Carol — I’ll own up to being a big fan of Mencken. Sure, on occasion he wrote with too much acid in his pen, but I can only admire someone who so clearly saw the growing menace of the nanny-state progressives and fought them constantly.

I’ll agree with you that Bryan wasn’t all bad. And I don’t know whether Mencken would have agreed with me that the solution to the alleged problem of teaching evolution in Tennessee schools was to get the government out of the education business.

But in any event, my initial point was that the comparison of Mencken and Paglia isn’t particularly apt because he was an individualist and she is to a large degree a collectivist.