“I sincerely hope that the nobility and gentry of the lowlands will not make the colossal mistake of viewing this trial of Scopes as a trivial farce. Full of rustic japes and in bad taste, it is, to be sure, somewhat comic on the surface. One laughs to see lawyers sweat. The jury, marched down Broadway, would set New York by the ears. But all of that is only skin deep… when the curtain falls at least all the laughter may be coming from the yokels. You probably laughed at the Prohibitionists, say, back in 1914. Well, don’t make the same error twice… Now the clowns turn out to be armed, and have begun to shoot.”
— HL mencken for The Baltimore Evening sun in July 1925
So here we are almost 100 years later and the fundamentalist wingnuts are back at it, rolling back reproductive rights, banning (if not burning) books, and supporting any odd charlatan (idiots like MTG and fork-tongued opportunists like JD “My Book Was Wildly Overrated” Vance) who will gladly hitch a slop-wagon to their narrow-minded and self-interested agenda. The fact that a philandering, thrice-married libertine like Trumpf, who had “relations” with a porn star before paying her off, can carry the banner for the evangelical Right is an utter disgrace. Sodom meet, and be repeatedly violated by, Gomorrha. Trump’s new “God Bless the USA Bible” is probably scratch-n-sniff. No amount of Ariadne’s string could disentangle the sulfurous labyrinth of lies, distortions and hypocrisies that the GOP has erected for itself. One risks turning inward and falling into a state of catatonic despair. Except that, as Mencken states, “the clowns turn out to be armed and have begun to shoot.”
Great Exudations 