Category: History

Fear and loathing in 2024

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla mans (cats?) the National Affairs Desk in our bedroom.

It was not quite 4:30, and I was not quite up.

I was awake, rolled up in the blankets like a strip of bacon in a breakfast burrito. But I was in no rush to get unwrapped, gnawed on, and shat out by Election Day 2024.

My Gonzo pin, a gift from a friend during my own Gonzo period.

Like Mike’s bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” it has finally arrived: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Don’t worry. I haven’t been reading Ernest Hemingway in the run-up to The Big Show. No, I’ve been wallowing in bits of this and that from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

The Good Doktor wrote madly about The Edge, until he finally stepped over it. Nineteen years later, dead by suicide, cremated, and shot from a cannon by Johnny Depp, he still has more class — albeit in a certain Hell’s Angels style — and gave more service to his country than many a president.

Writing about the Hell’s Angels in his book of the same name, HST described people like the ones Herself recently saw herding flamboyantly Trump-flagged pickups up and down Tramway, horns honking:

“They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”

He may have been a bit premature with the second volume of his “Gonzo Papers,” titled “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” If he had kicked his dope-soaked alter ego Raoul Duke to the curb and survived to see this generation of swine — HST would be 87 today — he might have looked back on the ’80s with a certain fondness, even longing.

Describing the difference between the ’60s and the ’80s, between the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, he wrote:

The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everybody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day. …”

Don’t you wonder what he’d have had to say about the 45th president — impeached twice, beaten in his bid for re-election, tried to reverse the defeat with violence and chicanery, obviously insane, declining hourly — and still within a whisker of winning a second term, going two for three? I know I do.

HST mentioned that guy only in passing, as far as I can recall. But he took note of Joe Biden’s first major presidential-election meltdown over a plagiarism scandal at law school in the ’60s. The candidate who hopes to succeed Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, had won her first election — as San Francisco district attorney — just three years before HST died in 2005.

So, yeah. HST left the party too early for a change, and more’s the pity. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes wasn’t even readable. But when he was on his game the Good Doktor could walk with the King. Or savage him. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be reading right now as we all tiptoe toward The Edge once again.

Here he is again, quoting John Keats instead of his personal fave, the Book of Revelation:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Selah.

• Late update: Seems Charlie Pierce had HST on the brain today too.

A tale of two Harolds

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

“I would like to tell you how genuinely proud I am to have men such as your son in my command, and how gratified I am to know that young Americans with such courage and resourcefulness are fighting our country’s battle against the aggressor nations.”
—Lt. Gen. George C. Kenney, Allied air chief in the southwest Pacific, in a 1943 letter to my grandmother, Clara Grady, noting her son’s receipt of the Distinguished Flying Cross

Kind of a gloomy November morning here in The Duck! City.

But not as gloomy as it must have been back in the Forties, when the men of the 433rd Troop Carrier Group were fighting the Japanese in and around New Guinea.

I was surfing lazily across the Innertubes when I stumbled across a Library of Congress collection of interviews with some of the men who served in the 433rd with then-1st Lt. Harold Joseph O’Grady, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1943 but rarely discussed his wartime service, even with family.

One of the interviewees, another Harold — Harold E. “Vick” Vickers — discussed his service from right here in Albuquerque back in 2005, and again in 2012. What a small world it is.

Vick wanted to be a pilot like my old man, but didn’t have the vision for it — “You had to have perfect eyes,” he said — and so he served in a support role, in operations, with the 433rd.

And he had to take ahold to get that job. He enlisted in what then was called the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the Army Air Forces), but instead found himself in the Signal Corps. Vick wasn’t having any of that — he fought to be Air Corps and got his wish.

“Be careful what you wish for,” they say. And they ain’t just a-woofin’.

Vick was supposed to ship out — for real, on an actual ship out of San Francisco — but wound up ordered to travel to New Guinea with the air crews in a formation of brand-new C-47s.

His plane blew an engine and missed the departure, and once the aircraft was squared away his crew had to play catchup, solo, with a brand-new navigator, island-hopping across the Pacific to Brisbane and finally to Port Moresby, New Guinea, which had yet to be pacified by the Allies.

