Re: Call the Decorum Police!!! [was Ellen Willis dies
On Nov 9, 2006, at 11:56 PM, Gar Lipow wrote:
If you want an example of an attack obit, there is the famous Mencken obituary for William Jennings Bryan
I’m not going to forward the whole thing. but here is the link http://www.peeniewallie.com/2005/06/hlmenckens_ob.html
[And there’s this one, from The American Mercury
doubt, confirm Jesse Lemisch’s worst suspicions.]
“Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings
Bryan’s last secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious
detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most
sedulous flycatcher in American history, and by long odds the most
successful. His quarry, or course, was not Musca domestica but Homo
neandertalensis . For forty years he tracked it with snare and
blunderbuss, up and down the backways of the Republic. Wherever the
flambeaux of Chautaqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of Idealism
ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the
saved, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their
wives who were unyieldingly multiparous and full of Peruna–there the
indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew
every forlorn country town in the South and West, and he could crowd
the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn.
The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly
penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the gallery
jeered at him at every Democratic National Convention for twenty-five
years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle
dream away the lazy day, and men still fear the powers and principles
of the air–out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance
to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive his game. The news
that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke
the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his
Message there would be such a breathless attention, such a rapt and
enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world has not
known since Johannan fell to Herod’s headsman.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days
were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him
there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who
sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the
toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main Street of little
Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the
Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest
shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust–so accoutred and
on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the
morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the
heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country
lawyers, country pastors, all country people. I believe that this
liking was sincere–perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His
nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and
hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light
upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of a country town
was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In
the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I
suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate
manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him–if not
at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But
the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but
the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane
politics for purely ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in
their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham…. His
place in the Tennessee hagiocracy is secure. If the village barber
saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.
But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a
far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too
deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully
literate men, even of the kind who write school-books. There was a
scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was not more
than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the
most romantic editorial writer could dredge up, save in the eloquent
South, was t the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by
his earnestness–that under his clowning, as under that of the
juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But
this was apology, not praise… The truth is that even Bryan’s
sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields,
definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in
the Philippines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo
Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists
under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead
them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war,
or when he dreamed himself into a tin-soldier in uniform, with a
grave reserved among the generals?… Was he sincere when he pleaded
for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the fagot and the
stake in Tennessee?
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was
sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded
by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany
without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of
his grotesque career was simply ambition–the ambition of a common
man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing
that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring
voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their
betters, that he himself might shine. His last battle will be grossly
misunderstood if it is thought of as a mere exercise in fanaticism–
that is, if Bryan the Fundamentalist Pope is mistaken for one of the
bucolic Fundamentalists. There was much more in it than that, as
everyone knows who saw him on the field. What moved him, at bottom,
was simply hatred of city men who had laughed at him so long, and
brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted for
revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against
them, to set Homo neandertalensis upon them, to punish them for the
execution they had done upon him by attacking the very vitals of
their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any merely
religious frenzy, however inordinate. When he began denouncing the
notion that man is a mammal even some of the hinds at Dayton were
agape. And when, brought upon Darrow’s cruel hook, he writhed and
tossed in a very fury of malignancy, bawling against the baldest
elements of sense and decency like a man frantic–when he came to the
tragic climax there were snickers among the hinds as well as hosannas.
Upon that hook, in truth, Byran committed suicide, as a legend as
well as in the body. He staggered from the rustic court ready to die,
and he staggered from it ready to be forgotten, save as a character
in a third-rate farce, witless and in execrable taste. The chances
are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has
been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He
will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction
ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President
of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually
elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable
gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dulness has got into the White
House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least
nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in
Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that
the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and
that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly
on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors
waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the
Blue Room. We have escaped something–by a narrow margin, but still
safely.
That is, so far. The Fundamentalists continue at the wake, and sense
gets a sort of reprieve. The legislature of Georgia, so the news
comes, has shelved the anti-evolution bill, and turns its back upon
the legislature of Tennessee. Elsewhere minorities prepare for
battle–here an there with some assurance of success. But it is too
early, it seems to me, to the firemen home; the fire is still burning
on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any
moment. The evil that men do lives after them. Bryan, in his malice,
started something that will not be easy to stop. In ten thousand
country town his old heelers, the evangelical pastors, are
propagating his gospel, and everywhere the yokels are ready for it.
When he disappeared from the big cities, the big cities made the
capital error of assuming that he was done for. If they heard of him
at all, it was only as a crimp for real-estate speculators–the
heroic foe of the unearned increment hauling it in with both hands.
He seemed preposterous, and hence harmless. But all the while he was
busy among his old lieges, preparing for a jacquerie that should
floor all his enemies at one blow. He did the job competently. He had
vast skill at such enterprises. Heave an egg out of a Pullman window,
and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United
States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their
pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the
mean streets behind the gasworks. They are everywhere that learning
is to heavy a burden for mortal works. They are everywhere that
learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds, even the vague,
pathetic learning on tap in little red schoolhouses. They march with
the Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order
of United American Mechanics, with the Epworth League, with all the
rococo bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to bring some light
of purpose into their lives. They have had a thrill, and they are
ready for more.
Such is Bryan’s legacy to his country. He couldn’t be President, but
he could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of
shutting off the presidency from every intelligent and self-
respecting man. The storm, perhaps, won’t last long, as times goes in
history. It may help, indeed, to break up the democratic delusion,
now already showing weakness, and so hasten its own end. But while it
lasts it will blow off some roofs and flood some sanctuaries.