Nonsenseorship | Page 9

Hecht's first novel.--Ed.] on my native
heath. Woe the prophet who is with honor in his country! He will flee
in disgust in quest of hair shirts and a bastinado.
Thus, the citizens. With the left hand they greet the iconoclasts and
hand them royalties. With the right hand they pass further laws for the
iconoclasts to denounce. A phenomenon results. With the thought of
the masses becoming more and more neutral in the highty-tighty war
between Good and Evil, the laws created by these same masses grow
more and more rabid. But it must be borne in mind that although the
masses, carried away by flagellant impulses, assist in the creation of
these laws, in the main, they are laws, self-created platitudes which
give birth to new platitudes. Logic is the most pernicious of the Holy
Ghosts responsible for the conception of undesirable Gods.
I am prepared now to make further revelations. The foregoing, although
bristling with inconsistencies, seems to me, nevertheless, a ground
work. I will begin the apocalyptic finale with a resume of the
choir-leaders, the high priests, the Mahatmas of Sir Frankenstein.
Item one: It is obvious that the laws of the land being the ghastly
climaxes of artificial logic and not of human desires or biological
necessities, therefore the salaried apostles of these laws must function
similarly outside nature.
The high priests, it develops indeed upon investigation, diligently
lickspittling to Sir Frankenstein, have no following. The masses are not
going to Heaven in their wake. They, the high priests, are magically out
of touch with their worshippers. And from day to day they grow further
out of touch until they are to be seen high in the clouds tending the
fugitive altars that are soaring toward God on their own power.
These high priests are the creatures elected, commissioned and
delegated by the proletaire to perpetuate its grandiose and impossible
image. And this they do. They are the custodians of the public morals,
meaning the protectors of the huge trick mirror out of which the
complexes, neurasthenias, and morbid fears of the public stare back at

it in the guise of Virtue, Honor, Decency, and Love. These custodians
are also, to leap into the denouement, the censors here under discussion;
censors not only tolerated but insisted upon by the people to annoy and
harass them and inspire them to further ballot flagellations in order that
they, the people, may be spared the disaster of discovering themselves
different from what two hundred centuries of self-idealization have
driven them into believing themselves to be.
This, the high priests do. In every village, hamlet and farm they have
their say. They chastise. They make things fit for decent people to see
or wear or drink, and people flattered to death at the idea of being
considered decent submit piously to the distastement infringements and
taboos.
All-powerful are the censors. But despite this all-powerfulness they
labor under a wretched handicap. They are stupid. Stupidity is the
paradox to be found most often in all-powerful Gods. They are stupid,
the censors. And the Devil is clever. The Seven Arts which are the
Seven Incarnations of Dionysius, the Seven Masks of an unrepentant
Lucifer, elude them in the horrific struggle. Or at least partially elude
them. Occasionally a cloven hoof is spied and sliced to the bone.
* * * * *
We return now with proud and tranquil ease to the beginning of this
tale, to the phenomenon of a tolerated literary iconoclasm in a land
alive with caterwaulings of virtue.
As hinted above not all the Arts escape, nor do any of them escape all
the time. Music, whose sly and terrible vices were for centuries
unperceived by the high priests, has been brought to earth in places.
"Jazz Incites to Sin. Syncopation is Devil's Ally." Discovered! One
reads the morning paper and feels a return of hope. The High Priests
are aroused. They have disembowelled an ally. There is hope then of a
bloody fray. Another Edition and they will be on our own heads,
swinging their snickersnees. Mencken will be arrested and burned in
public. Anderson will be strung up by the heels and his estates
confiscated. There will be war--red war, and we in the army of the

iconoclasts growling impotently at each other will face about and have
at them with hullaballo and manifesto and snickersnee in turn.
"Nude Painting Banned From Window. Nab Store Keeper." We read on.
The snickersnee swings towards the vitals of Hollywood. "Movie
Magnate Charges Work of Art Cut; Sues Censors. Seeks Redress in
Courts."
Valhalla! They are closing in. Another forced march and they are upon
us.
Alas, our coffee cools as we wait impatiently for the alarms to sound.
We are intact. Mencken still lives. Anderson still lives. The tide