449) We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease.

H.L. Mencken
Prejudices: First Series (1919)
quoted in part by
Hunter S. Thompson in
Better Than Sex (1994)

450) The public [...] demands certainties. [...] But there are no certainties.

H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, First Series (1919) [B16]

451) Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

H.L. Mencken
A Book of Prefaces (1917) [B16]

452) The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, First Series (1919) [B16]

453) Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Third Series (1922) [B16]

454) Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Third Series (1922) [B16]

455) No one in this world, so far as I know ... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

H.L. Mencken
"Notes on journalism"
Chicago Tribune (9/19/26) [B16]

[Note: Often paraphrased as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."]

456) The booboisie.

H.L. Mencken
phrase [B16]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 738 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

When Danny Robert Villegas staged a robbery at Kennedy Space Center Federal Credit Union in South Daytona Beach on Monday, he wasn't just creating another weird-crime headline.

Villegas allegedly was out of dough and wanted to be arrested so he could go back to the federal pen, having served time in Phoenix for a previous robbery and finding the digs to his liking.

He may be on to a trend that financial planners often don't mention.

An article in the New York Times Jan. 7 suggested that using prison as a stop-gap measure during hard times might become more common.

The Times relates the story of Timothy J. Bowers, who held up a teller in Ohio last May, handed the $80 dollars immediately over to a security guard and waited peaceably for arrest.

Bowers, 62, had recently lost his job and saw prison time as the solution to food, shelter and health care needs until he turns 66 and qualifies for Social Security, the article reports.

There's no excuse for crime, even staged crimes, and we'd find these antics merely deplorable if they didn't speak to a genuine angst afloat in the land:

Worry about financial security and saving for retirement as taxes and insurance costs rise, pensions disappear and layoffs are announced at major corporations.

The Big House still doesn't have much appeal as a retirement village of last resort -- but we live in strange times.

• A fundamental conservatism and clinging to outworn tradition, an inability to profit from past experiences (owing in part to a refusal to admit past mistakes).



• A tendency to reject or ignore information which is unpalalable or which conflicts with preconceptions.



• A tendency to underestimate the enemy and overestimate the capabilities of one's side.



• An obstinate persistence in a given task despite strong contrary evidence.



• A belief in brute force rather than the clever ruse.



• An undue readiness to find scapegoats for military set-backs.



• A suppression or distortion of news from the front, usually rationalized as necessary for morale or security.



• A belief in mystical forces -- fate, bad luck. etc.

There are others, but these are the ones that I think are most relevant to our current situation.

Incompetence in governance is unfortunate and potentially dangerous at any time, but during wartime such negligence is criminal, and gets people killed.

GENERAL: Now, Field Marshal [Haig] has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.

CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: Ah, would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy, sir?

CAPTAIN DARLING: How could you possibly know that Blackadder, it's classified information?

CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: It's the same plan that we used last time, and the seventeen times before that.

GENERAL: Ex... ex... ex... actly! And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard. Doing precisely what we've done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do this time!

There is, however, one small problem.

CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds?

GENERAL: That's right. And Field Marshal [Haig] is worried that this may be depressing the men a tad. So, he's looking to find a way to cheer them up.

CAPTAIN BLACKADDER: Well, his resignation and suicide would seem the obvious.

(In our current circumstance I'm not bloodthirsty enough to demand the latter, but the former sure would be nifty.)

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig was the stolid, unimaginative, plodding Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, who was responsible, along with a lot of other generals, for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of his own men by sending them "over the top" of the trenches to walk in a line at a slow pace directly into German machine gun fire coming from the high ground on the other side of the Western Front.

It happens that I'm in the middle of doing some reading about World War I -- I just finished Tolkien and the Great War and I'm in the middle of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. (I've got the one-volume Hew Strachan history of the war on order -- I read the John Keegan some years ago, along with Stokesbury's Short History, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and a couple of others.) So the reference to Haig seems doubly appropriate to me.

Here's what Fussell writes about General Haig -- it's interesting to compare and contrast with Bush:

One doesn't want to be too hard on Haig, who doubtless did all he could and who has been well calumniated already. But it must be said that it now appears that one thing the war was testing was the usefulness of the earnest Scottish character in a situation demanding the military equivalent of wit and invention. Haig had none. He was stubborn, self-righteous, inflexible, intolerant -- especially of the French -- and quite humorless. And he was provincial: at his French headquarters he insisted on attending a Church of Scotland service every Sunday. Bullheaded as he was, he was the perfect commander for an enterprise committed to endless abortive assaulting. Indeed, one powerful legacy of Haig's performance is the conviction among the imaginative and intelligent today [Fussell was writing in the mid-70's] of the unredeemable defectiveness of all civil and military leaders. Haig could be said to have established the paradigm. His want of imagination and innocence of artistic culture have seemed to provide a model for Great Men ever since.

