Tag: Hunter S. Thompson

Step right up

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore.

Once again I was awake too early.

We’d bailed on election-night coverage as it slouched inexorably toward its denouement because someone around here has to get up at stupid-thirty to make us some money. Not me.

If I had dreams, I don’t remember them. But I do remember something Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post said during the PBS coverage last night.

It was a particularly fatheaded pronouncement, even for an associate editor of The Washington Post. And I didn’t make a note of it because I’d said something similar the first time TFG flipped his wig into the ring. That the 2016 election would show us who we were as a country.

Plenty of us already knew what we were then. Not enough, though. But surely anyone who has been paying attention since has caught up. Right?

Well, there’s the phone, on the nightstand. It’s not my practice to take the pulse of the planet before coffee, but I could hear Herself prepping in the bathroom and thought that if I got cracking I could make her a bite of breakfast before she left. If she had any appetite.

And so I picked up the phone.

Well, the rest you know. Another massive breakdown of politics, press, and populace. We’re just waiting on the details, is all.

Hunter S. Thompson has already filed his report, of course. He had the scoop after my first election, in 1972, when he wrote:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

[George] McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

We still don’t know the answer to that one, Hunter old sot. The barrel appears to have no bottom.

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.

The big O

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
You get a sky shot! And you get a sky shot! And you get a sky shot. …

I have never paid the least bit of attention to Oprah Winfrey, not even when she sat down with Ol’ Whatsisface to chat about how it really wasn’t about the bike.

But after last night I can see why so many other people have.

Holy hell. There must be a metric shit-ton of folks who wish she’d run for office, and even more who pray she never does.

I have paid some attention to Bill Clinton, and often wish I hadn’t, especially after doing it again last night. (See Hunter S. Thompson on Mister Bill in “Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.”)

After watching Mister Bill polish his own idol for the better part of quite some time it was a positive relief to hear Coach Walz singing Americana a cappella. I am not and never will be a football fan, but I’m finding the Democrats’ sense of play in this go-round as refreshing as a cold beer in the cheap seats.

2024: A Spaced Odyssey

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments
“Uhhhh … what was the question again?”

I am not a senile old fool.

Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply taking a cheap political shot, hoping to stop me from serving another term as Your Humble Narrator here at whatever the hell it is that we, or you, or I am doing at this whatchamacallit, the thing. The … bog? You know.

Now, it’s true that I may occasionally stare blankly at my iPhone, the way that monkey did at the glossy black rectangle in that movie — c’mon, you know the one — because the nice lady on the phone asked me for my phone number and I’m trying to look it up in Settings without hanging up on her because hey, I never call myself. Do you?

Hello? Hello?

Shit.

But I can assure you that while I’m pawing helplessly at that glossy black rectangle I no longer make the plaintive hooting sound. Like the monkey. The one in the movie. You know, where the bone turns into a spaceship and Siri or Alexa or Elon is trying to kill everyone and the young guy in the spaceship turns into an old guy in a Home who can’t remember his phone number? Is it HAL9000? No?

I do? I’m making it right now? I’m sure you’re mistaken. Whoever you are. Ook ook ook.

And sometimes I may forget who the president is, but only because I’m pretty sure it’s not the Red Skull or Pumpkinhead or Dick Tater, whatever the crazy orange fella’s called, the one who looks like a giant circus peanut with beady little eyes like a big fat rat with a mouth like an asshole and is always in the news because he keeps doing stupid shit and getting caught at it but nobody seems to be able to put him in jail and somehow they all think the other fella is the problem because he can’t remember who the King of the Moon is or the name of that movie with the monkey who can’t remember his phone number or how to find it in that big black iPhone that the Space Baby left somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, where the bones turn into Great Red Sharks driven through Bat Country by Hunter S. Thompson to Las Vegas, where an infinite number of monkeys are writing “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’24.”

Anyway, whoever’s president now seems to be a little quieter and more laid back and I don’t have to think about him all the goddamn time and I kind of like that because it’s restful and I seem to need a lot of naps lately. Like right now.

I have good news and bad news

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

Guess which is which?

It’s a very Irish sort of day here in The Duck! City, gray and gloomy with a steady drizzle, just the ticket for observing the departure of Shane MacGowan.

’Tis a fine soft day so.

He was just 65. But as Jerry Jeff Walker is reputed to have said to an elder, “You’re older than I am, but I’ve been up more hours.” By that reckoning MacGowan may have rivaled Mel Brooks’s 2,000-Year-old Man.

I have the two classic Pogues albums, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash,” produced by Elvis Costello, and “If I Should Fall From Grace With God.”

Every Christmas Eve Herself and I dance in the living room to “Fairytale of New York.” I have never been moved to dance to one of Henry Kissinger’s bleak, self-aggrandizing dirges.

However, I’m happy to let the late chef and author Anthony Bourdain dance a whipsong on Kissinger’s grave. Here’s a passage from his 2001 book “A Cook’s Tour,” forwarded by Hal Walter:

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”

For more of that sort of eulogy, see the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. I’d give a pretty to see Zombie Hunter S. Thompson arise from the grave and pick up where Bourdain and LG&M leave off. You may recall HST’s Rolling Stone obit for Richard Nixon.

• Late update: Charles P. Pierce also has a few thoughts, as you might expect.