He Was a Crook
Hello. Yes, I did place myself in Kenneth Lay’s neighborhood in my last blog entry, but I can assure you that I didn’t kill him. Plus, a man who represents the darkest and ugliest part of ourselves doesn’t die that easily. It’s possible that he’s not dead at all, but trekking in the high mountains of Argentina right now, where Alex Gibney (who made the documentary Enron: the Smartest Men in the Room) is on location for another film. It would be interesting to see their accidental encounter.
For now, we’ll just assume Kenneth Lay is really dead, and use the quote from Revelation that Hunter used for his piece titled He was a Crook about the death of Richard Nixon:
And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great has fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
-Revelation 18:2
And for today’s HST wisdom, here is one appropriate graph from that same piece:
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spot of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful…
-Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex
For those of you who are following the lawsuit filed against Hunter and his estate by a former employee and the local publicity surrounding it, I’ll keep you posted.
Okay, I’m off to my mountaintop retreat.
Your friend, Anita Thompson
