Loren Martell just called. He is abandoning his coverage of the Duluth School Board.
Loren was frustrated that his column this week only made it to the Reader’s Online version. I too was surprised that it wasn’t in today’s paper copy. The Reader’s publisher Bob Boone, to whom I am grateful for his having published over 100 of my columns, gave Loren the impression that he thought Loren’s writing was a bit snarky. I’d be more inclined to describe his prose as aceberic like Mark Twain’s or HL Mencken’s. Okay, Okay. So the two words are not all that different.
Here’s a little dose of Mencken:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Also attributed to Mencken No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. but this, alas, can not be verified.
Oh and today I was reading American Rose about the ecdysiast Gypsy Rose Lee to Claudia. HL Mencken coined the term. He must have been a good biology student. He coined it for the incomporable strip teaser Gypsy. Claudia was so overcome that she had to leave immediately afterwords and travel to her Seminary in New Brighton and cleanse her soul.
