the wooded banks of the Potomac in the Virginia hunt country where dwell the nation's flesh-and-blood spooks...

...Every public official with large powers in his hands should be held in suspicion until he proves his case, and we should 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 keep him at all times in a glare of light...

...Young America is about to be set atwittering by the movie version of the Washington Post's young tyros, Bernstein and Woodward, reincarnated and beatified by that matinee beauty Robert Redford and by counter-hero Dustin Hoffman, slaying Richard the Terrible and his White House horribles...

...Well, and how are his feelings to be stirred up...

...He was the Baltimore Whangdoodle, that's what—probably the most gifted and gaudy magnifico ever to practice American journalism, and certainly a unique specimen...

...After a long session reading—and writing about—this feminist screed one sees with clarity that Ms...

...He frequently conceals his thoughts behind such imagery as "mirrors and blue smoke...

...Because their conviction was "vindicated" on that August night, such pundits think that their views of the Presidency and their air of cynicism are therefore justified...

...It covers the field inadequately, and a large part of it is launched by persons with private interests to further...

...Mencken himself, in a 1937 memo to Paul Patterson, put it thus: "I believe that the safe and rational course for the papers themselves is still that of Liberalism, and that we should be watchful of radical propaganda by our own men...

...We read, for example, that "The first job of a newspaper, to be sure, is to print the news, and nowhere on earth is it done more diligently or more honestly than in this great free Republic, the envy and despair of all the decadent principalities of Europe...

...Such emotions and prejudices are not necessarily ignoble...

...There is, furthermore, an appalling, unnatural mean-spiritedness in much of the Women's Movement...

...This is not a healthy attitude...

...Cynicism tends not to lead to improvements in our condition...

...Well, possibly minor changes, but of detail and not of essence...

...And a great many of the bunco artists who pass for editors and investigative reporters nowadays would be turned out to pasture with politicians, public interest lawyers, lobbyists, evangelists, and other quacks...

...It is the leaders of government who are responsible for defining, and of course pursuing, the common good—i.e., those policies which will not necessarily give the populace immediate gratification, but which will give society a solid, lasting order within which it can continue to function freely and progressively...

...Indeed, one of the chief purposes of every journalist worth his salt is "to stir up useful hatreds...

...First scare him—and then reassure him...

...Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut...

...For either exercise would prepare them equally for the low estate to which they aspire, as Mencken clearly elucidates...

...The Founding Fathers, recognizing this essential distinction, balanced the powers within government to restrain the aggrandizement of power not only by the executive but also by the legislature...

...He obviously had a hard time of it...

...From the very first issue, where Ann Crittenden Scott had the average housewife working 100 hours a week (hardly leaving her time to be a sex object), the magazine has manifested the "intellectual hatred" characteristic of those "hysterical women" that Yeats condemned in his poetry...

...In How the Good Guys Finally Won Breslin holds up Congressman Tip O'Neill for the highest esteem precisely because he was convinced of coming impeachment at a time when "there wasn't even a shred of documentation, only a race-track suspicion by one Congressman...

...We can note about the Ms.-fits what Orwell did about the journalistic intellectuals of his land, "their severance from the common culture of the country...

...Of the Liberationist designation of motherhood as a condition of victimization, Dec-ter says: "For women to claim that they are victims when they are so clearly not is merely an expression of their terror in the face of the harshnesses and burdens of a new and as yet not fully discovered freedom...

...Arlington House $8.95 Sun, inherited in his office a splintery old filing cabinet once used by Mencken himself, and some spiritual vibration therefrom moved the young man to present us with this convenient collection...

...Nobody seemed to care much about the teaching of evolution anymore, one way or other...

...There is certainly a good deal of truth to this Machiavellian view, yet Breslin shows no understanding of our Constitutional system, of where power should lie and how it should be used...

...Not infrequently those private interests are adroitly disguised as public interests, but their real character remains...

...That common thread that tied together all of Mencken's writings and beliefs," says Lippman, was "the libertarian's insistence that individuals should be free to do what they please if their acts do not harm others...

...They feared a monopoly of power in the hands of the legislature as much as they feared that the executive might become a monarch, for they understood the strong tendency in the legislature to reflect private or popular interests rather than the common good...

...At one point he contends that "all political power is primarily an illusion...

