Posted on 05/24/2004 2:07:42 PM PDT by .cnI redruM
The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that.
Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.
And why would I want to go to Athens in the summer, anyway? Only a fool or a paid sportswriter would do a thing like that. ... Or a suicidal terrorist, eh?
You bet. There will be plenty of those in Greece when July rolls around. It will be like strolling up to a wasp's nest that some jackass just swatted with a sharp stick. Welcome to the birthplace of the world-wide Olympics, bubba. You'll like it here. Just get naked and prowl around the streets tonight. You will find friends everywhere.
Well, I don't know. That is a long way to go for a beating. Or to get your head chopped off on worldwide TV. Who needs it? Not me, old sport. I think I will hunker down out here in the high, bright mountains this summer, and watch the Olympics on TV. It may be slightly duller, but so what? It is the only game in town.
Needless to say Hunter seems to hate Republicans more than Hitler's Nazis. Islamonazi attrocities don't rate Hunter's attention either.
Watched “Gangster No. 1,” because I have a peculiar affinity for 1960s British gangster movies. Tawdry men in good suits plotting small crimes in cramped flats. The cursing is somehow fresher, because it’s done with a different accent than your tiresome standard Jersey voice. Instead of fuggin’ it’s FACKIN’, which just sounds crisper. Fack me! Basic plot: something quite novel for the gangster genre, really. A young up-and-coming thug tries to move up the food chain and take his boss’ place. Because he’s lean and hungry, you see! Also 78% more psychotic. But here’s the peculiar - dare I say British – twist. He has a mad crush on the boss. He’s almost swoony over the guy.
A few reviewers noted that there seemed to be a repressed homoerotic subtext, and I thought: repressed? Okay, let’s recap. The young gangster is introduced to the boss, and the voice-over describes him entirely in terms of his clothing, and ends with the words “he was all man” as we first see the boss’s face. And the boss looks like someone you’d see in an 80s band where everyone had white suits and carefully feathered hair. It’s David Thewliss – fine actor (I also saw him in “Timeline” where he also played an unsympathetic prig) but he gives off no mob-man menace whatsoever. At one point the up-and-coming gangster comments on the Boss’s tie pin; the Boss gives it to him. It has his initials. Our hero treats the moment with such reverence you’d think he’d gotten the football captain’s class ring. We’re going steady!
If they’d played up the angle a little more, it would have made the movie much more interesting. The Sopranos has a gay-gangster sub-sub plot going - not that I’ll know how that turns out tonight, because I’m editing this bilge I wrote Saturday. There’s a big gap in what I banged out, because I obviously lost my train of thought and googled Hunter Thompson Children to see if he did have kids. I got a column from 2003 from his ESPN gig. No link because I nuked the history and emptied the cache. But I have these quotes from Duke circa last summer, a prime example of what Neal Tennant calls "Miserabilism":
The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.
The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.
The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.
The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.
That’s what what this addled has-been was writing last summer. I love much of his early stuff – at his peak, he was the best fiction writer journalism had. But this is college-paper stuff. “Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor.” And our aspirin bottles are hard to open and our dogs are stupid and our fries are too fattening and our parking lots are striped in such a way that today’s wider vehicles fill out the spaces, making it difficult to avoid getting a door ding, and our TV newspeople smile too much and our royalty checks are getting smaller and smaller as the newer ESPN website readers read this stuff and think, whatever, gramps instead of buying the books. To repeat:
“our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world."How true! Somewhere in Tibet there’s a man who admired our Social Security system until it was looted by the greed-crazed bastards who invented the Gaza Strip. Here’s your meds, Mr. Thompson. The blue one you can chew; the yellow one just dissolves in your mouth. Don’t eat the cup this time.
The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives. The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.Of course in Thompson’s world the Big Darkness is always coming. Every day it doesn’t come means it’ll just be bigger and darker when it finally arrives. He’s the anti-rooster, bitching about the dawn: sure, it worked today, but one of these days the sun won’t come up, and then where will you be? Sitting on your nest popping out eggs like THEY want you to, completely unprepared for the Big Darkness! Which will be huge! And dark!
It would be funny if it was, well, funny, but it’s not even that. It’s just rote spew from the other side of the latter sixties. You had your Hopeful Hippies, the face-painters and daisy-strewers, convinced that human nature and human history could be irrevocably changed if we all held hands, listened to “Imagine” and realized that the war is not the answer. Regardless of the question. But the other side was the sort of dank twitchy nihilism Thompson spouts. It has no lessons, no morals, no hope. Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here’s the worst part, Winston – inside the boot is NIXON’S FOOT.
Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before.
He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.
That is so right. I once was speaking with a neighbor who is a megaleftie protestor type, and his twentysomething nephew came by. We exchanged pleasantries, and he was carrying a book. The megaleftie type asked him what it was, and it was Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. The nephew raved about the book, and asked me if I had read it. I came within nanoseconds of asking the guy if HE was on drugs too, but instead, I just said, "No," and hoped he wouldn't continue praising Thompson as if he was anything but an idiot.
Maybe he would like to try Saddams plastic grinding machine.....would that be feet first or the head...?
I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.
Such is the legacy of the drug addled 60s free love crowd.
More than any other single thing that Hunter did was to cement the reputation of the Hell's Angels. They had almost disappeared several times prior but some prominent news items put them back in the headlines and public consciousness.
After Hunter's book, the club grew and grew. Outlaw culture is the norm these days. Whether it is high school kids getting pierced and tattoos or the triple crossing meth addicts on Jerry Springer.
What's funny/ironic is that Hunter could see that outlaw culture should not be the norm. He mentions in "Hell's Angels" a school shooting (they targeted jocks, brains, etc.) that sounds like the Columbine of it's day.
He was a major fighter in the culture wars and now he has regrets that America isn't what it once "was"?
Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed
(A) Highways don't last forever. They were built after WWII. (B) There have always been crooked cops just like there have been crooked politicians in America for hundreds of years. (C) Our children may be poor but many of the poorest are rich enough to have tv, electricity, and other luxuries. Compare our standard of living to other nations. Look at the size house/apartment people live in around much of the world. (D) We've (Generation X) seen that the Baby Boom would bust Social Security and that we would get "nothing". It wasn't a lock box. It's been a pyramid scheme.
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