I'd committed some time ago to presenting a paper at a conference with a grad school buddy on Hunter Thomspon and philosophy. This, already, should scare away just about anyone with a serious interest in Academic Philosophy, Journalism, or Hunter Thompson, and for good reasons: If you take any one of these seriously, that's reason enough to regard you as a werido, but to try to pull them all together, make coherent sense of them, and do this with any seriousness - well, you'd have to be out of control to consider it.
And for myself, I'd given up on Thompson some years ago, because he'd clearly gone off the deep end and given up, himself, on writing, coherence, and the human race. And I'd given up on Academic Philosophy for largely the same reasons. As for Journalism, I never had much faith in it to begin with, from age 9, delivering the Toldeo Blade and occasionally reading the thing I was stuffing into boxes in suburban Maumee.
But when Thompson offed himself a while back, and my grad school chums circulated to me the euology written by fellow Duquesner Paul Swift, I bought into the idea to toss off a panel on Thompson and philosophy, with the notion in mind that an anthology might follow. I still don't know if that's a good idea, or whether the world could possibly benefit from it, let alone ourselves. But it has propelled me back into Thompson, for good or ill.
So, I found myself buying Kingdom of Fear today at our local ChainBookStore, and zapped through the first 70 pages tonight. Turns out Hunter decided to write again, at the end of his life. And he had something to say, too. And it's filthy.
Typically, he makes broad, unsupported, suspect leaps of analogy between such fare as a youthful arrest of his own, a sad and twisted case of a woman in Colorado arrested for a murder her friend committed without her knowledge, and Moussaoui's connection to terrorist acts. Bad analogy? Probably. But that doesn't matter. Thompson points out, without saying so, that what we're doing, what we're underwriting as a society, is guilt by analogy. And the whole thing - America, the Global War on Terrorism, Thompson's own writing - is so filthy, so dreadful, that my only recourse at this point is to bathe to the furthest extent permissible under the law, or even a little further.
The purest cleqansing is truth: most of us see throught his whole guilt-by-analogy bullshit, and the polls are only just catching up. On the downside, the truly guilty will always get away with it: it's now coming out that the American Red Cross has, through a combination of arrogance and bureaucracy, become completly innefective at aiding disaster relief. It has yet to come out (so far as I know) that the Republican administration funnelled all-- all private relief donations after Katrina to the Red Cross, or that the Red Cross got that way under the fine guiding hand of their long-time president, Liddy Dole.
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