Zoo in the head

De mortuis, etc.

Pat Robertson's views on the role of Satan in Haitian history have been reverberating around cyberspace. There's a particularly interesting post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the question of whether good deeds can excuse evil words (short answer: No): in his support, Coates enlists Christopher Hitchens, seen on video explaining his refusal to pretend to mourn the Rev. Jerry Falwell. (Scholars of loon may wish to scan this 2001 footage of Falwell and Robertson agreeing that the USA brought September 11th on itself, on account of all that sodomising and abortion and not supporting Israel enough - you can't knock Robertson for inconsistency.)

The comments after the Coates post, debating the rights and wrongs of speaking ill of the dead, point towards an extraordinary piece of post-mortem invective, H. L. Mencken's obituary of William Jennings Bryan, best remembered now as an opponent of Darwinism - just before he died, in 1925, he made a fool of himself at the Scopes trial. Here's Mencken's assessment:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

Possibly Mencken went too far. Before his evangelising days Bryan had been secretary of state, three times Democratic presidential candidate, and a champion of liberal, democratic ideals - he led campaigns against big banks and America's new-minted imperial ambitions; and a century on, was he wrong?

I always associate his name with Vachel Lindsay's poem, recalling the effect of Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign on a young idealist:

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West  

Demented

(from Media Matters via The Huffington Post)

In case you don't have time to watch the video, or can't believe your ears, a transcript:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, OK, it's a deal. And they kicked the French out, you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

"But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island, it's cut down the middle; on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera, Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come. But right now we are helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable." 

The final sentence almost redeems him. The rest takes us back to Blake:

"Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again."

Straight in your face.

You will eat your babies

The Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas, channels Cormac McCarthy. More zaniness from Fred Phelps and his fag- and Jew-hating chums here and here:

Remember, Obama’s roots are deeply sunk in Africa, and his heart lies in Africa.  Can you name a single place in the world that needs food more than Africa?  Imagine how Bloody Beast Obama will be licking his chops at the thought of using the billions of dollars of fake money to pay a lot of worthless young white women to bear children, and nurse them for a year or so, in order to ship those freeze-dried plump white babies to Africa to meet their food needs? 

And there's even video.