Sunday

Mencken rarely fails to crack me up, even when I don't agree with him. Here he is, writing about human rights:

"A dog is a standing proof that most so-called human rights, at bottom, are worth nothing. A dog is proverbially devoid of any such rights, and yet it lives well and is happy. For one dog that is starved and mistreated there are 10,000 that are coddled and overfed.”¦ Yet a dog has none of the great rights that men esteem, glory in and die for. It cannot vote. It cannot get converted by Dr. Billy Sunday. It cannot go to jail for some great and lofty principle–say, equal suffrage or birth control. It is barred from the Elks, the Harvard Club and Congress. It cannot serve its country by dying of septicaemia or acute gastro-enteritis. It cannot read the Nation. It cannot subscribe to the Y.M.C.A. It cannot swear at waiters. It cannot eat in Pullman dining-cars. It cannot be a Presbyterian."

Funny stuff. It's not apt stuff--a dog has none of those rights because it would have no use for them if he did--but it is funny stuff and highlights a more important point: rights aren't all they're cracked up to be. And I suspect the whole notion of rights has done great harm by turning upside down the proper order of things (we should have all rights, period, unless a right naturally belongs to the government . . . but such an argument would takes reams and reams of cyber-paper to sort out and therefore falls outside the scope of this blog post).