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.”

Second thoughts: Two months after Hunter Thompson’s suicide, former admirer Michael Capuzzo rethinks the writer’s motives in a weekly newspaper owned by the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.

Capuzzo calls Thompson’s suicide an extension of the “Gonzo Con” he perpetuated on readers all those years. He uses an expert to claim that the good but fake doctor was a “psychopath” and a “sadist.”

“Thompson will endure, I suspect, as a comic genius,” Capuzzo writes. “One cannot read parts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas without a wide grin. If, however, as Tom Wolfe declared in the Wall Street Journal, Hunter was the 20th century’s Mark Twain, if paranoid psychopathology is all that’s left of the brave, tender hope of Huck Finn, there’s more nihilism in that thought than any man can swallow without gagging and vomiting up all hope, leaving the nihilist in control.

“That, one suspects, was always the point of Thompson. Nothing is a more dishonest feature of the Gonzo Con than the facile way Thompson cloaked himself in the masters, especially William Faulkner. ‘Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have always known this,’ Thompson said.

“The ironies here are numerous, but for a journalist to use perhaps the greatest American novelist as a cover for inventing facts because he himself could not succeed either by creative invention or honest reporting is secondary. Chiefly ironic is Thompson’s use of the great Southern moralist to preach precisely what Faulkner stood all his life against. Answering critics who thought his vision too dark and negative, Faulkner in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech warned against the true doomsayer, all but prophesied Hunter Thompson.

Declaring it the writer’s duty ‘to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past,’ Faulkner warned against writers who succumb to the paralyzing fear and hopelessness of modern life. Such a writer works without ‘the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed . . . without pity or compassion . . . though he stood among and watched the end of man.’”

As I have tried to convince an attorney friend of mine in Florida who worshiped Thompson somehow as a great factual reporter, and likes to tell me I don’t get it when I try to disabuse him of that notion – and who has ridden along with me on quite a few gonzo journalism-style adventures – I suspect Capuzzo gets it pretty close to right.

I don’t think you can compare Thompson to Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway. Wolfe is closer to Mark Twain, as is my good friend Rick Bragg.

Thompson was a master stylist who said a lot of things we were all thinking but could not get published in a “family newspaper.”

As I have said before, he was largely a failure as a reporter. He never seemed to actually get the story he was assigned to cover, but came away with a hillarious tale with the caricature of himself in the middle of it. He got famous for his proximity to power and for seizing the moment at a rare time in history when going wide open was possible for rock stars – and for Hunter S. Thompson.

If there is an editor or a publisher out there who would like to fund and publish some wide-ass open journalism with real reporting power behind it, get in touch. Here at The Locust Fork we know how to do it. If only we could fund it.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Don Schanche at the Macon-Telegraph for this find. Feel free to send us links you think are worth blogging on. Blog on.

GW

It is possible to write in the rain, but not so much in the cold, at least not when it is January cold in April.

The problem could be the first hints of arthritis creeping into the knuckles, or maybe the dark cloud that keeps hovering around the brain.

The problem is, as Hunter Thompson once said, “I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.”

Fear and Loathing was the perfect phrase for the good doctor and his time. As any half-decent philosopher or scientist knows, extremes are subject to opposites. This is best expressed in Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which says, in essence, “what goes up, must come down.”

The era of self-love, otherwise known as “the me generation,” inevitably suffered from self-loathing.

And at a time when freedom of the individual was at its height, in the era of “free love and dope,” some paranoia was also inevitable – especially if the feeling was somewhat driven by psychedelic drugs.

It is hard to imagine a better phrase to represent the truth in 2005, though, especially since our fearless leader is a very sick man-child named George W. Bush, aka the Texas Souffle.

Every time his dark green Huey helicopter flies out of D.C. north over Maryland, some of the liberals in Takoma Park flip him the bird. They wonder if the Secret Service can see them, maybe add their names to some watch list.

If Hunter Thompson was paranoid under Nixon, imagine the opportunity for fear of the technological abuse by spies today.

In today’s Washington Post there’s an article about a plan by the feds to embed computer chips in passports under the headline:

Privacy Advocates Criticize Plan To Embed ID Chips in Passports

Luckily, the plan is at least being opposed by travel-related businesses and privacy advocates, who say the high-tech chips would do more harm than good. If you are interested, the public comment period at the State Department ends Monday, April 4.

