Damn, my dad is smart.

Travis-I thought your obit was excellent and can see why the paper decided to print it. Thompson fried his brain with drugs and squandered his considerable talent. I hope you are doing well and making the most of this semester. When you get time, drop me a note and tell me about your courses and theatre productions... Last piece of advice-don`t get too down on the good old USA. If you think the neocons are bad, try spending a little time with the Russians or the boys from Tikrit. Isn`t the real issue human nature, or more to the point, what each of us can do to help others and make this a better world. HST`s real tragedy was that he quit trying and lost his idealism. Self pity is a poor companion. His epitaph might simply read: "A character, lacking in character". Take care of yourself and keep in touch-Love, Dad

I care too much

Thompson obituary presents narrow view of writer's life
Letter
February 25, 2005

To the Editor:
Re: "A Beast Who Became an Illustrious Fossil," Opinion, Feb. 22

I found C. Travis Atkinson's response to the death of Hunter S. Thompson both sad and highly inappropriate. Atkinson started the article with some "creative vitriol" of his own, referencing the good Doctor's "stoner-class fans" and position as the high priest of drugs. What he neglected to mention was that Hunter not only revolutionized the English language, but was also a top-notch journalist. By inserting his own subjectivity into his works, Thompson broke a long-standing taboo in professional journalism, and thus spawned an entire new literary genre. And while it seems easy to point to drugs as his bread and butter, HST was a highly competent journalist whose observations were anything but "mundane."

Admittedly his words fell off a bit over the past 15 years, however it is irresponsible to highlight that as his legacy on the day after his passing. In the same light Atkinson jumped on the Hunter-bashing bandwagon by bringing up the fact that much of Thompson's own portrayals of events were not "factual accounts." It was HST himself who wrote, "Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."

In the end, it is this very mystery of fact vs. fiction that defined the Duke of Gonzo. He got off on people wondering just how crazy he was. On TV, in biographies and in college newspapers people will continue to question his suicide, which is exactly what the old bastard wanted. Atkinson's piece was a narrow and unfortunate look at the later years of a man who changed the written word and history alike. But then again, I'm just a stoner-class fan.

Bruce Armstrong '06

My Response, e-mailed to Armstrong 10 minutes ago.


Armstrong:

Your letter to the editor was the most execrable, mendacitous lump of horseshit I've ever read. I'd like to come into that hell-hole of a frathouse the next time you're busy with the weekly circle jerk and beat you like a dog with the runs, but apparently you're a fellow Red Sox fan, and so that just wouldn't do. However, I'd still like to give you a little lesson in the proper methods of critically responding to newspaper articles. The next time you decide that something you're reading warrants taking an hour to shit out one of your poorly crafted, self-important diatribes, please go through the following checklist to avoid looking like an even bigger asshole.

5 STEPS TO CRITICAL REFORM:

1) Don't pack a bowl halfway through the article. This way, you give yourself the opportunity to READ THE WHOLE THING, in case the writer happens to address a contrasting theme in the second half of the piece. Often, a sophisticated writer will acknowledge his subject's failings before praising him in order to present a balanced, fair view of theperson whose life is under consideration. See my Daily Sun article of2/25 for an example of this technique.

2) Avoid quoting the article narrowly and out of context. One example of this mistake is seizing on the writer's use of the word "mundane" to sarcastically denigrate his characterization of his subject's entire opus, when in fact the writer only used the word in connection to his subject's output "over the last 15 years."

3) Since, as an admitted stoner-class fan, you suffer from a diminished capacity for reading comprehension, take the article to a responsible adult and have him explain it to you in his own words. That way, you won't mistake a slap at the idiots who think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on actual events for the writer taking a ride on the "Hunter-bashing bandwagon" (nice turn of phrase there, by the way).

4) Try as hard as you can to remember, at all times, that an article that is critical, in part, of one of your heroes is not necessarily a prima facie case of bad writing. Nor, in all likelihood, should you feel personally insulted by it: in all likelihood, the writer couldn't give a fuck what a dumbshit like you thinks.

5) If 1-4 prove impossible, take your bowl, your coke spoon, your stash, and your keyboard, and shove all of them up your mother's ass.

I hope we get a chance to meet each other someday, Armstrong. Perhaps we'll have a few drinks and talk this thing out. But for the Love of God, do try to learn a bit about writing before then - until I opened the paper on Friday, I didn't believe that anyone who's read The Great Shark Hunt could write so poorly. As things stand now, you're nothing but a goddamned disgrace. Eat shit.

Yours,
C. Travis Atkinson

Terry Francona gets a call from the President

Presidential address
Boston Globe, 2/25/05

Francona was asked what he plans to say to President Bush when the Sox visit the White House Wednesday.

"Probably, `I'm sorry,' " Francona said.

The last time the two spoke was by phone when Bush called to extend congratulations on winning the World Series.

"I thought it was somebody else," Francona said. "It was real short. I was taking a nap with my youngest daughter. The whole time he was talking to me I was thinking, `Who is this?' I couldn't put a name to it. I couldn't figure it out.

"Then I hung up and got a call from [Senator John] Kerry. I said, `Oh [expletive], that was the president.' "

A Beast Who Became an Illustrious Fossil

Note: This is a revised version of the Hunter S. Thompson obituary that I first posted on 2/21/05.

