Remembering Hunter Thompson

I got hit with the “How’s your pocketbook?” argument the other day. I replied that it’s actually doing fine, thank you very much. But when nearly sixty percent of American households have less than a thousand dollars in savings, we cannot claim any real national economic strength. Further, considering the erosion of civil rights in this country, we cannot pretend that our pocketbooks are a means to security.

The experience nudged the memory of an old Hunter Thompson quote to the surface, turning up in his 2003 book, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century: “Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.”

I tend to think alot about Hunter Thompson around the time of the Super Bowl. Besides being a raw power of social and civil criticism, Thompson was a delightful sportswriter. The last regular writing gig he had was a column called Hey Rube for digital ESPN’s Page 2 site. The series produced the last book he published…