AMONG my increasingly-few remaining heroes is HL Mencken, who was known as "the sage of Baltimore".
AMONG my increasingly-few remaining heroes is HL Mencken, who was known as \"the sage of Baltimore\".
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alan taylor
Mencken was the kind of journalist whom few journalists read these days, not least perhaps because he was as tough on his so-called peers as he was on everyone else.
His lifelong subject, as Gore Vidal, another of his fans, noted, was "nothing less than Freedom's land and Bravery's home, the (not so very) United States". Writing in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, Mencken opined: "We have all been on a bust. Every American, high and low, has been blowing money like a drunken sailor. We have fallen into the folly of mistaking luxuries for necessities." Four years later, he had this to say about banks: "What is to be done about crooked banks, nitwit banks, bad banks in general? The problem seems to be beyond the capacities of American legislators, for every solution that they have arrived at in the past has turned out, in the light of experience to be no solution at all."
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Barack Obama has not lived up to being The Boss
AMONG my increasingly-few remaining heroes is HL Mencken, who was known as "the sage of Baltimore".
Mencken was the kind of journalist whom few journalists read these days, not least perhaps because he was as tough on his so-called peers as he was on everyone else.
His lifelong subject, as Gore Vidal, another of his fans, noted, was "nothing less than Freedom's land and Bravery's home, the (not so very) United States". Writing in 1932, in the midst of the Depression, Mencken opined: "We have all been on a bust. Every American, high and low, has been blowing money like a drunken sailor. We have fallen into the folly of mistaking luxuries for necessities." Four years later, he had this to say about banks: "What is to be done about crooked banks, nitwit banks, bad banks in general? The problem seems to be beyond the capacities of American legislators, for every solution that they have arrived at in the past has turned out, in the light of experience to be no solution at all."
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We moderate all comments on HeraldScotland on either a pre-moderated or post-moderated basis. If you're a relatively new user then your comments will be reviewed before publication and if we know you well then your comments will be subject to moderation only if other users or the moderators believe you've broken the rules, which are available here.
Moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. Please be patient if your posts are not approved instantly.
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