This is similar to the policy around the Eaker Compound, Humble Manor and both Deer Camp North and South. The only difference is that you have to have a carton of smokes too.
Posted on 05/24/2004 7:27:35 PM PDT by wagglebee
Hunter S. Thompson's ESPN column was scrubbed of controversy late Monday afternoon when online editors worried the famed gonzo journalist had gone too far.
In a column entitled, "Let's Go to the Olympics," Thompson went off on the Abu Ghraib prison picture scandal, exclaiming: "Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these [Abu Ghraib] photographs did."
But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer.
"Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.
The cleansed paragraph now reads:
"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.
As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."
Developing...
Hunter went too far when he survived the womb.
You must be young, right?
Even Keith Richards? There's a contest I wouldn't want to judge :)
Even Keith Richards.
Hmmm. I remember just one critique of Clinton, in 1992 in RS, but his political writing disappeared, at least from Rolling Stone, after that. I just guessed that someone on the high Left "got" to him. He wrote about thoroughbred racing or pollo or something.
I'd like to read his critiques of the Clinton cabal. Looking forward to it.
I read something he wrote about clinton during the '92 campaign. Mentioned a place called Plato's Retreat.
Oh, I've read HST's work, and have no doubt that he beats them on sheer variety. On volume of use, though...that's some pretty stiff competition.
He had an 11 year start on Ozzy.
This is similar to the policy around the Eaker Compound, Humble Manor and both Deer Camp North and South. The only difference is that you have to have a carton of smokes too.
Senile mofos!
Dude! That's not a passport, it's... A HUMAN HAND!!!!
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.
He quit after the media blew up at him for saying Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted a successful black QB.
In other words, a hell of a lot less inflammatory.
That may be true. Help me here, Dave............FRegards
bttt
Well darlin',
I am ashamed that you carry one too!
Sent to the ESPN editor...
In Hunter S. Thompson's article titled "Let's Go To The Olympics" he wrote, "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport." Would you please remind him that he doesn't have to? Americans don't have to "defect," we can leave and change nationalities any time we want. I would also like Hunter to tell us WHOSE passport he would rather carry. Oh, never mind, he is just being a Trendy-American-Hater. He won't care what I think, or respect the 99.999996% of his countrymen that DIDN’T EMBARRASS OR ABUSE ANY OF THOSE TERRORIST, ANTI-AMERICAN, ANTI-DEMOCRAY, ANTI-FREEDOM MURDERERS! Remember, those sub-humans weren’t in Abu-Ghraib for unpaid parking tickets.
When only 20-30 out of 3,000,000 people do something wrong, should we publicly declared that we are "ashamed" of everyone? If that is the case, then should we be “ashamed” of any society in which more than 00.000000008% of their population has been accused of crimes? This is ridiculous!
When he refers to the abuse as “the American dream in action,” he even insults generations of good people whom have carved out the most free and fair society the world has ever known. I’m sure that more than one of his ancestors are rolling over in their graves right now.
I don’t believe that you should continue to pay him to publish his "dribble." I didn’t ask for this political anti-American smear from a “sports” organization. He is allowed to voice any opinion that he wants, but you have the choice of whether or not to PAY HIM TO PUBLISH IT! – Shame on you!
P.s. I noticed that your credits state that he “now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen.” That brings up many more questions…
Great letter.
HST wrote a book back in 1992 about the presidential campaign. I do not remember the name of it. It was actually funny in places. His motto for Clinton at the time was: "He may be swine but at least he's our swine". I actually think he felt uncomfortable with Clinton because he was, gosh, just a little too conservative for him.
"Hitching Stump" was a story about how Clinton was introduced to the joys of copulation by a mule by the name of Stump. HST swears that there is some factual basis for it. He also wrote a story about how Clinton almost mistook a new reed for his saxaphone for a potato chip and ate it.
Heady stuff. Strictly satire, you know.
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