Megan McArdle has a post where she asks people for poems they like. A good idea. So I am stealing it.
I put two on there, see below.
Please add your own, though the entire Iliad, for example, should be represented by a choice selection, etc.
Arts & Letters
Mencken, Schmencken
Michael Barone has a good post where he mentions how Mencken hated FDR: “Mencken was taken to be a force for social liberalism and toleration in the 1920s. But in the 1930s, he vitriolically opposed Franklin Roosevelt … and the New Deal.”
Barone is right, and it is unusual to see anyone mention Mencken’s anti-FDR phase. He is usually treated as a liberal hero for ridiculing religious people, and his disdain for the Republican presidents of the 1920s and those who voted for them.
But Mencken hated FDR at least as much as he despised Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.
He did make one grudging concession to Coolidge:
Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.
This is actually half wrong. It is accurate to note that Wilson, Hoover and FDR, three presidents who are not usually lumped together, were all “world savers”, and this is not usually a good thing for a president to be. But Coolidge had a well-developed philosophy and acted on it. Like Eisenhower, he did the actual work quietly, while presenting a soothing image to the public. But Mencken was too convinced of his own intellectual superiority over everybody to notice that. That unearned arrogance is what makes Mencken age rather poorly, in my opinion. That said, he can be a clever writer and sometimes astute, and frequently funny. But the self-regard is grating.
Mencken was at his best in his books about the American language. There he mostly restricted himself to observable facts, or reasonable deductions therefrom, and while an amateur, he did a good job with it. His books of memoirs
Worthwhile Reading
Nick Cohen was raised by liberal and very political parents, and never met a conservative until he was 13. In this post, he writes about the evolution of his thinking and about leftist attitudes toward Iraq.
Cohen’s book, What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way will be published in February.
Today at A&L
A&L links to The Common Review, which appears to be the “Great Books Club” official journal- but I may be wrong. It is clearly associated with Penguin. Do the Chicago lads (and lasses, I guess) know anything about the path of the Great Books Clubs from then to now?
A&L was looking at the review of a new E. D. Hirsch book, The Knowledge Deficit. Albert Fernandez begins with some grudging agreement with the argument Hirsch develops.
Another Path to Our Democratic Hearts
Architecture can move us and if we come to associate the institutions and offices of a democracy, the role of the rule of law, then those buildings are going to invoke in us a powerful allegiance. State capitols and county seats are the focus of our towns. In Europe, a visitor asks the natives where the cathedral is; a good tourist visits even the tucked-away chapel with the great painting. Few Europeans coming here find very satisfactory answers when they ask us. A few churches are lovely, of course. While we may be more religious in many ways than Europe, you can’t necessarily tell that from the beauty, centrality, or even inspiring nature of most of our churches. It isn’t just that we haven’t been religious as long and missed the great cathedral building centuries. We are splintered and take our religion a lot more personally.Across broad swaths of America and in small to middling towns, county courthouses define the geography, the history, and even the current social life of a town. Local citizens sit on the square, gossiping, watching the town’s life go by. As I sit wait to be taken or excused from a jury, I watch a cross-section of our community. Our history/government department put up a large poster of the county seats in Texas some old, some new. Students stare at them intently, trying to find their county. The poster connects them to both the towns from which they came and the importance of the requirements for American history and federal/state government.