Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

The preacher stopped at last and there arose out of the darkness a woman with her hair pulled back into a little tight knot. She began so quietly that we couldn’t hear what she said, but soon her voice rose resonantly and we could follow her. She was denouncing the reading of books. Some wandering book agent, it appeared, has come to her cabin and tried to sell her a specimen of his wares. She refused to touch it. Why, indeed, read a book? If what was in it was true then everything in it was already in the Bible. If it was false then reading it would imperil her soul. Her syllogism complete, she sat down.

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders — that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous — by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

…

Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can’t understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.

…

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process.

And now my miniature Mencken festival can get underway, since my copy of A Religious Orgy in Tennessee was ready for pickup at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. Any day now, Treatise on the Gods should be waiting as well. Because, of course, I’m clearly not finding enough things about the present day to make me cranky and disenchanted, right?

“Though our online database is updated hourly to match actual in-store quantities, all of our books are sold on a first-come, first-served basis,” says the email. “Powell’s stores are browsed by thousands of walk-in customers every day, and in all likelihood the items below were purchased or mis-shelved by another customer.” Of course, the book in question was only available at the Chalmers Warehouse, so it’s doubtful there was any customer browsing or mis-shelving going on. Chalk one up, instead, to Powell’s online store perhaps not being all its cracked up to be. At any rate, with my virtual credit refunded to me, I’ve now ordered the later reprint of Treatise on the Gods as a replacement. Let’s see how it goes this time.

Thanks to a combination of a Powell’s gift card I hadn’t yet used and the fact that I had virtual credit about which I had forgotten on their website, I just now was able to order two books which of course I’ve now removed from my Amazon wishlist, both by H. L. Mencken. The first, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee, collects for the first time all of his reports from the Scopes Monkey Trial. The second, Treatise on the Gods, was “controversial even before it was published in 1930″.