Posted on 02/21/2005 5:21:10 AM PST by Texian First
The godfather of gonzo believes America has suffered a "nationwide nervous breakdown" since 9/11, and as a result is compromising civil liberties for what he calls "the illusion of security." The compromise, he says, is "a disaster of unthinkable proportions" and "part of the downward spiral of dumbness" he believes is plaguing the .....
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
HST styled himself after H.L. Mencken, the acknowledged master reporter of the 20th century. P.J. O'Rourke, Christopher Hitchens, and others would all say as much (Is Anne Coulter inspired by Mencken? Mark Steyn?).
But Mencken lives on with a body of sophisticated and sardonic work that seems to be endless in volume and scope. HST managed to produce only a very small fraction of his output, and it is supremely self-indulgent and monoscopic 60's leftist ranting.
I'm afraid you're right that HST will be bookended by the Hell's Angels at one end and Johnny Depp at the other. And that's about it.
RIP nonetheless.
Of all that will be written about HST in the coming days and weeks, a more appropriate epitaph will not be found. A profound summary of the man's raison d'etre....
He got Buchanan right.
"The fact that he got away with his senseless self-aggrandizement in the guise of his writings says more about the gullibility of us, the public, than it does about the fact the he was simply a zero with a typewriter who was given a platform to spew his crap from."
That kind of sums it up for me. ;)
"Where the Buffalo Roam" is a great film - Bill Murray captures his spirit way better than the paranoiac Depp version of him.
> HST styled himself after H.L. Mencken, the acknowledged master reporter of the 20th century.
Yesterday he seems to have styled himself after Ernest Hemingway. I read Kerouac, Kesey and Wolfe's Acid Test. Loving memorials to the beat and hippie generations. Then it turned 1971, I got out of college, and I saw no reason to prolong it with HST.
What is this, dump on Perdogg day???
Great post.
Yes, I guess you could say there has been a lot of death going around recently. So many people we grew up with, be they celebs or family, are no longer with us. If there are people I love or appreciate, I now tell them so, while I still can.
I read his Hell's Angels book when I was a teenager. I really enjoyed it.
well done.
The movie, "Where the Buffalo Roam" about the 72 campaigns, has made me laugh for years.......
Been there. Did that.
Read a couple of his books and never understood why he was so well-regarded by many people. All I could think, while reading his essays, was "What a self-absorbed, drug-addled, egotistical ***hole!"
Just my opinion, but I think suicide is really the ultimate in selfishness as well. May God have mercy on his soul.
What "way" would that be?
LOL. Maybe this way?
"Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads?" he writes, referring to the people currently occupying the White House. "They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis."
Yeah. That's a good way.
All I said was he did drugs. I didn't condem his soul.
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