Something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?
– Bob Dylan

No sir, not a chance. Mr. Jones does not even pretend to know what’s happening in America right now, and neither does anyone else.

We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but (this) is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane… We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.
– Hunter S. Thompson

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

The realization of just how far the situation has degenerated now comes to me every morning as I wake. It is impossible to sleep late anymore. There’s no more rolling over and going back to sleep. The onslaught of thoughts about impending doom will not go away.

Oh how I long for the great 1970s when all I cared about was sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. In those days, it was easy to sleep 12 hours a day.

Party all night. Get up late. Play some tennis to keep in shape.

But that life is no longer possible.

Bush is king, now. Partying is out. Even Paris Hilton and Britney Spears have been shamed and run off from the LA party circuit and now stay locked in their homes for fear of arrest.

It’s 2008. And even with only a few more months to go of Bush’s empire supporting big oil, big insurance, big drug companies and big weapons manufacturers there is no time to lose.

Bush’s brain Karl Rove, who was let adrift from the White House last August to be the fall guy - if Congress could get him - is still all over the place.

Tennessee GOP Bans Media for Rove Dinner Speech

Iowa Protest For Karl Rove Leads to Arrests

Rove’s noxious gaming is supported by the most high powered cocaine the Columbians can make. Without it, no one could ever keep up with him.

Cocaine Sustains War in Colombia

These poor Democrats with their little pot sticks are no match for a serious contender high on high powered cocaine.

Do a Google search for “how many more lives have to be destroyed by Bush and Rove Shakespeare?”

And you will come up with so many hits there is no way to count them all. Here’s just a quick sampling.

Economists Explain: Bush Destroyed Our American Dream

The Iraq Legacy: Millions of Women’s Lives Destroyed

Bush Has Destroyed Iraq and America

Bush destroyed the GOP

Homes Gone, Lives Destroyed–Now Katrina Evacuees Try to Keep Right to Vote

The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina

There is a debate as to how it will all end, but it’s not looking good - for Democracy or the America Dream.

Will the story of this time be remembered as a comedy?

The Comedy of Errors

Or as a tragedy? Or as just a bad time in history?

The Life of King Henry the Eighth

Is Bush really Caligula reincarnate? According to Wikipedia, he was also known as an insane tyrant, famous for his cruelty, extravagance and sexual perversity.

I think I know the answer already, but it has not trickled down to all the people yet, at least not in my homeland, Alabamaland.

But give it time.

How many lives have to be destroyed before they get it?

A year after Hunter S. Thompson ended his life, his widow unveiled a new literary magazine dedicated to the gonzo journalist and aptly printed at 3 a.m. on the day of publication, according to the Denver Post.

Excerpts:

A small, offbeat answer to say, The New Yorker, the Woody Creeker offers a literary view of the world seen through the eyes of a funky enclave that tries to forget it lives in the shadow of Aspen.

“We hope that we can have a magazine represent that part of Hunter: Challenge authority. Brook no nonsense. Call it what it is,” said George Stranahan, a contributor, as a steady stream of neighbors poured through the door of his Woody Creek Store waiting for the first issue.

The Woody Creeker is a tribute less to Hunter S. Thompson the writer than Hunter S. Thompson the neighbor, revered for fighting to preserve the rural quality of Woody Creek and for holding court in a corner at his favorite watering hole, the Woody Creek Tavern.

Read the whole story here:

Magazine Debuts as Tribute to Thompson

Subscribe to Woody Creek Online

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they’ve always worked for me.
- Hunter S. Thompson

The Flying Dog Brewery in Aspen, Colorado, is unleashing a new beer in early June called Gonzo Imperial Porter in a unique illustrated four pack to honor the memory of Hunter S. Thompson, according to this announcement released on the brewery Web site.

A limited edition, 750 ml bottle will also be available from the brewery’s tasting room. The first 100 of will be signed by artists Ralph Steadman.

