Thoughts of HST and what is truth..

Okay, so I've been kinda slow gettin' off the ground here, but what the hell, eh? Nobody's really lookin in on this exercise in self-absorption anyways.

Been reading a lot of Hunter S Thompson lately, particularly the Nixon excerpts from "The Great Shark Hunt" and "Fear and loathing on the campaign trail" you might call this the good Doctor's golden age before he became something of a parody of himself.

Jeez, it happens to all of us, he was a man of his time, and his time ran out long before he did. I suppose there is a certain nobility in staying true to one's self, but in Thompson's case nobility is not quite the right adjective.

Still, having seen "Where the Buffalo Roam" as a college freshman, and shit-scared of that maniacal cold-warrior Ronald Reagan and the prospects of being a draft-age sacrifice to the virtues of the free world in some far off desert like Iran, or Afghanistan, or Libya, I devoured all of his works. His excesses seemed quite natural to an 18 year old who was trying to shake the scales off his eyes and see the world as it really was. His skewed, twisted perspective was a breath of fresh air in a world that was seemingly being turned into one long national commercial for the grand old flag. A proposition I have never been able to buy into.

Looking back on smilin' Ronnie's time, it all seems kind of innocent now, compared to where we are today, and what we have become. Apparently it was just too much for the good doctor. Obits from his death seem to suggest that he was something of a clown, that his glorification of dope, and outlaw lifestyle was passe', even dangerous. Maybe so, time, they say, waits for no one. I suppose that once we all sobered up and decided it was time to make some money, have families, get SERIOUS about life, we had to put the good doctor away like we had to hide our Nixon bongs, dope music and cigarettes. No time for the edge. I'm not sure it was an even trade.

I wish he were around, in his prime, now. This administration was made for his style. There is no real point these days in trying to make reasoned arguments about anything. Truth has become something that can only pass muster if it is "fair and balanced" whatever in the hell that means. I suppose it means that truth now is talking points, and in a society that values choices above all other things, truth becomes a brand. So you have your fundamentalist brand, or your neo-liberal brand, or your islamofascist brand, or your corporatist brand, or your uniquely American consumerist brand.

In fact you have so many brands of truth to choose from that you can mix and match at will, so long as your brands of truth are compatible, and if not, someone will come along with an adaptor truth to make them compatible.

Here's some truth. 3200+ American troops dead in the desert and cities of Iraq. 20,000+ casualties in an open-ended power grab that 4 years and half a billion dollars later shows no signs of ending. You can characterize it, based on your brand of the truth, but you cannot deny the deaths, you cannot brand that as anything but the truth.

And if you truly believe that this somehow makes you safer, that you can insulate yourself in the proposition that this was a war of necessity, that all of those lives were lost in order to bring peace and stability to the world, that our leaders don't lie to us - their enemies do, domestic and foreign, then there is nothing I can say to change your mind. And like the good doctor, you will become a parody of yourself, because your time is running out.