… is from pages 122-123 of H.L. Mencken’s essay “On Being an American” as it is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s essays, Prejudices: A Selection:
Consider, for example, a campaign for the Presidency. Would it be possible to imagine anything more uproariously idiotic – a deafening, nerve-wracking battle to the death between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Harlequin and Sganarelle, Gobbo and Dr. Cook – the unspeakable, with fearful snorts, gradually swallowing the inconceivable?
No one has ever bested Mencken at understanding and describing the farce that is politics and the frauds and goons who are its most successful practitioners.