So much for the loathing and fear.

In the special issue of Rolling Stone dedicated to Thompson’s memory, New Orleans historian Doug Brinkley says the good doctor had been despondent since the 2004 presidential election, after it became obvious that all the efforts of the smart set and the new kids fighting for the Democratic Party had been for naught.

Another four years of Bush seemed just too much to bare in a wheel chair.

Who could blame him for checking out early, before the grim reaper could come along and take him like Terri Schiavo, who hung on 11 days without a feeding tube in a Florida hospital.

Thompson would not have stomached the family infighting that characterized the Schiavo case. He was clear. He wanted his ashes shot from a gonzo fist-shaped cannon on the grounds of Owl Farm.

As I have already laid out in my own living will, which carries about as much legal weight as the copyright symbol at the end of this story, I want my ashes scattered by the Blue Angels along Alabama’s Gulf of Mexico coast. I once wrote a story about the first female Blue Angel pilot. If she is still flying, I would want her to do the deed.

It was there along that great stretch of beach that in the late 1980s and early 1990s I was perhaps the most comfortable in the world for more days of the year than anywhere else.

When I say comfortable I do not mean economically. My take home pay from The Islander newspaper amounted to about $15,000 a year.

But I only paid $150 monthly rent for the cinder block cottage on Lagoon Avenue, where I tripped and drank Bloody Marys and watched the 1992 Democratic Convention in a hammock with an old TV pulled out on the patio, the waves crashing into the beach only a few yards away.

It was easy to take comfort in that scene, knowing that in spite of the Jennifer Flowers story Bill Clinton was about to walk all over George Herbert Walker Bush.

Sadly, John Kerry just did not inspire that same confidence in the winter of 2003 when I pulled up stakes in New Orleans and hunkered down in a Birmingham bunker to ride out the second Bush storm.

So far the world has not come crumbling to an end during Shrub’s tenure, which must be some kind of miracle – although I suspect not the kind he is thinking about when he and pal Karl Rove discuss the issue.

Can’t you see them in the hot tub together, with Jeff Gannon, talking about how blessed they are to be in the White House?

Restore dignity to the office indeed. There is not an ounce of dignity left in the White House. It all got taken out with the trash with Nixon in 1974, and only briefly returned with Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980.

Dog only knows what kind of strange sex the Reagan’s favored, although it’s easy to imagine that it involved cowboy hats, boots, leather, horses and of course the signature axe.

The thought is almost too much to bare while hanging out in the gay bars of D.C., trying to find the one honest queer who might be able to save the Republic.

Dog help us all.

GW

Google is great. But it is useless this morning at finding any stories about the Hunter Thompson tribute at the National Press Club last night. Maybe all the reporters present were too stoned and drunk to write anything about it.

It could be that I am too hung over to have the patience to keep looking. The only thing I can find is this brief in the Washington Post about it. Maybe you can catch it on C-SPAN.

I didn’t take any notes, but the program provides a few interesting details, including a few select quotations from the good doctor himself.

“Gonzo journalism is a style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism,” Thompson once said. “The best journalists have always known this.”

Perhaps blogging at its best could be called gonzo journalism. You be the judge.

My only complaint was that non-Press Club members were confined to the 13th floor ballroom where smoking was not allowed and the only imported beer served was Heineken. OK, my attorney in Florida insists Thompson actually liked Heineken – or at least he referred to it in his writing.

My recollection is that he made Bass Ale famous in the U.S. when he talked about drinkng it by the case at the Washington Hilton swimming pool during the Watergate hearings. But then life has taught me that personal recollections are not perfect, especially when a buzz is involved.

In what the Press Club refers to as, “A tribute to Hunter, by his friends, peers, colleagues and other troublemakers,” several speakers who knew him told stories about the man who killed himself in his kitchen a couple of months ago.

Former Aspen Daily News editor Chris Robinson was on the panel, along with Frank Mankiewicz, Al Eisele and Corey Seymour, one of the editors of the Rolling Stone HST tribute issue.

Time magazine White House correspondent Matt Cooper acted as master of ceremonies and introduced a list of speakers who all attempted to make the audience of Thompson fans laugh.

Several of us walked out and headed for the upstairs bar when James Rosen of Fox News came on. Smoking was allowed at the Press Club bar for members, and they did serve Bass Ale.