Paul Fussell
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)

John Keegan says of Haig:

Haig, in whose public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common touch. He seemed to move through the horrors of the First World War as if guided by some inner voice, speaking of a higher purpose and a personal destiny. That, we now know, was not just appearance. Haig was a devotee of both spiritualist practices and fundamentalist religion. As a young officer, he had taken to attending seances, where a medium put him in touch with Napoleon; as Commander-in-Chief he fell under the influence of a Presbyterian chaplain whose sermons confirmed him in his belief that he was in direct communication with God and had a major part to play in a divine plan for the world. His own simple religion, he was convinced, was shared by his soldiers, who were inspired thereby to bear the dangers and sufferings which were their part of the war he was directing.

John Keegan
The First World War (1998)

Finally, in his study On The Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman F. Dixon devotes the large part of a chapter to examining Haig's character. He says, in part:

For a start he was conservative, conventional, and, in his attitude toward the French, ethnocentric. His diary and dispatches suggest that he was unemotional and totally anti-intraceptive (i.e. not one to reflect upon his own motives). He was manifestly lacking in compassion toward his fellow men. He was a confirmed believer in the direction of events by supernatural powers (according to research a common correlate of authoritarianism), and reserved almost to the point of being totally inarticulate.

Haig also betrayed the triad of traits which, according to contemporary [1976] research, defines the obsessive character and is correlated with authoritarianism. He was obstinate, orderly and mean.

[...]

It will be recalled that according to Rokeach people differ along a continuum of open-mindedness. At one end are those who are open to fresh ideas, and at the other end those who find it hard to accept and act upon information which does not accord with their systems of belief. Haig, like many authoritarians, seemed to have belonged to the latter category. Certainly his behaviour before and during [the] Third [Battle of] Ypres appeared to reflect the workings of a mind that was impervious to contrary information. Nor did he make up for his 'closed' mind by having a fertile imagination; for about Haig's lack of this faculty there has been almost complete unanimity of agreement. Lloyd George had no illusions on this score when he wrote: 'I never met anyone in a high position who seemed to me so utterly devoid of imagination.' Wavell described Haig as having 'a one-track mind'; and even Haig's chaplain, Duncan, whose adulation of his chief bordered on the sycophantic, was forced to admit that there may have been grounds for supposing Haig to have been unimaginative. [...]

[...]

Now, whether or not the Third Battle of Ypres, which was described by A.J.P. Taylor as 'the blindest slaughter of a blind war' and which cost the British over 300,000 casualties for 'trivial gains', exemplifies incompetence is perhaps debatable. People are still divided on this issue.

What is certain is that Haig's conceiving of this battle, his conduct of the fights,and his apparent inability to let go are consistent with the personality of the man and not attributable, as some would have it, to stupidity.

Norman F. Dixon
On The Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976)

There you have it, Haig and Bush.

Although there are surely significant differences, I think there's quite a bit of overlap between Haig's character and Bush's, and Cheney's as well, which is to be expected considering that they share the same authoritarian outlook.

Haig, at least, knew better than to declare victory before anything had actually been been accomplished. Ultimately, the Allies won World War I not because of Haig, or any other Allied general, but because Germany couldn't sustain the fight, and the United States entered the war. For Bush in Iraq, there is no deus ex machina, no great power to come into the fray and change the balance, and insurgents, by definition, live off the land and don't have supply lines or dissent back home to worry about (since they are the dissent). There's really no hope for George Bush's War, no matter how fervently the dead-enders and true believers wish for it, and certainly no small-scale escalation is going to make a significant difference.

[Thanks to Polly via Daily Kos]

Addenda: Krugman:

I began writing about the Bush administration’s infallibility complex, the president’s Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power — the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity — it’s a recipe for disaster.

The interesting question here is whether there is a more structural explanation for why these people are always — and systemically — wrong. I mean, it’s fun to blame everything on their being idiots. But there’s a more interesting — and more accurate — explanation here.

In my opinion, their wrongness is a function of their ideological approach to the world. And I mean that in a philosophical sense. Like other nationalists throughout history, they interpret the world through the lens of their own idees fixe. Ideologues like them approach the world not as empiricists but as advocates. They don’t survey the phenomena around them and derive fact-based conclusions. They survey the external world for data points that reaffirm their pre-existing views.

