The Man of Myriad Bromides
19 January 2009
Editor, Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
The fawning coverage of Barack Obama in today's edition of your paper combines with the increasingly surreal homage that Americans now pay to this man-of-myriad-bromides to remind me of a piece of wisdom from H.L. Mencken:
"People in the mass soon grow used to anything, including even being swindled. There comes a time when the patter of the quack becomes as natural and as indubitable to their ears as the texts of Holy Writ, and when that time comes it is a dreadful job debamboozling them."*
From the likes of Bruce Springsteen to the ordinary man and woman in the street, the deification of Mr. Obama is as dangerous as it is infantile.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 335.
Editor, Washington Post
1150 15th St., NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Editor:
The fawning coverage of Barack Obama in today's edition of your paper combines with the increasingly surreal homage that Americans now pay to this man-of-myriad-bromides to remind me of a piece of wisdom from H.L. Mencken:
"People in the mass soon grow used to anything, including even being swindled. There comes a time when the patter of the quack becomes as natural and as indubitable to their ears as the texts of Holy Writ, and when that time comes it is a dreadful job debamboozling them."*
From the likes of Bruce Springsteen to the ordinary man and woman in the street, the deification of Mr. Obama is as dangerous as it is infantile.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
* H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 335.
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Thursday June 18, 2009 at 10:26am