Category: Journalism

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.

Rocking out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments

Having taken note of of the pummeling endured by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for showing all the backbone of two clawless fiddler crabs when it came time to take a stand in the 2024 pestilential erection, Mother Times struggles up out of her rocker on the Saturday before Election Day, squeaks out a fart, and plops back down.

“That’ll show ’em,” she mutters before falling back into a fitful snooze.

Democracy dies, yadda yadda yadda

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Slogans, like talk, are cheap.

Ho, ho. I beat the rush to the exit after The Washington Post‘s management stepped on its editorial dick by declining to endorse a candidate in the pestilential erection. I had already canceled my account based on the plummeting value of their homepage, not the cowardice of the ownership.

Not long ago the WaPo was beating The New York Times like a dusty rug when it came to good, old-fashioned, nut-cutting hard news. Now they pretty much both stink, but at least Mother Times offers some good recipes to take the vile smell out of your nostrils. Plus she still employs a friend of mine.

So I’ll try to forget that the topside of today’s homepage is spattered with shit like “25 Jump Scares That Still Make Us Jump,” “What’s It Like to Tail the Vice President?,” and “Nobody Told Me This Would Happen to My Body in My 40s.”

I’d serve up a critique of the content, if I had clicked on any of it. Alas, I moved on with great haste.

At least the NYT doesn’t start bullshitting you right up there in the flag, like the WaPo. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” me bollocks. What management does in the darkness you can see in the balcony at any adult theater. Tidy up afterward and check the phone to see if anyone Bezos has business with has invited you to a cocktail party. No? Might as well go lay off a few columnists, if they haven’t all quit already. Only one opinion counts at the newspaper in the nation’s capital, even if it’s mostly being expressed from mansions in Miami, SoCal, or low earth orbit.

Of course, if Jesus Hitler prevails on Nov. 5, it won’t mean much to the WaPo’s owner. Bezos is a podium billionaire, runner-up on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And when JH (No. 432) croaks any and all contracts with Blue Origin because Elon (No. 1) was the last guy in the Oval Office to kiss his ass when the deal went down, well … maybe the internment camps can double as Amazon fulfillment centers.

Hey, a dollar isn’t red or blue. It’s green, baby.

Riding the great Divide

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Shades of autumn in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

O, the weather outside is far from frightful. And the fires are mostly prescriptive. And since we’ve no place to go … even so, let’s just hold off on the snow for a while, if you don’t mind.

Fall rides are my favorite rides. While I occasionally miss aspects of Interbike — the paydays, the feasting and roistering on various publishers’ credit cards, the simply Getting Out of Dodge — I do not long to waste another week of prime cycling weather motoring to and from Sin City in a clattering Nipponese four-banger, with long miles of trudging from casino to expo and back again through the low-hanging clouds of Marlboro exhaust and Bud Light sweat.

On Friday I was muscling the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff around the Elena Gallegos Open Space when I came up on a couple mountain bikers standing about where I saw a good-sized rattler in the grass on Tuesday. So I stopped to see what was what.

They’d seen a tarantula hairy-legging it across the trail and stopped for a peek, so I had one too. Didn’t take a pic, because I always feel like some sort of half-assed journalist — or worse, a tourist — when I’m doing that sort of thing where people can catch me at it. But it’s always educational to see one of the critters who actually belong here in the Upper Chihuahuan Desert.

Speaking of things that go bump in the desert, thanks to everyone who lent an ear (sorry, no returns) to the revival of my long-dormant Radio Free Dogpatch podcast. I have no idea what’s next — I mean, shit, do any of us 10 days away from the pestilential erection? — but as soon as I do, you’ll hear all about it. Oyez, oyez, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.

Your Daily Don (or not)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Are we there yet? No.

The whole “Your Daily Don” thing never really took off, did it?

Honestly, the less I think about Darth Cheeto and his new droid, Clockwork Orange, the happier I seem to be.

Speak of the devil and he appears, as the saying goes. So let’s not and hope he doesn’t.

There are other ways to pass the time. Jogging. Hiking. Cycling down to the bosque to gauge the color of the cottonwoods (not quite spectacular yet).

And reading about the newish editor and vice president of the Albuquerque Journal, who apparently is doing 10 days in the clink on a shoplifting rap.

Whatever is the world coming to? I’m old enough to remember when only reporters, photographers, and copy editors were so poorly paid that they had to steal to make ends meet.

The Journal may be so hard up it can’t even afford a poorly paid copy editor. My tribe goes unmentioned in the “Contact Us” section of the Journal‘s ghastly website, though I found a “design desk” with four people on it, or under it, depending on whether they’re still sharp enough to steal booze. And two assistant city editors but no actual city editor. Maybe s/he’s in jail too.

That the Journal apparently has no copy desk wasn’t news to me. Not after I saw the story refer to Patrick Ethridge as “editor in chief”, “executive editor,” and “Executive Editor” (in the “Contact Us” lineup, Ethridge is called, simply, “editor”) and report that he was serving “10 days” or “ten days” in the calaboose.

These are peccadillos that even the most poorly paid, knee-walking-drunk, one-eyed copy editor could catch on the first pass through the story from underneath the design desk between attempts to grope one or more of the designers. When one sees these tiny turds floating in the bowl one wonders what monstrosities lurk beneath.