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The suicide of Hunter Thompson has triggered encomiums from bloggers including our own. They may not always have agreed with him, but they admired his way with words.
Digby was a big fan.
He spoke for us in a weird sort of exaggerated drug addled way that defined the world. For some of us of a certain age who follow politics, his view of the game informs us in ways that we will never wholly shake off. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail remains the seminal work of baby boomer campaign journalism. He took the genre, shot it up with mescaline and invited us all along for the ride.
Digby recently was re-reading Generation of Swine, a collection of Thompson’s political essays from the 80s.
He saw it all then — the bizarre up-is-downism, the hallucinatory nature of the modern media, the craziness of America in its days of dominance. I was struck, however, at how deeply uncynical he really was, how strangely hopeful and secure that the American people were simply too solid to be completely taken in by these people. The state of politics today must have made him feel like he was on a bad trip that would never end.
Tom Paine writes of Thompson:
He could be a bitter, graceless, savage drunk, and he often used words like blunt instruments, when a gentler method might have sufficed, but he always at least attempted to tell the truth even when the truth was not in him. He is gone, and we will not see his like again.
With any luck.
With Thompson gone (or maybe not), Scott Ott at Scrappleface figures there’s one less candidate for Dan Rather’s job at CBS.
With all the chatter about Dr. Gonzo, not much attention has been paid to a curious rewrite by Fox News of comments by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Atrios has the story. Clinton, on a tour of Baghdad, decried the actions of “suicide bombers,” according to an AP account. Fox News (using the same AP story) opted to embrace what once was White House terminology, and changed her words to “homicide bombers.” Oops, says Atrois, even insiders like Fox aren’t up with the current authorized lingo. It’s suiciders.
And speaking of the 2008 Presidential campaign, Glenn Reynolds reports on another juggernaut, this one on behalf of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. After all, if the bobblehead is out there already, can the official announcement be far behind?
Meantime, Jeff Jarvis, still agitated about a week-old New York Times article that recounted the blogswarm that preceded Eason Jordan’s evaporation, publishes an email to Times executive editor Bill Keller suggesting a summit conference of bloggers and Times editors seeking common ground.
Jarvis, who is as close to a godfather as the blogosphere has, reassures Keller that “When bloggers hold journalists in disdain, I scold them and remind them that they would be nothing without reporters; they are not Danny Pearl, sacrificing his life to find the truth, and they are not the Wall Street Journal, supporting him in that quest. And when reporters disdain bloggers, I remind them that they are dismissing the public they seek to serve.”
Keller emails back with verve and wit, suggesting an online chat (thereby creating an online chat) instead of a meeting, and assures Jarvis that he too has his own favorite bloggers, and hints that Jarvis is among them.
A bemused reader weighs in, observing with some admiration that the exchange of emails illustrates “how high-profile people compete to out-casual one another, without giving an inch when engaging in a polite power struggle.”
–Susan Q. Stranahan
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