...Thus: "On the one hand, the astute journalist must remember the public's incapacity for taking in more than one thing at a time, and on the other hand, he must remember its disposition to be swayed by mere feeling, and its habit of founding that feeling, upon general and indefinite impressions...

...Yet history must march, so no intrepid investigative journalist has yet doubled back to see who invented and sensationalized those scares and why...

...And so is all politics...

...At the present time that effort is especially necessary, for we confront a high development of government propaganda in both domestic and foreign affairs...

...and then showily rescuing us all at the last minute from the menace...

...only one of these pieces has ever appeared in a book, and now we have them between two covers in 206 pages, including the anthologist's 28-page essay on the subject's newspaper career...

...If for reasons of budget escalation the deans want to accept all corners including even those who cannot read, they might well impose as an alternate test attendance at the movie Jaws, instructing the neophytes to study carefully the shark...

...The matter has probably not been put with such clarity and brevity since Aristotle's Rhetoric...

...Indeed, he shows quite convincingly that the journalist, the politician, and the shark all share common arts and appetites, and perform quite similar functions in our society...

...The point should be of more than antiquarian interest for aspirant journalists today...

...Book Review/Eugene H. Methvin Boogers, Haints, and Bunco Artists • • Six or seven moons ago, a New York Times reporter ventured into the Tennessee hinterland town of Dayton to check on the enlightenment and progress of its denizens upon the fiftieth anniversary of the famed Monkey Trial...

...There is—and this cannot be overly emphasized—a crucial difference between the popular will and what has traditionally been called the "common good...

...Anthologist Lippman was prevented from including it by a peck-sniff professor retained by Mencken's estate-managers to bring out a forthcoming volume of unpublished letters...

...This, in substance, is the whole theory and practice of the art of journalism in These States...

...This essay would make an excellent preface for an anthology of Anderson columns such as those that set the Senate sharks on the late Sen...

...They will not be printing the true news until they show what is behind every effort to corrupt it...

...We must try to penetrate them and to counteract them...

...They will be gone equally whether the radicalism that comes in is of the Right or of the Left...

...Mencken was first, foremost, andperdurably a newspaperman...

...This is one of "the lessons of Watergate" that we have yet to learn: Just because President Nixon eventually admitted his involvement, does not mean that those who said all along that he was "guilty" were at all justified...

...If people think you have power, you have power...

...As a fugitive from the politicized 1960s, the magazine points up the real thrust of that decade: the elimination of distinctions—sexual, moral, and intellectual...

...demonstrates, is a dangerous thing...

...To what end...

...He wrote it in 1928 by request of Baltimore Evening Sun managing editor Paul Patterson for a confidential critique...

...For example, today we have more sophisticated audiences, but we also have more sophisticated practitioners, and the politicians and journalists have learned to collaborate more artfully in bamboozling the yokels...

...The popular will is a response to the leadership of government...

...Watergate was basically a case of popular representatives versus the public leader—the good guys versus the bad guy—and it was a glorious occasion because Congress (i.e., the people) triumphed...

...Decter sees the "true grievance" of Women's Lib as not discrimination butas anger at the fact of being women...

...It should be our fixed policy to be very suspicious of what is generally said and generally believed, and to set forth, whenever possible, the other side...

...The popular will, which the Founding How the Good Guys Finally Won by Jimmy Breslin Viking Press $6.95 Fathers clearly intended to be represented for the most part by Congress, is a constantly fluctuating stream of opinion that provides government with the necessary feedback by which it can guage its actions...

...Already the deans of journalism schools are being trampled flat by thundering posses of would-be world-savers who are suddenly impressed with the power of the pen and the plethora of unemployables tumbling from other more theoretical and useless academic assembly lines...

...the spectacle makes him seem as preposterous as any other booster he ever roasted alive...

...It seems to me that the American newspapers, in the face of the immense propaganda now flooding them, have forgotten or neglected that capital fact...

...The good deans would do well to greet all aspirants at the door, hand each a copy of this work, and see which can read a book written in American English...

...Not that the reading would necessarily inspire them with the ideals and ethics of their prospective profession...

...Breslin doesn't always put things so simply...

...All healthy journalism in America—healthy in the sense that it flourishes spontaneously and needs no outside aid—is based firmly upon just such an invention and scotching of bugaboos...

...Slavery is Liberation, in other words...

