The Dark Nugent Returns

Phil Nugent is an internet/Real Life friend who was really the guy who cajoled me to actually start writing again. It came as a nasty shock when he deleted all the posts in his great blog, The Phil File or Here Be Monsters, but he's got a great new one up, that everyone should read, but I'll excerpt the bit about how Hunter Thompson is really the guiding spirit of our culture, which involves too much of the blogosphere.

Hunter is in the mouth of Bill O'Reilly when he bravely invites people onto his TV show so that he can boldly scream at them to shut the hell up; he's in the camera of Michael Moore when Moore invites himself into Charlton Heston's home so that he badger his ailing, muddle-headed old host until he says something garbled that can be taken as a racist slur by the people in the audience waiting for something to boo, then whip out a picture of a dead little girl Heston never met and demand to know if he doesn't feel somehow responsible for her death. (When he was healthy and relatively clear-headed, Heston was both an enthusiastic gun owner and a dedicated participant in the Civil Rights Movement, which is exactly the kind of combination that the participants in today's opinion culture can't make sense of; it would demand that they imagine a person who chooses his postions on issues according to what feels right to him, not which ones are in his chosen half of the "conservative"/ "liberal" score card.) The myth--the big lie--behind the Hunter archetype is the idea that it's a brave, political act to call someone a werewolf or a worthless criminal ward heeler or a rosy-tailed babboon. It is, instead, the most effective way of convincing anyone who already disagrees with you that they have the consolation of knowing that their opponent is a jerk.