Category: Current Affairs

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The Last of Hunter

Two last notes and I think I’m done with Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, unless he comes back to life and kills himself again.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle did a decent obit on him today. Jay Johnson, the former Examiner news editor I mentioned last night, figures in the Chronicle’s account of Hunter’s work for the San Francisco papers. Here’s Jay’s part of the story:

Chronicle Executive News Editor Jay Johnson, who also edited Thompson’s columns when he wrote for the Examiner, said Thompson could not dictate over the phone, so he filed his stories page by page over the fax, sending multiple revisions as the two spent many hours throughout the night and into the morning “wrestling the column to the ground.”

“Nobody was as much his editor as his sounding board. He needed to talk it out and get reaction to it. It was not the average creative process,” Johnson said.

One morning as deadline neared and they were still working it out, Thompson, who was known to have an affinity for controlled substances, told Johnson, “Our real drug of choice is adrenaline.”

Johnson said Thompson was easiest to work with when he was covering a presidential campaign. But he was often just “riffing,” Johnson said.

He fondly recalled one night when Thompson told him how he had tried to cheer up a friend who was scheduled to go in for back surgery. He took a bunch of explosives out to the backyard and stuffed them into his Jeep. As the hood flew into the air and the Jeep exploded into pieces, the two friends realized what they had projected into the sky would soon come back down.

“They are like dancing around with this shrapnel coming down,” Johnson said.

Johnson told him to write it down and that became Thompson’s next column.

Johnson said it seemed that part of the reason Thompson enjoyed writing his column for the Examiner was that he had a burning desire to be plugged in. In the days before the Internet, Thompson turned to Johnson to give him the latest news.

“By calling in, he could ask what was on the wires. He would ask me to read him stuff. That way he could be involved in the business,” Johnson said.

And second: I’ve been hearing and reading some of the “Hunter went out on his own terms” and “Hunter never wanted to die in a hospital bed” stuff that’s out there. I’m not buying the nobility or courage some seem to see in his suicide. God, or who- or whatever, rest his soul. But over the last few years, I’ve seen several people who were close to me die with what appeared to me to be real strength and forebearance — yes, even when they died in hospital beds. I’ve watched others go on with their lives despite the kind of loss I could hardly bear. From where I’ve watched, one thing they all seem to have in common is a belief that every day they got was a gift of some kind, if only a chance to see what would happen next, even when they saw the course their stories were taking. We’re surrounded by people going through the same thing every day, really. Nearly silent. Barely seen. Never celebrated. But what courage.

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More Hunter

Just two things:

One, his most recent column at ESPN.com: “Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray.” I didn’t even know he was writing for ESPN.com. It”s actually an entertaining and at times lucid piece.

Two, just checking on Technorati to see how the blog people are taking the news. I’m surprised by how much comment there is, from the outright sappy (“Hunter, we hardly knew ye” — apparently meant seriously) to the self-consciously neo-gonzo (“Too wierd [sic] to live, too rare to die“) to the actually original and humorous (like the blogger who asks, “What kind of God lets Hunter S. Thompson shoot himself, but is cool with allowing Dan Brown [author of “The da Vinci Code”] to go on living?”).

Like I said, surprising. I assumed Thompson’s act was so old, inebriated, and stuck in the glory days of Nixon-McGovern that folks had moved on. Maybe “Doonesbury” and the movies (both the Johnny Depp one and the Bill Murray one) endeared him to the post-me (me, not Me) generation.

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Hunter Thompson

From The New York Times site, where I first saw the news (The Rolling Stone site, which still lists Thompson as “national affairs desk,” doesn’t have an item posted yet):

DENVER (AP) — Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism.” Well, the AP’s got to play it straight. But I don’t think a description like that begins to touch what Thompson did. What do they mean, “books like ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”? Fact is, there’s nothing like it. And what Thompson did wasn’t to popularize a form of fictional journalism. He invented a new, sort of quasi-journalistic literary genre that challenged readers to figure out just what in it might reflect the writer’s experiences. The exercise was more to distill and intensify the reality he experienced. But no more stabs at explication and criticism from those ill-suited and unqualified to do it, like me.

The person I immediately thought of upon reading this news was Jay Johnson. Jay was one of the news editors at The San Francisco Examiner when Thompson was writing his column for the paper, and it often fell to him to be Hunter’s “editor” (he was just “Hunter” around the newsroom, though he was never there) — the person who would sweat in increasingly unquiet desperation as Hunter’s Sunday night deadline came and went. Hunter often (perhaps always, when it came to The Ex) communicated by fax. Back in the mid-’80s, when Hunter’s Ex saga began, fax machines would accept and print out long scrolls, not neat single pages. And Jay would be the one who would get Hunter’s scroll. The column was typewritten, but it was usually preceded or accompanied by a long, scrawled personal note to Jay or maybe just an off-the-cuff diatribe to set the tone. Long after Hunter stopped writing the column, he’d still fax his late night screeds to Jay. I sure hope he kept them. They’d be a minor (or, who knows in this world? — major) treasure.