...it must be both sides...

...In the aftermath of Watergate, the distinction between cynicism and skepticism has become increasingly blurred...

...We gave him a unisex name de-liberately...

...They will never be doing their duty until they invent some way to strike a better balance...

...He applauds the ascendancy of Congress, because he thinks it closest to the popularwill...

...In an article, "But What About Our Sons ? ," two Ms...

...suspicion must precede indignation...

...Unless a newspaper can manage to arouse his feelings it might just as well not have at him at all, for his feelings are the essential part of him, and it is out of them that he dredges up his obscure loyalties and aversions...

...One of the chief purposes of the Sun, as I understand it, is to stir up such useful hatreds...

...But Lippman managed to bootleg in a tantalizing and illuminating quote: "Most men are convinced, not by appeals to their reason, but by appeals to their emotions and prejudices...

...The causes thereof lie deep The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 25 down in the psychology of the Homo boobus, or inferior man—which is to say, of the normal, the typical, the dominant citizen of a democratic society...

...Et tu, Henry...

...In How the Good Guys Finally Won, Breslin shows us a glimpse of Congressional backroom politics during the confusing and difficult period prior to Nixon's resignation, and as a behind-thescenes look at how Congress acted in a time of crisis, the book is invaluable...

...First fake him—and then fake him again...

...correspondents mention how "one pregnant woman told us—within earshot of her three-year-old son—how disappointed she had been that he had been a boy...

...Breslin's argument, however, is seriously flawed and much too simplistic...

...That function is, quite simply, scaring the hell out of the American people, occasionally devouring a few hapless victims...

...In addition, as Midge Decter has shown in her brilliant The New Chastity, Women's Movement radicals are involved in a desperate war against nature itself...

...A little language, Ms...

...First get him into a panic with a bugaboo—and then go to the rescue, gallantly and uproariously, with a stuffed club to slay it...

...For a seasoned Mencken aficionado, the surprise of this tome is the revelation that the old man could wax as sentimental as Kiwanian undertaker about the altruism and idealism of his craft...

...And, praises be, here at long last we have an anthology of Mencken the newspaperman, pieces he wrote on the craft and state of American journalism collected and packaged together with a biographical appreciation by Theo Lippman, Jr...

...The accomplished mob-master lays his course accordingly...

...Thus, for all the talk about "new freedom" and "liberation," the real drama underlying the sound and the fury of the magazine is an old one...

...If it ever succeeds in this country our function will be gone, and with it our liberties...

...was above all a scoffer, and won fame as such, so it is astonishing to see that he harbored and occasionally gushed positive opinions...

...The ordinary flow of news is partial in two senses...

...Skepticism of the actions of government is an essential component of the popular will because it leads to constructive improvements...

...In an age hesitant to make any distinctions, Ms...

...Another Mencken essay, entitled "Newspaper Morals," is as fine an essay on the high journalistic art of character assassination as any I have ever read, and it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1914, before Lenin became celebrated for it, and long antedating the appearance of such eminent twentieth centurymen of letters as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Jack Anderson...

...I only propose that we view it skeptically, and refuse to assent to its devices and pretensions until we are sure that they are intelligent and sincere...

...if anything, they were doing the country a great disThe Alternative: An American Spectator January 1976 27...

...Book Review/Bill Kucewicz Did the Good Guys Really Win...

...For Mencken, much of the practice of journalism, as of politics, involves a kind of humbugging akin to the making of the movie Jaws, and the creation and marketing of that fish with six-inch teeth...

...Perhaps Mencken's most trenchant opus on newspaper editorial pages is not in the book...

...Hatreds useful in whose judgment and whose definition of utility...

...What seems to make this tendency all the more pervasive is the general attitude of cynicism on the part of many writers and other political pundits, like Breslin, that has become so entrenched over the last year...

...His career as working journalist spanned a half-century, 1898-1948...

...Whatever else he was —man of letters, magazine editor, historian of the American languageH.L...

...Since that fateful Thursday in August of 1974, it has become fashionable to chastise those of the American public who supposedly kept their rose-colored glasses on too long and thus failed to see that President Nixon had been "guilty" all along...

...Mencken edited by Theo Lippman, Jr...

...The truth-in-packaging cops would manacle Mencken for labeling such a package "Liberal" today, of course...