“We had to do something to honor our friend and co-conspirator Dr. Gonzo and last time we checked the sign out front said brewery, so it seemed only right to unleash a tribute beer,” they say. “Gonzo energy has been racing around the brewery like a three-legged dog on acid for over ten years now.

“Like Hunter this beer is deep and complex. Gonzo Imperial Porter has been brewed with black, chocolate and crystal malts, and hopped with Millennium and Cascades. This is a turbo charged version of the Road Dog and at 9.5% ABV it will bite you in the ass if you don’t show it the proper respect.”

Mmmm. Don’t know about y’all, but here at The Locust Fork, we can’t wait.

If you want to call someone a thieving pig fucker, you’d better be prepared to produce the pig.
- Hunter S. Thompson

Robert Love, an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an editor-at-large at Playboy, has written a guide to editing Gonzo Journalism based on his personal experiences editing Hunter S. Thompson.

En excerpt:

. . . my intention is to take you through the editing process for gonzo journalism as I knew it - inside the sausage factory. Each piece had its own considerations and contortions, but there were common elements, which in the years since, I have identified and classified. . . .

Hunter’s manuscript pages were themselves manic, bristling works of art designed to turn the long, tedious job of writing, editing, polishing, and retyping a manuscript into a task worth staying up for. They were typed on the IBM Selectric or written longhand in his distinctive, exclamatory script on various kinds of custom letterhead. Never on boring blank pages. Sometimes he used stationery from the Woody Creek Rod and Gun Club (Hunter Stockton Thompson, Executive Director), or the Gonzo Fist. . . .

Then there was his homemade photocopied stationery, which combined lurid photos, tabloid headlines, and other media detritus that struck his fancy. Where they came from I never found out, and I never asked why, but for weeks at a time all the pages arriving at the office were typed under a letterhead that said:

VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE!

or

CONFIDENTIAL OPEN AT ONCE FROZEN SEMEN

or

MAN SUCKED THROUGH 11-INCH WATER PIPE

or

FORGET THE SHRIMP, HONEY, I’M COMING HOME WITH THE CRABS

What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough.

Read it all here and come back to The Locust Fork, where we welcome your comments. (Hit the comments link below).

Sitting up late blogging and watching C-SPAN, I managed to catch the speech by Bill Moyers taking on the media and the government at the conference put on by a non-profit group called Free Press, “working to involve the public in media policymaking and to craft policies for more democratic media,” according to its mission statement.

I may as well publish my own book on the press now, since the Newsweek debacle will make it even harder to do or sell any meaningful investigative journalism for some time to come.

Meanwhile, the MSM thinks it can stop the bleeding circulation numbers and the plummeting public trust in public opinion polls by covering more church. What a joke.

At least there’s one newsman on TV willing to take on a sycophant like Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman who let gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon in the press room and who is now blaming Newsweek for deaths in the Middle East and diminishing America’s reputation in the world. I think someone needs to look in the damn mirror.

Keith Olbermann is calling on McClellan to resign. It won’t happen, of course, but at least someone has the guts to say it out loud in front of a camera.

Is the American press as we know it doomed - along with 229 years of experimentation with Democracy?

Let us all now bow down and give praise to famous men, right? Shouldn’t we all just be grateful for the crumbs they throw us?

I already know one real reporter who recently had to take a job as a grocery store checkout clerk just to feed her family. We’ll all be working for Wal-Mart soon - if a lot of people don’t by dog stand up and protest the direction we are headed.

It’s just a damn good thing the Republican Party decided a long time ago that presidential terms should be limited to two in the wake of FDR’s four terms during The Depression and World War II. Otherwise, the organized religious forces in this country might just anoint George W. Bush king for life and we could kiss this great experiment in Democracy good bye.

The good news is, there will be more elections in 2006 and 2008. There is some chance that the libertarian independents might just split from the religious conservatives and help the pendulum to swing back and allow a few more Democrats back into power.

Otherwise, dear friends, Hunter S. Thompson may prove right to lament the death of the American Dream. It sure seems to be slipping away these days. It’s hard to even muster a decent “ho, ho.”