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