MARK JUDGE: H.L. Mencken and the Worst Experience I Had as a Journalist.
2024 is the year to get out of journalism. The mainstream press has gone woke, which makes for very boring copy. The conservatives hire through nepotism and the buddy system and produce dull journalists. It’s all angry politics, wokeness, and celebrity stalking. There’s no real freedom. There’s no great coverage of the arts that’s the result of years of study and experience. It’s all hackery. A media crisis? It’s a catastrophe.
100 years ago, in January 1924, H.L. Mencken launched a new magazine—The American Mercury. Mencken historian Charles Mott described the Mercury: “It made an impressive appearance as a whacking big octavo in double-column Garamond-set page sheet bound in green covers. It was clearly planned for the more thoughtful reader of a free thinking sort who had fifty cents to spend on a magazine in those inflationary years. For such a reader the contents of the new review were both intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining.” They reviewed the best books and artists and challenged the prevailing social mores, all with a great sense of fun. The writing was, is, astonishingly alive.
What media product today is “intellectually exciting and to the last page entertaining”? The Bulwark?* National Review? The Nation?
I recently re-read some classic Mencken, including his famous obituary of William Jennings Bryan. It was published in the Mercury in 1925 and is still fantastic: “Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest… He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
One hundred years after being written, and four decades after I first read those words as a college student in the 1980s, Mencken still remains more real, hilarious and bracing than anything I’ve read in the media in years.