Saturday, February 26, 2005
Freedom fries
Through Gonzo'd eyes?
Courtesy of The Fixer of Palestine comes this free dispatch [36 MB download] from Iraq:
Funny, haha? Not really, which is after all the point. Check out Doonesbury. He's onto it:
Since Flacks Americana have daubed the Madison Avenue Machine Corps in Gonzo technicolour; imbibing the maxim "when things turn weird, the weird turn pro"; it's hardly surprising that Hacks Britannica are being exhorted to emulate their Uncle Duke's quest for The New Journalism's ultimate high; and The Empire's new low:
"At a time when the media on both sides of the Atlantic are going through a period of self-examination, perhaps the greatest memorial for 'Duke' would be for journalists everywhere to aspire to that same intellectual independence which [Hunter] Thompson embodied - even if they have neither the desire nor the constitution to imitate his intake of dangerous substances. When he ran for local public office on a libertarian platform in the 70s he found himself up against a crew-cut Republican. Thompson duly shaved his own head and then referred to his Republican rival as 'my long-haired opponent'.
"We'll miss him."
Err... no you won't, as we've already established. Far too lacking in nuance, what? Quoth the Grauniad's observer-in-chief:
"Do you get people thinking by hammering them or [sic] the head? Or by gently poising a point as a question they may care to ponder?" (Michael White, email to The Gurgling Ulcer, October 2004)
Well, being the very antithesis of a news outlet, this screed seeks to avoid topicality and relevance wherever possible. But now the drugs don't work, as today's Telegraph reminds us, it is perhaps fitting to mark our appreciation of Doctor Thompson's delicious elixir:
"As he retreated from the front line of journalism, he became a freak show on the corner of American pop culture.
Is that supposed to be an indictment of a man who recalls Our Leader with such clarity?
"I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn't handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub," Thompson adds, "then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away."
Little wonder then that the great shark Hunter spawned such a menagerie of mimics:
"A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way..."
Indeed. Throughout most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I wondered why anyone would want to be in any way remotely similar. For, as the man himself remarked in one of his alter ego's brief moments of clarity:
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."
Except perhaps the muppet hacks pumping bile into the ether...
Of all the verbiage spouted this week in tribute to the original Doctor of Spin, I enjoyed the Counterpunch curmudgeonliness best of all:
"I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.
"Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.
"I tried to re-read Kerouac's On The Road a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That's a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he'll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I've been sipping into his diaries, Confessions of a Barbarian, and laughing every couple of pages. 'Writing for the National Geographic,' Abbey grumbled, 'is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts.'"
Which was almost as cutting as the critique crafted by the creator of Shotgun Golf, who declared death to wordsmithery and all of its sycophants:
"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." (Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
What an epitaph. It ought to be tattooed inside reporters' eyelids. In braille.
UPDATE: Yet another letter to the editor:
Date: February 26, 2005 13:42:36 GMT
To: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Cc: s.milne@guardian.co.uk, michael.white@guardian.co.uk, r.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk
Dear Mr Rusbridger,
I note with interest that this week's Guardian tributes to Hunter S. Thompson, including the selection of Gonzo quotes ("In his own words", 21 February), eschewed this verdict on the fourth estate:
"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971)
"We'll miss him," concluded your leader of 22 February ("A libertarian legacy"), exhorting scribes to imbibe Dr Thompson's delicious elixir in pursuit of "intellectual independence" in the face of "the current debate about whether or not journalists are too disrespectful of politicians".
The evidence suggests otherwise, although it is never too late to redeem oneself.
In that spirit, perhaps you could advise me when you will be devoting your front page to the logical culmination of this week's revelations about Lord Goldsmith's "advice" and the push for war: an outraged call for the Prime Minister's resignation or impeachment, supported by an analysis of why your newspaper has taken so long to apprise its readers in plain English of the gravity of his high crimes and misdemeanours.
Richard Norton-Taylor's article on Wednesday ("Revealed: the rush to war", 23 February) quoted the reference by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, in her letter of resignation as a Foreign Office legal advisor, to the invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression". I'm sure I need not remind you of the Nuremberg Tribunal's designation of this offence as "the supreme international crime".
Thank you for your time; I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
[Raoul]
Fear and loathing indeed.
CORRECTION: The quoted diatribe on journalism comes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971, not Rolling Stone magazine from 1994, as originally stated.
The confusion appears to have stemmed from Marc Cooper's blog and circulated into my email via a host of websites. Damn that infotainment super high way.
