 |
 |
Douglas Barbour wrote: > Well, I'm both, too, Ken. In fact, I'm probably a real scaredy-cat when > it comes to the kind of behavior Thompson apparently had to enact > rather than just imagine. And you're right, McGuane is still here, & > maybe because, although he considered Thompson a friend, he spent only > so much time with him. I was not a scaredy cat about "substances" but I seemed willing to backpedal away because I made this discovery: I may not have LIKED my life, but it's likely to be the only one I have unless I get my wish and am reincarnated as an English horn. With my luck I'd wind up in the hands of a 5th grader who is tone-deaf. Somehow Thompson seemed to be one of those men who could suck the air out of a room after 10 minutes. He's not the only one. I heard the same thing said about myself, and also about a far better human being, Dorothy Day; that last came from a man who was part of the Catholic Worker community in New York in the late 1960s. Dorothy was always right, and if you didn't think so, just ask her and she'd tell you. I suspect her cause for Sainthood does not rest upon her arrogance any more than did Teresa of Avila's or Ignatius Loyola's, but nobody's about to enter Hunter Thompson in that particular contest unless some distillery needs a photo of him as their new logo:-). > But as a reader, I admired Thompson's willingness to go all the way in > his fiery satiric anger, & to call the assholes as they were, in > public, so to speak, too. Sadly, in terms o that other discussion about > the potential effects of any art/writing/etc, such Telling against the > machine seems not to have all that much force -- although perhaps some > of us saw a bit more clearly through his aviator glasses. Certainly, > the rulers of today deserve someone at least as snarky & truthful (I > mean something other than 'honest' there) as him & his prose... The most curious phenomenon I've seen is radical religious publications, online variety: Sojourners edited by Jim Wallace, and an Episcopal magazine called The Witness (how good can they be, they published me:-). Wallis is a really interesting case: he is ordained to some mainstream Protestant denomination, he is very conservative in the area of abortion, but he believes in Gospel message of caring for the poor--and he believes that Bush et al. have lied and committed a form of treason against the God in whom they purport to believe. The political concept is indeed to tell truth to Power--to point the finger, to render unto the Conservatives what they have earned, to be as "snarky" and truthtelling as is required. Yes, I grasp your differentiation between honesty and truthtelling, the bound where at one level honesty morphs potentially into treasonable activity or at least what could be interpreted as "hate speech" (define for yourself). The beauty and curse of the Blog is that a lot of people are out there doing precisely this: doing their version of truthtelling, exceeding honesty via discourtesy and saying things someone else might rather not read or hear. Probably there are people out there, or here, who would willingly replace Hunter Thompson's positive qualities. It requires you not to give a damn about your reputation and employability, and probably requires some degree of physical courage because the more like El Salvador in 1980 this nation becomes, the more likely it is that they will beat the hell out of you, if not kill you outright. What it doesn't require is frequent infusions of Wild Turkey, cocaine, dilaudid, or peyote, thank you very much:-). Ken -- Kenneth Wolman Proposal Development Department Room SW334 Sarnoff Corporation 609-734-2538