Selah - HST
Greetings All,
In memory of Hunter S. Thompson, a hero from afar and a friend whom I never met, and indeed never wanted to know; I thought I would post a rant inspired by the man after the Presidential Election of 2004, however I didn’t finish it until he was gone. I have kept the origional spelling errors as I think it helps to capture the origional fury of the evening.
In his last article in Rolling Stone, Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004, he said “Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him “Mister President,” and then I felt ashamed.”
Some have said that he couldn’t take 4 more years of this nonsense, I personally wouldn’t dare speak for the man, though it is a reasonable conclusion to draw with how much he hated Bush and the lies that he stands for.
One could equally come to the conclusion that HST was a freak who had been too long on this earth, a man who no longer shocked people, or wound up fitting his description of his lawyer in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “one of God’s own prototypes — a high powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live and too rare to die.”
Either way, he is gone and with him the last true freak has left stage right, with the blast of a cannon and a a collective sigh of relief from the powers that be.
Selah
The Dangers of a Normal World
It occurred to me as I was reading a story about a fan meeting Hunter S. Thompson at a NY book signing event, that in this world of normalcy we are creating, he represents a dying bread of people who aren’t afraid to be complete lunatics for the sake of their work.
The father of Gonzo Journalism, and in a sense, Gonzo anything, desperately trying to hold on to his youthful drunken stagger, has set the tone for many young writers who do their best to emulate his style of drunken prose, even his lifestyle, however the fact that they are emulating an original to me is just further proof of a sad fact.
The antidepressants, lithium, and an overall public fear of anything rogue are for the radicals of his generation, indeed the future radicals of our time, equivalent to the Meteorite that blew out the flame of the Dinosaurs in the Cretaceous Era some 65 Million years ago.
People who would be wandering about in an ether binge, screaming about clown Nazis, starting riots because riots are fun, or riding fast on a two wheeled monster just outside of Pacifica, begging to loose control after hitting an impropmtu sand dune, and at the same time miraculasly survive are no longer in the arts.
No, instead, our rabble rousers are overweight shockumentary producers, who are far more interested in seeing their name in lights, or media pundits with nothing to add to our national discourse except perhaps a few thousand pills of Oxycontin which may be temporarily fun, but will not in the end solve any problems.
The weird have been replaced by the wise, and in doing so, thrown this crazy mixed up world into a boring state of equlibrium that now tolorates the snore inducing humor of Will and Grace, and Frasier.
The the world burns around us, and we are cursing about a womans breasts at the super bowl. Thousands of innocent lives are lost in a foreign country, and we scream “WE ARE HERE TO HELP”.
Whe are lost in a conservative haze of boring mediocrity and a so called life, with an illusion of peacfull bliss, save for the body count marching up towards the inevitable number where people say “Let them fix their own problems”, and leave them to the wolves.
Where is the rage and anger? Simple answer, on FoxNews, and Ironically, it is aimed at the media outlets for not blindly supporting our fearless leader and his pack of fools and weasils in the halls of congress.
Where is the Alan Ginsberg of our day? Where is the collective boiling point, where a gathering forms in the hills of upstate new york and people demand that enough is enough? When will we realize that we are being duped by a fool and a crook, and then what will be do about it?
Finally, where is that Gonzo Journalist, that Raul Duke, ready, willing and able to point out that he is a Doctor Of Journalism and that if anybody has a problem with him, they can take it up with the Hell’s Angles as he rides to his doom on a cloud of acid and wearing nothing but a stolen pair of overall from some yokal who needs no name, a camel hair jacket and a bucket cap that says this end up.