Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...also lived here, wire writers and correspondents working in nearly essential anonymity because they loved to write and tell the rest of the world how it is in this fabulous city, this creation of political philosophers and constitution writers. I think of the decidedly unromantic picture of H. L. Mencken sitting in the late night, overweight and sweating, pounding away at his keyboard in the Chesapeake heat, a fan blowing the steamy, soupy air around as he, clad only in a pair of BVDs, faces sheet after sheet of blank paper, ready to fill them with the excitement...
...Bumpers, billed as a star orator, did not disappoint. "When you hear somebody say 'This is not about money,'" he said -- quoting H. L. Mencken and delighting the audience -- "It's about money. And when you hear somebody say 'This is not about sex,' it's about sex." He told a story about how he and Clinton had once survived a rough plane landing in Arkansas: "We jumped out and ran away unscathed ?- to the dismay of every budding politician in Arkansas." He recited constitutional history and discussed patriotism, and at one point almost began to cry. He talked about...
Eugenics never recovered from the news of what had been carried out under its banner in Hitler's Germany. In truth, a number of people--including G.K. Chesterton, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann and Clarence Darrow--had ridiculed and debunked eugenic theories well before the horrors of the Holocaust occurred and became widely known...
...American middle class is accustomed to protracted adolescence almost as an entitlement. Disorienting, then, to confront the sometimes fatal precocity of the young in Finnegan's marginal world. H.L. Mencken had the American masses down as the "booboisie," hopelessly straight and dull and dumb. Finnegan catches perfectly the way ordinary America today may pass through some moral looking glass into a devouring universal consumers' bazaar wherein the remotest locales sell the fanciest drugs and perversions, and the minds of the young, ungrounded by their absent parents' experience or protection, become unrecognizably weird. Mindy, a model-pretty 17-year...
Brit Hadden, who had grown up in Brooklyn and was, much more than Luce, a true product of middle-class America, wanted TIME to be the witty, sophisticated, even cynical voice of his generation--something like a newsman's version of H.L. Mencken's popular magazine The Smart Set. But to Luce, TIME had a different purpose. It was to be a vehicle of moral and political instruction, a point of connection between the world of elite ideas and opinion and middle-class people in the "true" America hungry for knowledge...