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Lincoln and Bush

Still thinking about Lincoln and the current Bush and whether they would have been on the same side during the current or former unpleasantness. I figured the White House must have had a Lincoln’s Birthday event that might shed some light on the question. Checking the White House site, sure enough: George and Laura hosted a performance of “Lincoln Seen and Heard,” a dramatic presentation of some of the 16th president’s speeches and writings. Sam Waterston, who was Lincoln’s voice for Ken Burns’s Civil War series, presented the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The latter was delivered about five weeks before Lee surrendered at Appomattox; it had finally become clear which way the way would go. Yet Lincoln’s words, which he knew would be read in the South, are entirely without a sense of triumph. Bush could have learned something from that before he put the flight suit on and flew out to that carrier. But of course, if he was liable to learn a lesson like that, he wouldn’t be our George.

At the end of the evening, Bush talked briefly about what he had heard. He said Lincoln was our greatest president. And he hinted, of course, that Lincoln’s words bolster his program to shock and awe the world’s evildoers out of existence with high explosives and the wonders of democracy:

“The Civil War was decided on the battlefield; the larger fight for America’s soul was waged with Lincoln’s words. In his own day, Lincoln set himself squarely against a culture that held that some human beings were not intended by their Maker for freedom. And as President, he acted in the conviction that holding the Union together was the only way to hold America true to the founding promise of freedom and equality for all. And that is why, in my judgment, he was America’s greatest President.

“We’re familiar with the words of the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural, so eloquently read by Sam. And this performance reminds us that Lincoln wrote his words to be spoken aloud — to persuade, to challenge, and to inspire. Abraham Lincoln was a master of the English language, but his true mother tongue was liberty.

“I hope that every American might have the experience we had here tonight, to hear Lincoln’s words delivered with Lincoln’s passion, and to leave with a greater appreciation for what these words of freedom mean in our own time.”

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Dead, Dead Hero

BoingBoing points to the story of a Colorado woman who concocted a fabulous whopper about her husband’s heroism in Iraq: Over a half-year or so, “Amber” made regular calls to a local radio talk show, first talking about how she was in basic training, then disclosing that her husband “Jonathan” had been deployed to Iraq. Finally, Amber announced that her husband had been killed in action. She was left all alone, a military widow with one young child and, she said, another on the way. Tragic.

But the heroic nature of her husband’s death didn’t come out until Amber talked to a group set up to help military families in western Colorado. Jonathan had been killed trying to save the life of a little Iraqi girl. The story was full of other details, too, about the couple’s life and military service and everything. Media throughout the state, including the hometown paper, lapped up the story, which quickly unraveled. No Amber. No Jonathan. No dead hero. No one ever checked before issuing press releases or printing stories.

Wow.

Now, everyone, including Oprah, wants to know why “Amber” pulled the hoax. The consensus: Something is wrong with her. “Sometimes people have such a deep emptiness inside that when they get attention, they’re the recipients of well-wishers, the center of attention, they get a sense of importance and comfort,” one expert is quoted as saying.

Focusing all the attention on “Amber” and her obvious lack of balance (or incredibly well-developed, gutsy ability to pull pranks) leaves out the other side of the equation in this hoax and others: What is it about the rest of us — the emptiness in our own lives? — that we’re so ready to believe stories like this?

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Building the Pyramids

A few years ago I wrote a story about an online pyramid scheme that operated as a fantasy stock market. Without going into how it was supposed to work, one of the things that fascinated me was the willingness of so many people I found to be rational and articulate to send money to a faceless entity in the Caribbean with the expectation that they would get a big return. Many explained their readiness to send thousands of dollars into the ether by pointing to the real securities markets in the United States, where the technology/Net bubble was expanding fast. “Take a look at that,” they’d say. “That’s the real Ponzi scheme.”

Soon enough, real securities regulators busted the fantasy stock market and most of the people involved lost all or almost all of the money they’d entrusted to the operators. The real stock market unraveled, too, drawing the attention of the same regulators, and many people who’d jumped in during the bubble lost all or almost all of the money they’d entrusted to what securities laws and the business pages would have identified as “legitimate companies.”

I didn’t buy the simple, cynical line that there was no difference between one world and the other. Real companies actually created goods and services to generate revenue, for instance. (OK, except for Enron.) All the obvious differences aside, though, I was uncomfortable observing how similar the behavior of the phony market and real market looked, how much the world of “legitimate” finance seemed to justify the suspicion some of the pyramid scheme players voiced.