Courtesy of The Fixer of Palestine comes this free dispatch [36 MB download] from Iraq:
Funny, haha? Not really, which is after all the point. Check out Doonesbury. He's onto it:
Since Flacks Americana have daubed the Madison Avenue Machine Corps in Gonzo technicolour; imbibing the maxim "when things turn weird, the weird turn pro"; it's hardly surprising that Hacks Britannica are being exhorted to emulate their Uncle Duke's quest for The New Journalism's ultimate high; and The Empire's new low:
"At a time when the media on both sides of the Atlantic are going through a period of self-examination, perhaps the greatest memorial for 'Duke' would be for journalists everywhere to aspire to that same intellectual independence which [Hunter] Thompson embodied - even if they have neither the desire nor the constitution to imitate his intake of dangerous substances. When he ran for local public office on a libertarian platform in the 70s he found himself up against a crew-cut Republican. Thompson duly shaved his own head and then referred to his Republican rival as 'my long-haired opponent'.
"We'll miss him."
Err... no you won't, as we've already established. Far too lacking in nuance, what? Quoth the Grauniad's observer-in-chief:
"Do you get people thinking by hammering them or [sic] the head? Or by gently poising a point as a question they may care to ponder?" (Michael White, email to The Gurgling Ulcer, October 2004)
Well, being the very antithesis of a news outlet, this screed seeks to avoid topicality and relevance wherever possible. But now the drugs don't work, as today's Telegraph reminds us, it is perhaps fitting to mark our appreciation of Doctor Thompson's delicious elixir:
"As he retreated from the front line of journalism, he became a freak show on the corner of American pop culture.
Is that supposed to be an indictment of a man who recalls Our Leader with such clarity?
"I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn't handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub," Thompson adds, "then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away."
Little wonder then that the great shark Hunter spawned such a menagerie of mimics:
"A great number of feature journalists, when starting out, want to be Hunter S Thompson. Unfortunately, many tend to want to be him in the wrong way..."
Indeed. Throughout most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I wondered why anyone would want to be in any way remotely similar. For, as the man himself remarked in one of his alter ego's brief moments of clarity:
"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge."
Except perhaps the muppet hacks pumping bile into the ether...
Of all the verbiage spouted this week in tribute to the original Doctor of Spin, I enjoyed the Counterpunch curmudgeonliness best of all:
"I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I'm the same age as him but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of American rough-housers: first, in the mid-fifties Jack Kerouac, then Edward Abbey, then Hunter Thompson.
"Thank God I never tried to imitate any of them. Thompson probably spawned more bad prose than anyone since Hemingway, but they all taught me that at its most rapturous, its most outraged, its most exultant, American prose can let go and teach you to let go, to embrace the vastness, the richness, the beauty and the grotesqueries of America in all its thousand landscapes.
"I tried to re-read Kerouac's On The Road a few years ago and put it down soon enough. That's a book for excited teenagers. Abbey at full stretch remains a great writer and he'll stay in the pantheon for all time. Lately sitting in motels along the highway I've been sipping into his diaries, Confessions of a Barbarian, and laughing every couple of pages. 'Writing for the National Geographic,' Abbey grumbled, 'is like trying to masturbate in ski mitts.'"
Which was almost as cutting as the critique crafted by the creator of Shotgun Golf, who declared death to wordsmithery and all of its sycophants:
"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." (Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
What an epitaph. It ought to be tattooed inside reporters' eyelids. In braille.
UPDATE: Yet another letter to the editor:
Date: February 26, 2005 13:42:36 GMT
To: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Cc: s.milne@guardian.co.uk, michael.white@guardian.co.uk, r.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk
Dear Mr Rusbridger,
I note with interest that this week's Guardian tributes to Hunter S. Thompson, including the selection of Gonzo quotes ("In his own words", 21 February), eschewed this verdict on the fourth estate:
"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage." (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971)
"We'll miss him," concluded your leader of 22 February ("A libertarian legacy"), exhorting scribes to imbibe Dr Thompson's delicious elixir in pursuit of "intellectual independence" in the face of "the current debate about whether or not journalists are too disrespectful of politicians".
The evidence suggests otherwise, although it is never too late to redeem oneself.
In that spirit, perhaps you could advise me when you will be devoting your front page to the logical culmination of this week's revelations about Lord Goldsmith's "advice" and the push for war: an outraged call for the Prime Minister's resignation or impeachment, supported by an analysis of why your newspaper has taken so long to apprise its readers in plain English of the gravity of his high crimes and misdemeanours.
Richard Norton-Taylor's article on Wednesday ("Revealed: the rush to war", 23 February) quoted the reference by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, in her letter of resignation as a Foreign Office legal advisor, to the invasion of Iraq as a "crime of aggression". I'm sure I need not remind you of the Nuremberg Tribunal's designation of this offence as "the supreme international crime".
Thank you for your time; I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
[Raoul]
Fear and loathing indeed.
CORRECTION: The quoted diatribe on journalism comes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971, not Rolling Stone magazine from 1994, as originally stated.
