Tag: Hunter S. Thompson

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.

Between essence and descent

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Shadow descending.

You can’t go wrong with a good T.S. Eliot reference.

Hunter S. Thompson, whose larger-than-life shadow often fell between the idea and the reality, was fond of quoting “The Hollow Men.”

Francis Ford Coppola gave a strong nod to that one as well, along with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in “Apocalypse Now.”

Crash Test Dummies likewise put “Prufrock” to work, in “Afternoons & Coffeespoons.”

Lately, of course, the news is distinctly more William Butler Yeatsish, with things falling apart, mere anarchy loosed on the world, and the worst filled with passionate intensity.

It all makes me wish I’d paid more (which is to say “some”) attention during my high-school English classes. And that some other, more prominent slackers had gotten more out of history and civics.

One less cracker in the barrel

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Scott Pruitt is going back to lifting twenties out of the collection plate at First Baptist in Broken Arrow, sneaking tips off nearby tables at Cracker Barrel, and surreptitiously peeing in Tulsa’s municipal pools.

As Hunter S. Thompson once said, “Well shucks. It makes a man’s eyes damp, for sure.”

The Good Doktor was speaking of Nixon fluffer Pat Buchanan, who was whimpering publicly about the harsh treatment afforded The Boss as the hyenas of Watergate gnawed on his political carcass, and what Thompson had to say about that administration 44 years ago goes double for this one:

“By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, [Nixon] was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long.

“This is the horror of American politics today — not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed — but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned‐out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.

“How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high‐powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face‐to‐face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?

“Is the democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it.”

I’d let Pruitt run the siren all the way back to Oklahoma, if he didn’t mind that his personal vehicle was a splintery rail. Meanwhile, his replacement as EPA chief is a former coal lobbyist, because of course he is. Right again, Doc.

• Bonus Extra Credit Venom: Read HST’s obituary of Richard M. Nixon, who many of us thought — wrongly, as it turned out — was as bad as a president could get. 

 

The American nightmare

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Mandalay Bay, pictured from the walkway into the neighboring Luxor.

If Charlie Manson checked into the Safari tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big. — Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”

If we learned anything at all from the good doctor, it’s that anyone can bring anything at any time into a Vegas hotel room.

I’ve been doing it for years. Big black rolling suitcase with a big black messenger bag strapped to its handle, a camera bag, a 25-liter backpack, even a cooler. I always thought if anything drew a floorwalker’s eye, it would be the cooler.

“Sir, you’ll need to return that to your vehicle. We have beverages for sale in the resort.”

But nope. Not a peep. Not at the Luxor, anyway. And I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and speculate that Mandalay Bay doesn’t hassle Charlie either.

Regulars here know I own firearms, but nevertheless believe the Second Amendment was in dire need of a copy editor. And I’ll leave it to another Charlie, the invaluable Mr. Pierce, to bring the heat regarding our national acceptance of blood sacrifice on the constitutional altar.

But I will note that while eyes pop at massacres like the one in Vegas, their lids droop at the day-to-day body count in places like Albuquerque, where we are on pace to exceed last year’s 61 homicides, up from 56 the previous year and the highest number in two decades.

So I’ll encourage you to pester your legislators to consider both the cascade of blood and the steady drip, drip, drip. Urge them to do more than send thoughts and prayers, which have proven remarkably ineffective against the gun lobby. Remember that elections matter (we have one here tomorrow).

And cling to hope while remembering another quote from Thompson, a man with his own firearms fetish:

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.