Wonkette
Wonkette guest editor (and Reason sellout) Dave Weigel snuck into a screening of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter Thompson last night, and reports that it’s “funny and raw as hell,” but spoiled by dirty liberal anti-Bush hippieness, because everybody knows how much HST loved the Bush Family, oil companies and imperialist wars. (It’s Reason; what do you expect?) But was Thompson’s 9/11 column really “thin and watery stuff” and “a catalogue of worries and ‘Bush is dumb’ jibes”?
A Thompson lookalike sits at a typewriter and pounds out an ESPN column for September 11, 2001. And it’s really not a great column. It’s a catalogue of worries and “Bush is dumb” jibes; compared to, say, his obituary for Richard Nixon, it’s thin and watery stuff.
We haven’t read HST’s 9/11 column since about September 12, 2001, when it was posted on ESPN.com. But we sort of vaguely recall it capturing the ominous doom of the moment and predicting eternal horror. Let’s go back and see if the dead doctor was right, when he was addled and lazy yet still alive, and George W. Bush was AWOL again, and America was so baffled and terrified that a vicious rat-faced opportunist like Rudy Giuliani seemed comforting.
- The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
- It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.
- We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once.
- This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now.
- He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why.
- Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job — armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.
- The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.
- The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
Well, that’s more prescient than 99% of the 9/11 pontificating in the years since, let alone the first 24 hours.
And other than a relatively kind wish of “good luck” for the “goofy child-President,” at the end of the column, there’s nothing about Bush in the whole thing. So, do not believe Weigel’s terrible lies, and go learn about a strange, forgotten era when people could still read in this country, and there were still a few Writers.
(Gonzo opens on July 4. And unless the trailer used up all the good footage, it will be a fine excuse to waste two hours in an air-conditioned movie theater, with a thermos full of margaritas, on this coming Independence Day.)
Fear & Loathing In America [ESPN Page 2]
Night of the Hunter [Reason]
Jeeziz yeah we miss the doctor
First him and then Molly Ivins (or was it the other way round?—sometimes the details get blurry)
God love yer Dr Gonzo
“If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.”
Obviously from the Nixon obit.
This is my favorite person who has ever lived for all eternity, ever (and I really mean that). He brought out the Gannon thing and LOOKY here, a day after 9/11 and while everyone is screaming “BLOODY HELL KILL MOOSLIMS” The Good Doctor basically says “Your all fucked, and those sand-people aren’t gonna be the ones who fuck you either. Good luck, swine.”
He was the second coming of Jeebus. Right on.
But what about the part where Johnny Depp blew him? Into outer space?
And BTW, WTF: The only “thin and watery stuff” that ever came out of Harry S. Truman was the neon-bright glowing shaft of piss that followed a weekend’s debauchery.
Oh. We’re discussing the other HST? I still blame him for Raoul setting up James Earl Ray. So there.
http://www.infowars.com/articles/world/tom_flocco_arrested_tied_to_wh_child_sex_ring.htm
Oh and FUCK YOU Rusty!
Spot on, as far as I’m concerned.
Man, I forgot how much I miss that guy. He knew what was coming, and knew he wanted no part of it. Sad.
While I didn’t like everything he did, what he got right, I loved him for.
Shine on, Duke. Shine on forever!
He was our own surly prophet, a drunken martyr for the hyper-sentient. His words will always be true… How I wish he was here for this election to write The Great Shark Hunt Vol. 2, dammit.
I’ve seen this documentary! They premiered it at the Seattle Independent Film Festival two weeks ago. It’s really quite good. I’m sort of a Thompson buff myself and there was a lot in it that I didn’t know.
Sorry for a long post but here’s a great paragraph from the good doctor:
Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.
A hoot and a prolonged squeak in good doctor’s honor!
As much as I hate to say it, HST’s ESPN stuff was mostly crap. He seemed to be going through the motions and collecting a paycheck more than anything.
But man…was it really only a few short years ago that ESPN.com had Ralph Wiley and Hunter S Thompson writing for them? How fucking far they’ve fallen.
July 4th, fuckin’ eh right. Let the rubes watch the fireworks. It’s what they do best.