The confusion appears to have stemmed from Marc Cooper's blog and circulated into my email via a host of websites. Damn that infotainment super high way.
Comments:
Hi Raoul,
I found my way here via your comments at Harry's Place regarding their "Bloggers Versus the Media" debate.
Did you mean to infer that "bloggers are trying to bring down and replace traditional media" when you quoted Wonkette?
Jackie Danicki seems to think you did and that such an assertion was a no brainer. I'm not clear that you did say this.
I thought you were merely pointing out that political blogging is more advanced in the US than here in Britain and that Wonkette's example illustrates the way in which someone critically engaging (OK Wonkette does sometimes gossip a bit too!) with mainstream media organisations via a personal publishing platform such as a blog (which in her case is not wholly independent anymore but rather a part of a larger organisation - the Nick Denton bloghouse)can ultimately get themselves on the inside of the very organisations they may have started out critiquing - which will ofcourse involve them in the assumption of conditions which may not previously have applied to them.
I'm interested to know whether Mr Rusbridger replies to your letters. You raise the fundamental question of hypocrisy which seems to have marked some of the press coverage of HST's passing. I suppose this is to be expected given his totemic stature, and should perhaps be seen as a further enhancement of the legacy he dedicated a lifetime to creating.
I was also wondering if you have an email address?
I found my way here via your comments at Harry's Place regarding their "Bloggers Versus the Media" debate.
Did you mean to infer that "bloggers are trying to bring down and replace traditional media" when you quoted Wonkette?
Jackie Danicki seems to think you did and that such an assertion was a no brainer. I'm not clear that you did say this.
I thought you were merely pointing out that political blogging is more advanced in the US than here in Britain and that Wonkette's example illustrates the way in which someone critically engaging (OK Wonkette does sometimes gossip a bit too!) with mainstream media organisations via a personal publishing platform such as a blog (which in her case is not wholly independent anymore but rather a part of a larger organisation - the Nick Denton bloghouse)can ultimately get themselves on the inside of the very organisations they may have started out critiquing - which will ofcourse involve them in the assumption of conditions which may not previously have applied to them.
I'm interested to know whether Mr Rusbridger replies to your letters. You raise the fundamental question of hypocrisy which seems to have marked some of the press coverage of HST's passing. I suppose this is to be expected given his totemic stature, and should perhaps be seen as a further enhancement of the legacy he dedicated a lifetime to creating.
I was also wondering if you have an email address?
Hi Nick,
The quote was pretty self-explanatory, I thought. Reposting it here for clarity:
Q: Do bloggers end up as mainstream journalists? (Newsweek)
A: Yes. One way to define a blog is resume building. I advise anyone who wants a job in mainstream journalism to start a blog and write about mainstream journalism. (Wonkette)
Your interpretation seems reasonable enough, although the only point I was making was that some bloggers make no secret of their ambitions. Whatever one makes of Anne Marie Cox, her statement was pretty clear: write about the mainstream media and you might get hired.
As for Alan Rusbridger, I've only ever received an "out of office" auto-reply.
The quote was pretty self-explanatory, I thought. Reposting it here for clarity:
Q: Do bloggers end up as mainstream journalists? (Newsweek)
A: Yes. One way to define a blog is resume building. I advise anyone who wants a job in mainstream journalism to start a blog and write about mainstream journalism. (Wonkette)
Your interpretation seems reasonable enough, although the only point I was making was that some bloggers make no secret of their ambitions. Whatever one makes of Anne Marie Cox, her statement was pretty clear: write about the mainstream media and you might get hired.
As for Alan Rusbridger, I've only ever received an "out of office" auto-reply.
I haven't been here for weeks - nor has the author. good. he is a cunt who supports dictators and murderous totalitarian poiltical philosophies. Perhaps the fucker has gone away. I hope so.
medialens cunts, I fuckin hate them
medialens cunts, I fuckin hate them
Hi Raoul, I like your blog, which I found my way to via some agressive interchanges on the medialens forum...
I'm a big fan of medialens, HST, znet etc, but don't ever get enough time to read and contribute to all this bewildering expaning array of new news and comment.
I'm pleased to see you link to schnews on your site... it's a great institution, which I had the pleasure of working at for a year.
I contribute to a blog which i think you might like the collective lounge
and have a young and confused blog of my own benjizeitlyn.blogspot
benji / zeit
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I'm a big fan of medialens, HST, znet etc, but don't ever get enough time to read and contribute to all this bewildering expaning array of new news and comment.
I'm pleased to see you link to schnews on your site... it's a great institution, which I had the pleasure of working at for a year.
I contribute to a blog which i think you might like the collective lounge
and have a young and confused blog of my own benjizeitlyn.blogspot
benji / zeit
