Two For the Tribe
Good Morning. It’s a bright sunshiny day in Woody Creek. The sky is warm and blue and the puddles are drying up.
First of all, let’s congratulate Doug Brinkley and Johnny Depp! Doug’s book The Great Deluge is on the cover of the The New York Times Book Review. The Colonel’s Pirates of the Caribbean is also kicking ass. That’s two for the tribe.
David Oshinsky wrote about Doug’s book being “a morality tale, pitting helpless victims, heroic citizens and a few decent politicians against an inept bureaucracy at every link in the chain. This was an avoidable catastrophe, more the fault of man than nature, Brinkley says, and those responsible must be held to account.”
I picked the following for today’s HST wisdom because I happened to have it in front of me when I discovered Doug on the cover of the the NYTimes Book Review. So why not? It’s a letter that Hunter wrote to his friend Simon, at the London Independent on May 10th, 2002. Long before Katrina:
The news is bad today, in America and for America. There is nothing good or hopeful about it – except Nazis, warmongers, and rich greedheads – and it is getting worse and worse in logarithmic progressions since the fateful bombing of the World Trade Towers in New York. That will always be a festering low-watermark in this nation’s violent history, but it was not the official birthday of the end of the American Century.
No. That occurred on the night of the presidential election in the year 2000, when the nexus of power in this country shifted from Washington, D.C., to “the ranch” in Crawford, Texas. The most disastrous day in American history was November 7, 2000. That was when the takeover happened, when the generals and cops and right-wing Jesus freaks seized control of the White House, the U.S. Treasury, and our Law Enforcement machinery.
–Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
Any questions?
Until next time, Your friend in Woody Creek,
Anita Thompson
