Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Reminds me of
Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos? -- H. L. Mencken
The Sage of Baltimore was a man of much wisdom, not counting the latent racism, mental rigidity, and limited vision -- and in my dreams I'm having dinner with him, Mark Twain, Lao Tsu, Gore Vidal, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Marcus Aurelius, Aphra Behn, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Ambrose Bierce. But they'd probably have hated each other, and the price for being in the same state of being as all of them, at the moment, seems rather too high even for their company. At least I did get to meet Gore Vidal -- and vote for him for junior US Senator from California. He lost, of course. Tant pis. Mencken suffered a horrible decline and death: At the age of 67, three years after WWII, a massive stroke left him, suddenly and permanently, almost completely aphasic. For eight years, he lingered on, one of the wittiest homo sapiens alive, fully conscious inside his skull, but almost completely unable to communicate, and effectively silenced. But his influence was wide, and yet lives. Most of his writings were wholly topical, hence less appreciated now than they were in contemporary context, but _then_ he was a lion of the printed page, read by everyone.