...And for the Infidel Scopes, there was positive affection, but of a low and altogether unnewsworthy amperage...

...solves problems by ignoring or obscuring them...

...That, in a capsule, is a wholly coherent and comprehensive philosophy of journalism, soundly based upon clinical observation...

...It is this tendency which in the aftermath of Watergate many, including Breslin, have become blinded to...

...Vide the Great Phosphate scare, or the Great Cyclamate scare, which were supposed to turn our lakes and streams to green soup and our bone cells to metastatic cannibals, each of which caused popular stampedes and economic earthquakes costing millions, and neither of which has proved more than a politico-journalistic haint...

...And from 1920 when it was set down to today, nothing has changed, in either politics or journalism...

...Cynicism, on the other hand, can only serve to undermine the popular foundations of government because it misdirects our focus away from the actions which may provide long-term benefits to society towards only those which can be immediately realized...

...There must be a shelling of the fortress before the assault...

...Reduced to a rule of everyday practice, this means that the campaign against a given malefactor must begin a good while before the capital accusation—that is, the accusation upon which a verdict of guilty is sought—is formally brought forward...

...wants not so much to pass the ERA as to repeal the laws of nature...

...Until now the inside story has been mainly focused upon the inner workings of the Nixon White House, but Jimmy Breslin has written a work that ventures beyond these perimeters and looks at Watergate from the vantage point of Capitol Hill...

...Behold: "Truth is a commodity that the masses of undifferentiated men cannot be induced to buy...

...There is nothing for a decent newspaper in radicalism...

...Indeed, they have even learned how to enlist the scientists upon occasion, all the more to pump up their blimpish horrors before rushing to the rescue...

...This worthy, an editorial writer for the A Gang of PecksniffsAnd Other Comments on Newspaper Publishers, Editors and Publishers by H.L...

...What kind of a newspaperman was this whose shade can cause such eruptions after fifty years, yes, almost twenty after his bones have been lowered to their final roasting place...

...That was the newspaper reporter who covered the extravaganza for the Baltimore Sun—Henry Louis Mencken...

...If people think you have no power, then you have no power...

...this distinction, if not made carefully and continuously, will become blurred over time and will serve to undercut the strengths of a democratic republic...

...The very mention of his name was enough to evoke muttered imprecations, steam hissing from the ears, and an occasional pa-tooehy, sans tobacco juice, alas, progress and vogue having generally extinguished such habits among the Daytonians in this enlightened era...

...We must detect the falsities, whether of fact or of inference, in the news they launch, and set beside that news a kind that is more realistic and reliable...

...the hallmark of the authoritarian mind is that it cannot bear diversity...

...to say that an action by government (or for that matter business) which ostensibly goes counter to popular opinion (e.g., oil decontrol, the Russian wheat deals, Presidential vetoes) is in fact in the common good is more and more frequently to invite sneers and derision...

...What a timely good fortune...

...Presidents, in his view, are bad guys, because the Presidency, as it exists today, is a power-hungry institution that tends to subvert the wishes of all the people...

...Even for Darrow the Devil's Disciple, they harbored modest respect...

...in fact it tends to blind us to information and opinions that lie outside of our purview...

...We should fight resolutely at all times for the chief Liberal goods, all of them well tested and of the highest value, e.g., the limitation of governmental powers, economy in all the public services, complete publicity, the greatest tolerable degree of free speech, and a press secure against official pressure...

...That view may be correct, but the crucial issue is whether a country should be led by the popular will...

...For Bryan the Defender of Genesis, there was a modicum of admiration...

...H.L...

...Like old aunts with their predictions-come-true, a number of writers have felt the need to tell us their versions of the inside story—which, if we had only known, would have convinced us long before of the President's guilt...

...Only one figure, the Timesman found, still raised any hackles...

...No doubt ultimately those boogers will prove to be of comparable mortal danger to our national safety and welfare...

...is the reflection of both the debased politics and the corrupt language spawned by the overheated imaginations of our time...

...If the reformers in Congress were to create an independent federal regulatory commission to enforce such principles among today's practitioners of journalism, we would all be spared a colossal amount of buncombe...

...And another mother: "I censor all his books...

...I do not propose that we denounce the Administration incessantly and unreasonably...

...it is not intended to chart the course of government, but rather only to give government its bearings...

...The old-timers had mellowed...