Hunter S. Thompson

The journalist invented the politician so he'd have someone to look down on. I think Mencken said something like this, though it might have been Hunter S.Thompson.

You can read Thompson's book, Generation of Swine, as I am, for the title alone as it's oddly comforting. The short dispatches that compose the book, most of them written for the then very progressive SF Examiner in the mid-to-late 1980's, are little vignettes of how-to-survive in Hunter S. Thompson's self-styled apocalypse.

The 1980's were time of big time gang warfare led by right-wing lunatics; the era of Christian hypocrites, lousy Presidents, prolonged foreign excursions, bi-furcated cultural stand-offs between the half-educated and those with no education at all, media opportunists, 24-hour news cable television...Thompson's dispatches pretty much cover the waterfront.

I get the feeling from reading Generation of Swine that Hunter S. Thompson's still around, and that his voice is still vital. It's sort of sad feeling I suppose, though it's also a kind of tribute to feel this way, for what more can be asked of a writer?