Because I can feel a long, convoluted essay coming on and I really need to go to bed, let’s jump-cut to today. The New York Times has an excellent story on what’s happening with early retirees who have had their pensions “realigned” and health-care benefits cut:

“For Americans heading into retirement, the contrast to the previous generation is stark. The typical household headed by a 47- to 64-year-old is poorer today, in constant dollars, than a similar household was in 1983. The main reason is the disappearance of the traditional pension, according to Edward N. Wolff, a New York University economist who analyzed Federal Reserve wealth data.

Still, it’s not a tale of Dickensian woe — none of the people the Times talks to are being put out on the street, and we all still live in this amazingly prosperous land that has the power to decide to blow $200 billion or $300 billion on projects like arresting Saddam Hussein and installing a group of Shiite fundamentalists in his place.

Still, it’s a story of betrayal; of people who have worked in good faith for companies that have decided that they can’t afford to honor the commitments they made — breaking faith with former workers won’t hit the bottom line, I guess, unless the workers sue and win. You wonder about the deeper price, though, in shredding the already frayed trust people have in our whole enterprise — the American corporate one — and making it look like little more than a Ponzi scheme.

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I Dichotimize

Some matters of pressing importance:

Patriots-Eagles: Eagles. Dad points out that the Eagles’ quarterback, Donovan McNabb, went to Mount Carmel High School — the team is nicknamed “The Caravan” — with which my mom’s family has a long association. That’s enough for me. Go Eagles.

Sunni-Shiite: Tossup. You got to like the Shiites’ numbers. But the Sunnis know how to put the hurt on infidel and co-religionist alike, especially with their patented triangle offense. This one could go into OT.

Social Security (old)-Social Security (new): Old, for the moment, because at least we know what it is and what the problems with it are. Bush’s “new” deal has got the stink of Enron to it — a hustle that will make a few people rich

Schwarzenegger (actor)-Schwarzenegger (politician): He sucked as an actor, but I liked him better then because you could walk out of the movie theater or turn off the TV and be done with him.

To be continued … or not.

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Arnold, Our Arnold

Most excellent Arnold line from late-night CBS TV comedy guy Craig Ferguson:

“The U.S. Mint has released a new California state quarter. On one side is Governor Schwarzenegger’s head and on the other side is the rest of his head.”

(Thanks, Lydell.)

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Going Soft in the Head

My friend Garth wrote yesterday about his distress at a study from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that more than a third of high school students believe the First Amendment goes too far in safeguarding our freedoms of expression, the press, religion, assembly, and to petition the government for redress of our grievances (good luck with that last one).

In a way, it’s old news that a lot of Americans don’t hold with the fundamental freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. But Garth speculates about the trend:

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the growing anti-intellectualism in the context of the voting majority, but I hadn’t realized that it had infected children’s minds as well. I guess it only makes sense that fundamental misunderstandings about our government would be passed on. My worry is that this is only a trend that will worsen over time as these teenagers grow up, and that our government will be quickly taken over by those who would seek to exploit that ignorance, as opposed to fighting it.”

I think he’s right on about the current of anti-intellectualism and the trouble it’s bringing. A more disturbing piece of evidence is presented in a New York Times story today about how many science teachers are avoiding explicit discussion of evolution in their classrooms to avoid controversy.

” ‘The most common remark I’ve heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken,’ said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama’s curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.”

And the reason teachers are fearful of talking about evolution is that, Dr. Christy aside, conservative Christians are waging a war against it because the idea doesn’t pass muster with their interpretation of the Bible. You sort of expect that the anti-evolutionists, who are free under the First Amendment to propound any hare-brained ideas as the word of their god, are the same people who feel most strongly that the First Amendment goes too far.

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Back to Business as Usual

Thank [your deity here], we’re done with the Iraq vote. Now we can back to the really important stuff: The 9 a.m. (Pacific) CBS radio news led with Michael Jackson arriving at the courthouse as jury selection began for his trial on child-molestation charges. In the correspondent’s breathless report, you could hear the throngs screaming in the background.

In San Francisco, meantime, people actually protested the Iraq vote and, I guess, the way it’s being portrayed. It’s all well and good to point out all the conditions that made the event less than the dawn of full-fledged democracy in Iraq: martial law, the heavy military presence, the polling places that didn’t open, et cetera. But it’s a losing proposition, in PR and human terms, to demonstrate against the vote. Regardless of all the flaws, regardless of the long-term meaning, regardless of our government’s untruths in leading us into the war and its calamitously misguided actions in conducting it, when given the opportunity, a group of people who have suffered a degree of oppression we glimpse only in nightmares got a chance to change their future and jumped at it (one view of the event from The New York Times’s John Burns; and another from Salon, hardly a friend of the Iraq project). In my mind, that’s something to be celebrated, no matter how angry I happen to be about what has led us to this point and how much doubt I entertain about the future course of events there.

And in Iraq today, things are going back to business as usual, too. The insurgency is still on. Several U.S. troops have been killed in combat. I’m sure that soon it will be apparent that, in terms of creating a new government and new political reality in Iraq, yesterday was the easy part.