Mencken’s conservatism is not the opposite of romanticism; it is romanticism par excellence. Mencken did not worry about casting pearls before swine; he was the pearl already there. The world was his oyster.
Far from rejecting the world, Mencken enjoyed it. He was not an accomplice to its crimes, but an expert witness. He did not consent to it; he acquiesced sarcastically.
Mencken thought of the flag, not as some great symbol of high and mighty ideals, but realistically as a handkerchief. After all, he struggled to work when he had hay fever, which he succumbed to seasonally, much like most citizens do to symbols — which they are peppered with by the picky pecksniffian bluenoses running society, like they knows what’s what and what’s not. He believed that the flag represents the very fabric of civilisation, and that civilisation unravels as the flag unfurls. As he said, “The moral order of the world runs aground on hay fever.”1 Consider, for example, the unflaggingly feverish religiosity of the typical response to a sneeze.
Footnotes- H.L. Mencken, Damn! A Book of Calumny (New York: Philip Goodman Company, 1918), p. 52. [↩]