Several non-members crashed the bar, including an interesting fellow who described himself as a local auto mechanic who kept chewing on psilocybin mushrooms and muttering that Thompson would have been “appalled.”

I’ll have more to say about this in my Sunday column. For now I’ve got to head out into the rain and entertain a dog named Ripkin before he bites one of the neighbors and gets me kicked out of place where I’m house sitting in what they call The People’s Republic of Takoma Park.

As HST might say, got to go, Ho, Ho.

GW

by Glynn Wilson

SILVER SPRING, Md. – Delicate fingers on the tinkling keys of an electric piano on public radio. That is the music that runs through my life like the persistent rain drops of March in Silver Spring, Maryland, just a few miles north of Washington, D.C. It could as easily be October Uptown in New Orleans, or January in Birmingham, Alabama, or August in Timbuktu.

As Robert Blake told the press in L.A., after the jury acquitted him of viciously murdering his wife, when the jackals had the temerity to ask what he would do next: I am “cowboying” too, in spite of the rain, in a 1998 Chevy Venture. It’s not exactly The Shark. Only in some ways it is better, a more practical vehicle for an even more dangerous time.

If you do not know what “cowboying” is, I won’t explain it like Blake did. Google the transcript yourself.

What draws me to it is not just the freedom of the road or the wind in my hair or the promise of a poolhall filled with regular guys in the real world.

It is the story.

And it is the fleeting notion that freedom can survive — if only more crazed hippies would hit the road and take a chance and stand up to the bastards in a way Hunter Thompson could only dream of in his drug-addled state. The people of Kyrgyzstan know this, as Americans and the French used to, in another era. Run them out of town and sit in their desk chairs and gloat. That is what revolution looks like in the twenty-first century.

Calling Nixon a cheap crook was easy compared to trying to gain access to the Bush White House and ask one pertinent question without being “ghosted” and landing anonymously in a Cuban jail.

I have caught and missed many a great story in my life. There was the ignoble death of the EMPRESS II in the Gulf of Mexico and the Guiliani appearance at the Southern Governor’s Association conference in New Orleans when I ended up the only reporter in the room. I never got to cover a hurricane in Gulf Shores, or the Big One in the Big Easy, or a bona fide shooting war, at least not yet.

But, what still drives me like Ahab to the sea is the power of another story, one bigger than before. A story that saves the world somehow, or even for one day makes the lives of the little people better in some small way.

So for now I will range from New Orleans to Washington in that chase, hoping one day to make it back to New York — if the dirty bombers don’t get there first. One of these days I would like to see Paris, but this is not the time.

For now it is hard to tip the homeless man at the seven-eleven, working hard for his dimes in the rain. No matter. I know deep down the battle is here, where the power flows outward around the world like the smoke at a Texas barbecue. This is where the fight has to be if any of this is to survive — our experiment in democracy, that is.

Iraq is a backwater story, in large measure because it was already written down and mapped out in the smoke-free rooms of today’s modern think-tanks.

You can’t even count the dead and dying anymore on that side of the world. While the political, pious crowd fights for every diminished life in places such as Florida, where the most important commodity image-wise is orange juice — manufactured not just to mix with vodka.

Try reading all in one day the entire print edition of the Sunday New York Times, the Washington Post and the special edition of Rolling Stone dedicated to Hunter S. Thompson. I doubt there is a blogger who could do it, especially on a rainy Sunday after staying up late Saturday night drinking strong beer and listening to the Rhodes Tavern Troubadours at the Half Moon Barbecue.

Do that and then tell me you know what you’re talking about when you talk to me about objectivity or ethics. I am here to tell you that there is a such thing as objectivity and ethics, but they don’t look anything like what you think they look like, if you haven’t read what I have read and seen what I have seen.

The Locust Fork is a new blog dedicated to not only creating another “New Journalism.” This thing called a blog will either save the world in this century as the newspapers did in he last — or this is where we will chronicle its demise.

As long as it is still possible to cowboy in a van with a laptop and blog, there is hope for us all.

A great historian once said, “There is nothing more Southern than going down to ignoble defeat before overwhelming odds.”

The battle is joined, as Lee thought at Gettysburg. It may take a foolish man from Alabama to charge against today’s PR ramparts with wet powder and no ammunition.

Perhaps that is what the world needs — a man willing to charge against overwhelming odds, to spill some tea in the harbor of power.

Wish us well, dear Hobbits, and let us hear from you.