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Jan 29, 2005

Mencken the Blue




A lot of H. L. Mencken hasn't worn so well over the years--but every so often you stumble upon something that could have been written today. Agree or disagree, you can't help but wonder where Mencken came up with it:
All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters. [from"The Calamity of Appomattox," cited in A Mencken Chrestomathy, p 199.]


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