Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 10:24 PM by Gene

H. L. Mencken's rep has taken a ferocious beating since Terry Teachout's (how do you pronounce that name?) biography The Skeptic appeared to favorable reviews several months ago. I once revered the Sage of Baltimore too, but it's hard to kneel before a hero who was a flaming Jew-hater (a far cry from Jonathan Yardley's harmless hot-tempered clown), an idiot stalwart for Germany through the two world wars, and, in the end, a philistine. Even the celebrated style palls. Here's an excerpt from an article ("How Much Should a Woman Eat?") Russell Baker deemed fit to run in his deadly humor anthology:

Every competent circus man knows to the fraction of an ounce how much food his various and exotic charges require in the course of 24 hours. He knows that an elephant of such-and-such tonnage needs so-and-so much hay; that a snake of such-and-such a distance from fang to rattle needs so-and-so many rabbits, rats and other snakes. And in the army, by the same token, the dietetic demands of the soldier are worked out to three places of decimals. A private carrying 80 pounds of luggage, with the temperature at 65°, can march 18 1/3 miles in 16 2/3 hours upon three ham sandwiches, half a pint of stuffed olives and a plug of plantation twist. A general weighing 285 pounds can ride a cayuse up four hills, each 345 feet in height, on 6 ginger snaps and 12 scotch highballs. Experiments are made to determine these things, and the results are carefully noted in official handbooks, and so attain the force of military regulations. And so on. And so on and so on. And so on and so on and so on.

Let's not put too fine a nose job upon this: This is blather. This is filler. This is BS.

(By the way, the last three sentences aren't from the article; they're from a review of a book by Irvin S. Cobb. But they fit in quite nicely.)