Pajamas Media doesn’t have a monopoly on this problem. Indeed, it’s unclear whether our brains are even capable of perceiving things outside of an ideological lens of some sort. But not all lenses are created equal. And the thing that comes through in reading the Pajamas crowd is an extreme Manichean nationalism coupled with a persecution complex. As nationalists, the Malkin crowd embraces America with an almost-infantile devotion (my daddy can do no wrong). The world around them is also very easily divided into good and evil, American or not American, Muslim or not Muslim, and so on. On top of all this (and intertwined with it) is the persecution complex that is so central to the conservative evangelical political movement. To the Pajamas nationalists, the paranoia manifests itself as media bias — everywhere, at all times — in the same way that James Dobson sees a constant, unending assault on Christianity.

There’s a lot of interesting psychology here.

Indeed, I've said all along that once we get out of this particular patch of history, and the various wingnut factions are pushed back into the obscurity of the fringe world where they came from, there are going to be some fascinating books out looking at their rather bizarre psychology. I'm hopeful that I'll have the intestinal fortitude necessary to read them some time before I leave this mortal coil.

I often come back to the idea of my friend Roger Keeling that liberalism is the result of the scientific method turned to the social and political world, guided by the precepts of humanism. In this formulation empiricism is more important than ideology, and the liberal or progressive advocate must act as the scientific advocate does and back up his or her advocacy with results. If the facts don't support the case, then even the fiercest advocate has an obligation to let go of their operational theory and find something else that works. This, clearly, is a modus operandi that the wingers just cannot accept, and do not follow.

434) Except in pockets of ignorance and malice, there is no longer an ideological war between conservationists and developers. Both share the perception that health and prosperity decline in a deteriorating environment.

Edward O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life (1992)

435) To clone [...] a mammoth or a dodo or any other extinct organism [from fragments of DNA recovered from museum specimens and fossils] would be, as the molecular biologist Russell Higuchi recently said, like taking a large encyclopedia in an unknown language previously ripped into shreds and trying to reassemble it without the use of your hands.

Edward O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life (1992)

436) Every country has three forms of wealth: material, cultural, and biological. The first two we understand well because they are the substance of our everyday lives. The essence of the biodiversity problem is that biological wealth is taken much less seriously. This is a major strategic error, one that will be increasingly regretted as time passes. Diversity is a potential source for immense untapped material wealth in the form of food, medicine, and amenities. The fauna and flora are also a part of a country's heritage, the product of millions of years of evolution centered on that time and place and hence as much a reason for national concern as the particularities of language and culture.

Edward O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life (1992)

437) The favored living place of most people is a prominence near water from which parkland can be viewed. On such heights are found the abodes of the powerful and rich, tombs of the great, temples, parliaments, and monuments commemorating tribal glory. The location is today an aesthetic choice and, by the implied freedom to settle there, a symbol of status. In ancient, more practical times the topography provided a place to retreat and a sweeping prospect from which to spot the distant approach of storms and enemy forces. Every species selects a habitat in which its members gain a favorable mix of security and food. For most of deep history, human beings lived in tropical and subtropical savanna in East Africa, open country sprinkled with streams and lakes, trees and copses. In similar topography modern people choose their residences and design their parks and gardens, if given a free choice. They simulate neither dense jungle, toward which gibbons are drawn, nor dry grasslands, preferred by hamadryas baboons. In their gardens they plant tress that resemble the acacias, sterculias, and other native trees of the African savannas. The ideal tree crown sought is consistently wider than tall, with spreading lowermost branches close enough to the ground to touch and climb, clothed with compound or needle-shaped leaves.

Given the means and sufficient leisure, a large portion of the populace backpacks, hunts, fishes, birdwatches, and gardens. In the United States and Canada more people visit zoos and aquariums than attend all professional athletic events combined. They crowd the national parks to view natural landscapes, looking from the tops of prominences out across rugged terrain for a glimpse of tumbling water and animals living free. They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.

These are examples of what I have called biophilia, the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life. To biophilia can be added the idea of wilderness, all the land and communities of plants and animals still unsullied by human occupation. In wilderness people travel in search of new life and wonder, and from wilderness they return to parts of the earth that have been humanized and made physically secure. Wilderness settles peace on the soul because it needs no help; it is beyond human contrivance. Wilderness is a metaphor of unlimited opportunity, rising from the tribal memory of a time when humanity spread across the world, valley to valley, island to island, godstruck, firm in the belief that virgin land went on forever past the horizon.

Edward O. Wilson
The Diversity of Life (1992)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 740 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.