HST had started talking about the suspicious instantaneous disintegration of the WTC towers before his suspicious death. Poor guy. Damn lizards.
No longer with us: Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, WFB, JK Galbraith
This just depresses the hell out of me. Are there any public intellectuals still alive? Gore Vidal’s still around, I guess.
I saw the flick last night…loved it. The review seems a bit excessively nit-picky, in that he complains about the use of somewhat stock hippie footage in the discussion of Thompson’s association with that part of the counterculture, and about the use of film footage along with the description of Fear and Loathing, which I think actually make the documentary more accessible as a “stand-alone” or to those not already familiar with the subject.
And there’s only so much stock footage of Thompson…the amount used in the documentary is quite impressive.
I’m inclined to agree that the past-present parallels are a little overboard, but at this time in history, I don’t think the sentiment is entirely misplaced. I also disagree that the intent was to “sledgehammer[] into your cortex: Nothing changes! Everything’s awful! Why didn’t you rubes listen to Gonzo?” (Thopmson was never Dr. Gonzo to begin with, but that’s extraneous)…at least, that’s not what I took from it.
Oh sure predictions of the scary ‘future’.
This is kind of like reading too much into the horiscopes, nostradamus and the bible. You read it in different ways and you come to different conclusions. It’s easier to let other people do the thinking for you so you don’t waste braincells interpreting the world. There are only 2 words you need to know about the war on terror: Mission Accomplished.
Goddamn critics.
Borat: You’re spot on. Predicting the invasion of Iraq as Christian retribution for the 9/11 attacks is very akin to reading too much into horoscopes, when those horoscopes are, you know…quite detailed and turn out to be entirely correct.
NotNotLickingToads: Jebus. My sarcasm meter is fucked! Time to replenish with beer, I guess…
Re the litany of 9/11 predictions: Jesus fucking Christ.
A little depressed now. I was planning on having a G&T tonight anyway, but now I know something I’m drinking *for*.
jjgittes: Drink three for me (I will catch up. I always catch up). I’ll be trapped in this prison of walls and windows four more hours before reading my recently acquired (stolen from friend (kinda) ) copy of “Songs of the Doomed” to read on the liberal-commie public transit commute.
from The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved:
So far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry - a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient - to the parents - than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and in their own ways. (“Goddamn, did you hear about Smitty’s daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!”)
Res ipsa loquitur.
Hunter Thompson was the great American blogger, before there was such a thing. Mencken did it earlier, but Thompson had that unquenchable thirst for justice:
from Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s:
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whisky, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested… Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.
You were a mean, angry, sloppy, heavily armed drunk, Doctor.
But - Christdamnitalltohell! — you could WRITE.
Over thirty years ago, I hand-copied the following from “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas,” because it so resonated with me. I still have the quote in a scrapbook that I have carried around over the years.
Thinking about it now makes me feel hollow and sad. Again, but with more reason this time:
“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
:::Sigh:::
Fuck it.
HST was an amazing writer
“In a Nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile.” -HST
Yeah, he understood Truth. His later ESPN stuff was a bit weak at times, but who the hell else could have SURVIVED what he did for that long, never mind keep a machete-sharp edge on their talent? But I think W. and 9/11 provided enough Fear & Loathing to fine up that edge one last time.
Hunter was outraged because he WAS paying attention. He saw more clearly, and was hence more outraged, than many many people.
Of course, all we can apparently do is show how proud we are of our ability to quote him.
Anyway, I know where I’ll be on the 4th. Wearing my Bush t-shirt that says “Constitutions Are For Pussies’.
Selah.
“In a society of criminals, the only crime is getting caught. And the only sin is stupidity.”
HST
God, I miss him but I think events since his death would have forced us to lock him a car trunk while we read out the news to him–his recommendation for anyone wanting to hear the Nixon tapes.
Spider Jerusalem wept.
Thompson’s accuracy creeps me out every time I read that article. It’s like he could see into the future.
Bah. Just because you’re a drunken paranoiac on drugs and packing heat doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, after all. HST as a great writer? Hm. No.
Go back and read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 - it’s a brilliant insight into Presidential politics. For all his personal faults, the man was a genius. I can only imagine the fun he’d have watching the death throes of Junior’s administration.