I have already written the equivalent of three stories this morning, and I can’t bring myself to till those particular furrows again in a less passionate and more objective fashion. I wish I had the emotion and articulation that H.L. Mencken had. He could skewer the ruling class like no one else.

You have a pretty good idea of what the topics of interest might be; the media is talking non-stop about some of them and ignoring some of the others. What I find intriguing is that The Narrative is what it is all about, and there appears to be an increasing unwillingness to let facts get in the way of a good story.

I am not going to go any further down that road this morning, and in fact, the amount of rain that is going to be falling on the Virginia byways is going to make me forestall the trip to the farm until things dry up a bit.

I took the chance to glance through some of Menken’s ruminations, particularly the ones he had about famed Canadian-American radio preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. If you are scratching your head at the reference, I don’t blame you.

Aimee was a woman ahead of her time. She enjoyed a roller-coaster of a personal life, and a following of thousands of believers. She was one of the first major radio personalities, and in her time was heard from Australia to the Cape Verde Islands. Her preaching of the gospel played out against the backdrop of divorce and re-marriage, and in 1926, she disappeared with bathing in the Pacific ocean.

She reappeared weeks later with the story that she had been kidnapped, and escaped when her captors went for supplies for the cabin in the Arizona desert. All stories have to fit a narrative, you know, and the LA DA accused her of faking the kidnapping. The story attracted national attention, with the DA doggedly attempting to get the Grand Jury to indict her.

H.L. Menken was quite taken by the furor. You would have expected him to savage the evangelist, since he was no fan of religion, organized or not, and his public assumed he would continue his usual pattern of anti-fundamentalist articles and excoriate the preacher. Instead, he came to Aimee’s defense, identifying various local religious and civic groups that were using the case as an opportunity to pursue their respective ideological agendas against the embattled Pentecostal minister.


After all charges had been dropped against her, Mencken wrote that since many of Tinsel Town’s residents got their ideas “of the true, the good and the beautiful” from the movies and newspapers, “Los Angeles will remember the testimony against her long after it forgets the testimony that cleared her.”

I understand that about narratives. For example, I was going to tell you about the remarkable discovery I made at the Marine Corps Exchange the other day, but that would lead to a story I don’t particularly want to get into, though it was quite surprising and thoroughly enjoyable, and has led to all sorts of ancillary stories that are best left unsaid. It doesn’t fit any particular narrative, and thus would be a distraction.

Ditto for what is going on in town here in Washington, although I can say that the funeral cortege of former Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry, our favorite rascal, has been wending its way across the capital to permit Mr. Barry to lie in state at the Convention Center he did so much to create.

Mayor Barry is now one for the ages, and the past, unfortunately, appears to be the only place it is safe to contemplate these days. Hence my ramblings about the Sage of Baltimore. It is all about the Narrative.

Let’s take the traditional narrative about America. It is under assault, and has been most of my life. I find the traditional interpretation to be comforting, and I generally believe it, warts and all. Some people seem to prefer the warts, and in fact can’t seem to get beyond them.

Slavery is the bane of our national heritage. It was so evil that nearly a million of us perished in the conflict to eliminate the peculiar institution from our shores. I know there was injustice on the frontier, and that politicians have always been scoundrels.

I know that our grandparents were sold down the river by Goldman Sachs. Those bastards engineered the Black Friday collapse of the stock market in 1929, and those bastards are still calling the shots.

I know the policies of FDR were comforting, though they probably extended the length of the Great Depression, which really only ended due to the mobilization against Fascism.

I know our parent’s generation went willingly to fight for our way of life selflessly, and nearly a million young people did not come home again. I can only compare the sacrifice of the generation who has been at war since 9/11 in endless conflict and ceaseless deployments has a good case that they too are a Greatest Generation.

I know that Communism doesn’t work. That seventy-year experiment in changing human nature collapsed of its own ponderous weight and killed tens of millions in the process. Why that system seems to be a good idea again is quite beyond me.

I know that America is a pretty decent place to live, probably the best on earth, blemishes and all, and the number of people sneaking in here would seem to bear that out.

I know that none of the parties that operate the system can be trusted. Some are loonier than others in their delight in spending other people’s money, and the real 1% own both major political operations, and are in this only for themselves. They bear constant watching, and if nothing seems to be going on, it just means someone is pulling a fast one.

I know there is 600 years worth of gas and oil in this country alone. There is no energy crisis.

I know that the global surface temperatures have not gone up for 18.3 years. I don’t know what caused the “hiatus” the climate community is frantically trying to explain, but it clearly is not Carbon Dioxide. The climate is changing. It always does. I am just hoping it doesn’t get colder.

I am confident that more government doesn’t make things any better. I have been a government functionary most of my professional life and feel entitled to have an opinion about what works and what doesn’t work. After a period of time, the only thing our institutions are interested in is the preservation and expansion of themselves. It is a simple fact of entropy.

Oh well. None of that fits the narrative, whatever it happens to be. You see it all the time. An event happens. The narrative is taken down off the shelf and the story is jammed into it. It doesn’t matter what the story might be, it is always the same. As Rahm Emmanuel used to say, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Menken may have summed it up the best. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Old H.L. would be 133 years old today, if he were not busy welcoming Mayor Barry into paradise. There really is nothing new under the sun. And that specifically includes the narrative, of course.

(H.L. Mencken illustration by Jonathan Twingley).

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303