Tell us how you really feel...

Consider this op-ed piece about farmers:

Yet we are asked to venerate this prehensile moron as the Ur-burgher, the citizen par excellence, the foundation-stone of the state! And why? Because he produces something that all of us must have–that we must get somehow on penalty of death. And how do we get it from him? By submitting helplessly to his unconscionable blackmailing by paying him, not under any rule of reason, but in proportion to his roguery and incompetence, and hence to the direness of our need. I doubt that the human race, as a whole, would submit to that sort of high-jacking, year in and year out, from any other necessary class of men. But the farmers carry it on incessantly, without challenge or reprisal, and the only thing that keeps them from reducing us, at intervals, to actual famine is their own imbecile knavery. They are all willing and eager to pillage us by starving us, but they can’t do it because they can’t resist attempts to swindle each other. Recall, for example, the case of the cottongrowers in the South. Back in the 1920’s they agreed among themselves to cut down the cotton acreage in order to inflate the price–and instantly every party to the agreement began planting more cotton in order to profit by the abstinence of his neighbors. That abstinence being wholly imaginary, the price of cotton fell instead of going up –and then the entire pack of scoundrels began demanding assistance from the national treasury–in brief, began demanding that the rest of us indemnify them for the failure of their plot to blackmail us. [More]

Now consider it was written in 1924. Makes current opinion writers look almost cuddly.

By H. L. Mencken - the archetype for curmudgeonly writers. Example quote: "Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another."

More cheerful stuff from Mencken.

[via HitandRun]