Nonsenseorship | Page 8

himself.
Censorship, almost extinct in the restriction of the national literature,
thrives in every other field. Censorships abound. Food, drink, movies,
politics, baseball, diversion, dress--all these are under the jurisdiction
of a continually aroused censorship. The pulpits and editorial pages
emit sonorous hymns of taboo. Every caption writer is an Isaiah, every
welfare worker fancies himself the handwriting on the wall.
Unchallenged by the vote of the masses or by any outward evidence of
mass dissent, the platitudes pile up, the nation is filled from morning to

morning with stentorian clamor. Puritanism in a frenetic finale
approaches a climax.
But, and we tiptoe towards the crux of this phenomenon, the Bacchanal
of Presbyterianism is an artificial climax. Unlike the day of the later
Caesars, the populace does not abandon itself in imitation of its Neros
and Caligulas. Instead, we have the spectacle of a populace apathetic
toward the spirit of its time.
The Puritan debauch is the logical culmination of the anti-Paganism
and backworldism launched two hundred centuries back. The Christian
ethic, to the bewildered chagrin of its advocates, has triumphed. Not a
triumph this time that offers itself as a cloak for Jesuitism, colonization,
or empire juggling. But an unimpeachable triumph entirely beyond the
control of the most adroit of the choir-Machiavellis.
In other words the body politic finds itself betrayed by its own
platitudes. A moral frenzy animates its horizon. But it is a frenzy of
idea escaped control, an idea grown too huge and luminous to direct
any longer. The moral frenzy of the war was the moral frenzy of such
an idea--virtue become a Frankenstein. This virtue--the Golden Rule,
the Thou Shalt Nots, the thousand and one unassailable maxims, adages,
old saws invented chiefly for the protection of the weak and the solace
of the inferior--this virtue has taken itself out of the hands of its
hitherto adroit worshippers. A snowball rolling uphill toward God and
gathering furious dimensions, it has escaped the shrewd janitors of
orthodoxy who from age to age were able to keep it within bounds.
Thus in the war, confronted with the platitude that the world must be
made safe for democracy and with the further platitude that democracy
and equality were the goals of Christianity and with a dozen similar
platitudes none of which had any authentic contact with the life of the
nation, thus confronted, the proletaire was forced to lift itself up by its
boot straps and rise to the defence of a Frankenstein idealism of which
it was the parent-victim. Disillusionment with the causes of the war has,
however, served no high purpose. The Frankenstein God, the
Frankenstein virtue is still enshrined in the Heaven of the Copy Books.
And we find the proletaire still worshipping, albeit with the squirmings

and grimacings, a horrible idealization of itself.
The Thou Shalt Nots have escaped. They increase and multiply with a
life of their own. Logic is the most irresponsible of the manias which
operate in life. Logic demands that ideas be carried to their climax and
this demand, as inexorable as Mr. Newton's law, has made a
Frankenstein of the unsuspecting Galilean.
Hypnotized by the demands of logic, bewildered by the contemplation
of this code of backworldism which he himself seems somehow to have
created, the ballot maniac stands riveted at the polls and sacrifices to
his own image by hitting himself on the head with further virtuous
restrictions--a gesture necessary to prevent his own image from giving
him the lie. He must, in other words, prove himself as virtuous,
whenever public demonstration demands, as the Frankenstein platitudes
proclaim him to be.
The Puritanism of the nation, remorselessly upheld by its laws and its
public factotums is an extraneous and artificial pose into which the
blundering proletaire has tricked itself. There are innumerable
consequences. We have, firstly, the spectacle of the masses disporting
themselves slyly in the undertow of cynicism.
"Modesty," bellows Sir Frankenstein from pulpit and press, "is a
cardinal virtue." "Right O," echoes the feminine contingent and
promptly bobs its hair, shortens its skirts, and rolls down its socks.
"Abstinence, sobriety, are an economic and spiritual necessity,"
bellows Sir Frankenstein. Whereupon the male contingent votes the
land dry and gets drunk.
From the foregoing we may derive glimmers of truth concerning the
public tolerance of iconoclasts. "Main Street," a volume fathered by
Mencken, Freud, and the other Chaos-Bringers, leaps into prominence
as a best seller. It is devoured and acclaimed by the ballot maniac who
reads it, smacks his lips over its "truths" and sallies forth to vote further
canonizations of hypocrisy into the legal code. Even I, who ten years
ago prided myself upon being as indigestible a type of the Incoherent

Young as the land afforded, find myself for one month a best seller
[Footnote: "Erik Dorn," Mr.