by Steve Hutcheson

Created on: January 18, 2008

America's Hilarious Dark Side

H. L. Mencken wrote passionately about life and society in America one hundred years ago yet he may as well have been writing about events and the people of the United States today as his words still in many respects retain their import. Citing from his reference in Wikipedia,

It is no coincidence he regarded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the finest work of American literature; much of that book details episodes of gullible and ignorant people being swindled by Confidence Men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them); by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). The book can be read as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is " the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

The pressure on American society to subscribe to the threat of terrorism has conducted the world into an open schism between societies, one that harks back to the time of the Crusaders, the need to lead these people out of their religious oppression and into whatever salvation that the American ideal can offer them. For the most part however and largely unseen by the people of the US, Islamic communities are content with their belief and perhaps with some modifications, also with the processes of life that it entails. It is not so much a clash of religions but a clash of cultures, defining the differences what it is about good and evil, a lack of understanding of the others acceptances or dismissals in the way we live our life and they live theirs.

The American psych has been captured in part by the politically inspired media and molded into a compliant morass, the daily denigration of liberal thought and sentiment and the corresponding glorification of all that is conservative promoted as the new gospel. Objectivity on the part of editors and writers has been destroyed by a well founded but misused sense of nationalism and super-patriotism and a strong desire to not be castigated as un-American at a time of war or conflict, to limit the questioning of policy and the principals that lead to them and to fail their own impartiality first and more importantly

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