The Ballad of David Jungerman

Marxist FUCK! DIE!

Looks an awful lot like the CA inland valley where they have all those signs explaining why the Kern River no longer flows through Bakersfield. Let’s farm high desert!

Typical.

Thats what power and privilege will do to a guy.

Speaking of ignorant hypocritical assholes:

Glenn Beck attacks Hayworth for shilling for a scam, then pimps Goldline

Do these people even *think* before they talk, or are we truly into “doubleplusgoodduckspeaker” territory?

Having lived around farmers for a few years, I’m not stunned.

It’s fucking stupid that the very people who are helped by “socialism” are the ones who spend their time voting for folks to dismantle it.

@ManchuCandidate: Scratch a Libertarian, find a government teat.

H.L. Mencken:

….LET the farmer, so far as I am concerned, be damned forevermore. To Hell with him, and bad luck to him. He is a tedious fraud and ignoramus, a cheap rogue and hypocrite, the eternal Jack of the human pack. He deserves all that he ever suffers under our economic system, and more. Any city man, not insane, who sheds tears for him is shedding tears of the crocodile.

No more grasping, selfish and dishonest mammal, indeed, is known to students of the Anthropoidea. When the going is good for him he robs the rest of us up to the extreme limit of our endurance; when the going is bad be comes bawling for help out of the public till. Has anyone ever heard of a farmer making any sacrifice of his own interests, however slight, to the common good? Has anyone ever heard of a farmer practising or advocating any political idea that was not absolutely self-seeking–that was not, in fact, deliberately designed to loot the rest of us to his gain? Greenbackism, free silver, the government guarantee of prices, bonuses, all the complex fiscal imbecilities of the cow State John Baptists–these are the contributions of the virtuous husbandmen to American political theory. There has never been a time, in good seasons or bad, when his hands were not itching for more; there has never been a time when he was not ready to support any charlatan, however grotesque, who promised to get it for him. Only one issue ever fetches him, and that is the issue of his own profit. He must be promised something definite and valuable, to be paid to him alone, or he is off after some other mountebank. He simply cannot imagine himself as a citizen of a commonwealth, in duty bound to give as well as take; he can imagine himself only as getting all and giving nothing.

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 . . .

@Prommie: prehensile moron

Gawd, I love Mencken. Bought the entire run of American Mercury just for his editorials.

@nojo: He was the Original Chainsaw.

@Prommie: And before anyone jumps in, it was his partner George Jean Nathan who came up with the line about Puritanism.

How current is this?

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.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob’s hatred of superiority. 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.

This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee buffoonery. Nothing else can. 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. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive — and a few are enough to carry on.

III

The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged — and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple — and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

@nojo: The sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, may be having fun? Or getting a hired handjob?

@Prommie: Sneaking Suspicion.

It’s usually attributed to Mencken, since it was originally unsigned, and nobody knows who the hell Nathan is. (Except Benedick, I’ll presume.) But Nathan was a relentless aphorist — and that particular line hit.

Why aren’t the teabaggers on this guys front lawn demanding he repay it all and erecting a fucking crucifix to nail him to?

That sign looks pretty old and beat up. Why are we hearing about it now?

@nojo: Sorry but must opt out of admiration for Menken and no critic is ever right about anything (excepting George Bernard Shaw). Ditto the whole two first names deal: Is it George or is it Jean? GBS exempt from this too. The round table ‘wits’ only make me sorry I wasn’t there to piss in their martinis. If you have to work that hard to have a salon you’re just a bunch of drunks. Dorothy Parker can kiss my ass. Carry on.

@Benedick: Backstory: Somebody burned the sign, which prompted an article in the local Sunday rag.

Upon publication, said Rag received complaints that Farmer Jungerman was a fucking hypocrite, which prompted a follow-up article — and that’s where Think Progress picked up the story.

@nojo: Roger Alf.

@nojo: Marxist Hypocrite! FUCKING DIE!