Benjamin M. sent me a passage from Ambrose Bierce’s essay, “Election Day,” from George Barkin, ed., The Sardonic Humor of Ambrose Bierce, to go along with my earlier H.L. Mencken blog.
“Despots effete upon tottering thrones
Unsteadily poised upon dead men’s bones,
Walk up! Walk up! The circus is free,
And this wonderful spectacle you shall see:
Millions of voters who mostly are fools,
Demagogues, dupes and candidate’s tools.
Armies of uninformed mountebanks,
And braying disciples of brainless cranks.
Many a week they’ve belloed like beeves,
Bitterly blackguarding, lying like thieves,
Libeling freely the quick and the dead
And painting the New Jersusalem red.
Tyrants monarchical, emperors, kings,
Princes and nobles and all such things.”
And alluding to the day after election day:
“Magnificent spectacle! Every tongue
suddenly civil that yesterday rung (like
the beating of a brazen bell)
Each fair reputation’s eternal knell;
Hands no longer delivering blows, And noses, for counting,
arrayed in rows.
Walk up, gentlemen, nothing to pay.
The Devil goes back to Hell today.
Doesn’t his “braying disciples of brainless cranks” remind you of Fascists-R-Us, a.k.a., FreeRepublic?
8:05 am on November 3, 2004
