Monday, February 21, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson, RIP

Hunter S. Thompson, RIP

"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long."



"Hunter S. Thompson -- the world's first blogger." - Kos

I woke this morning to the news of Hunter Thompson's death, far from web access. A few hours later another death - that of my car - made my journey much much longer. So now I'm too exhausted by travel and distracted by the sudden practical matter of transportation to fully reflect on the loss of my favorite author, my jounalistic role model (well, I pass on the brutal substance abuse and guns, some combination of which likely led to his death).

I'll share instead Thompson's own words from 1972. Change "Nixon" to "Bush" and you could have rerun the samme paragraph last fall:

"How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same."

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