And that’s where things got really hairy. Not a memoir for the faint of heart. It gave me some idea of why the old man might not have been eager to share his war stories with snot-nosed kids.

Here’s to Vic, Hank, and all the rest of the men and women who did their best in far-off lands, especially the ones who never came back to tell their tales.

Throwing some Shade

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

The B-25J “Maid in the Shade
Photo lifted from the Commemorative Air Force

We had a blast from the past yesterday in The Duck! City.

As I was out riding trails on the Bianchi Zurigo Disc I heard a low-flying aircraft overhead. Glancing up I saw the unmistakable shape of a B-25 medium bomber rumbling northward.

The Auld Fella, Col. Harold J. O’Grady (USAF), got some time in the B-25 when he wasn’t working his day job flying C-47 Skytrains out of New Guinea during World War II (“The Big One”).

Introduced in 1941, the North American B-25 Mitchell was named in honor of Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, as was the Bibleburg high school Your Humble Narrator attended without distinction during 1969-71.

This particular model, a B-25J dubbed “Maid in the Shade,” was based out of Serraggia Airbase in Corsica during 1944 and saw service over Italy, which was appropriate, as I was riding a Bianchi.

Happily, the Maid was unarmed, and I escaped unscathed to tell the story.

Mooned

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

The Pink Moon, not quite full, glares down through a skylight.

Things are dark enough around here on a Tuesday morning without a bloated fartsack with federal muscle jetting from Mar-a-Lago to Manhattan on Uncle Sammy’s dime to get a kid-gloves arraignment at New York taxpayers’ expense on charges of paying hush money to porn stars, cooking the books, and in general showing all the class of a Hells Angel on a rented electric scooter, or maybe Fredo Corleone in Vegas, before Mikey sent him fishing.

Does this mooch ever pick up a tab?

In a proper world, Your Numble Narrator would be allowed to stay curled up in his toasty puddle of blankets until Old Mister Sun peeps in through the gaps in the vertical blinds, murmuring, “Rise and shine like me! Time for bones creaking, weak thinking, and strong black coffee to set everything aright!”

Alas, no. Herself is a spry young thing who is still on the clock. She arises at dark-thirty most mornings to place her cute lil’ button nose squarely upon the grindstone, that we may have our bacon and beans.

Do not weep for Herself, however. She likes it. She enjoys working and earning and being known throughout The Organization as someone who does not lean on her shovel but rather buckles down and gets the job done.

And if that means getting up at an hour I once considered a reasonable bedtime, well … she’s your gal.

• • •

The air is thick enough to slice for sandwiches.

Some days there is not enough sunshine and strong black coffee in the world, and this is one of them.

I don’t want to pay attention to what’s going down in Manhattan. But I feel obliged to keep one jaundiced eye aimed in that direction, if only because not paying attention is what led us to this sordid back alley of jurisprudence ripe with decades of uncollected garbage.

It’s not fun. Not nearly as nice as sleeping late, sipping a fat mug of joe, and idly skimming the news for lively items about camera-wearing cats.

It’s not even as enjoyable as listening to the wind howling at 666 mph and blowing my nose every 30 seconds because I am among the 26 percent of Americans who suffer from seasonal — ahhhhh-CHOO! — allergies.

And though Charles Pelkey and I could probably make a couple thou’ apiece by cranking up the old Live Update Guy machinery to chronicle this mess, we’ll give it a miss.

I mean, where’s the entertainment value? According to The New York Times:

While in custody, he will be fingerprinted, but special accommodations will be made for the former president: He is not expected to be placed in a holding cell and will spend only a short time in the office before his court appearance; he likely won’t be handcuffed or have a mug shot taken.

At the arraignment, Mr. Trump is expected to enter a not-guilty plea himself, rather than through his lawyers, as an act of defiance in keeping with his approach to the day, according to people with knowledge of his thinking. He is also weighing whether to address the cameras before the arraignment, another person familiar with the discussions said.

Just another rerun of “The Apprentice.” Looks like it’ll be a while before anyone gets around to taking out this old sack of trash.