He's dead, dead, dead, and gone and there's not a thing in the world that anyone could have done to stop it. The horrible truth of the Death of Hunter S. Thompson is that Thompson was pretty much dead to the world a long time before the good Doctor finally finished the job on Sunday. Most of Thompson's stoner-class fans think he's the ultimate symbol of chemically fueled splendor: they admire the drug-induced frenzy with which he approached his most famous works. Some people still insist that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a factual account. But anyone who's read the things he wrote over the last ten or fifteen years of his life already knows that Thompson, like many of his era’s lesser leading lights, left this world as a victim of drug abuse; if he was ever a leader of that subculture, the pressures of office had long since destroyed him. His brain was rotting from the inside out; the last shot ever fired by the world’s most charming gun nut just made it official.

The last great thing Thompson ever wrote came 11 years ago: an obituary of Richard Nixon, the only public figure left whose name retained any ability to incite the Doctor's dwindling but still potent reserve of creative vitriol. "Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it ... I have had my own blood relationship with Nixon, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it." It seems terribly appropriate that the last thing of value HST contributed to the literary world before the rest of his brain succumbed to the effects of the drug abuse was that vicious evisceration of his old enemy. As far as we, his public, were concerned, there were two Thompsons: the writer, whose works we bought, and the icon, whose works we wanted to read. The icon died with Nixon's resignation, because the writer's fixation with that evil old Nazi-heart never subsided. Thompson never found a new subject after Nixon and the death of the dream. Nixon represented the dark side of the American character, and Thompson could never stop trying to kill him. In his final years, Thompson was still writing occasionally about Nixon in his Page2 column on ESPN.com, though all of his last missive concerned a new form of golf he'd just invented.

And so, the icon became a historical figure, and all historical figures are doomed to be misunderstood. The obituary pages will read, "Thus Dies Thompson, the high priest of drugs, excess, and literate insanity. He might have been relevant for a while back there. Some say he was a journalist. No one in the op-ed department knows enough about him to say for sure."

Even in his decrepit state, Thompson remained a champion of sorts - the aging Muhammad Ali of the counterculture intelligentsia. The folks who knew how to trot him out without provoking a wolverine-fit were putting Thompson's image anywhere they could put it, and anytime he needed more money, all he had to do was write a few short paragraphs full of strangely-worded, mundane observations, punctuated by phrases like, "Ah... but that's how it works, Bubba. All energy flows according to the whims of Dick Cheney," and someone would publish it, package it with reviews from second-rate papers (I once saw a quote from the Tulsa World, my hometown’s bush-league daily, on a newer HST book jacket), and scream “The Grand Duke of Gonzo’s latest masterpiece!” All anyone ever had to do to drum up interest in a book with a title like, "Handles of Whisky on the Bus to D.C." was get the old man to sign off on it. Yes, he was an aging champion - but more like Jake LaMotta doing his nightclub act than Ali getting to light the Olympic torch. All Thompson had left, in the end, was his name.

Just thinking about it now makes me wonder why anyone who wants to do anything good with his life wouldn't plan on dying young, before...

Before a snot-nosed Ivy Leaguer like me gets the chance to smear you in a public forum, that's for sure. None of that can make me forget what a brilliant mind we lost thirty years ago. It wasn't all about Nixon and the 60's for Thompson: by the time that all went down, he'd already had the kind of life that would make anyone green with envy. And since Thompson's life was his work until the end of Nixon, you could easily say the same thing about Thompson's journalism. He was a force to be reckoned with, even when he wasn't in print. He wrote an official press release announcing his discharge from the Air Force in which he proudly fantasized about throwing a wine bottle into the guard booth as he sped his way out of Eglin Air Force Base. He brought the Hell's Angels into the widespread consciousness of the intellectual drug counterculture when he introduced them at Ken Kesey's La Honda retreat; in doing so, he helped bridge the gap between the burgeoning subcultures of the country’s working and middle classes, forging a short lived anti-establishment alliance with true street cred, which might have changed the course of American History – if it had only lasted. Its breakup at the Altamont festival sent him into the ultimately terminal Nixon spiral of the later years of his brilliance. He ran a protest campaign for Sherriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, whose satirical rhetoric was so sharp that he almost ended up winning the race. He chronicled the death of both his great passions – the 60's protest culture and the American Dream – and remorselessly nailed the coffin lids shut on both of them when he realized that it had all been what he called "a lame fuckaround." He capped off that era by writing the greatest book on American politics that I've ever read, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he noted:

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves, finally just lay back and say it: that we are a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anyone in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Sic Semper Gonzo. I will miss him during every horrible minute in which that passage still rings true of the decaying dream of America at whose side he fought and died.

Tickets! Tickets!

I GOT SOX TICKETS! I GOT SOX TICKETS! I GOT SOX TICKETS!

The Postmodernism Generator

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern


This program will randomly generate a new bullshit, postmodernist "critical essay" every time you reload the page. It's built on what the techies behind it call a "recursive grammar engine." God, I love that.

Anyway, a friend of a friend of mine sent it to his history professor, who offered the following response:

Your forwarding of this satirical web address reveals a dismaying disregard for the ineluctable fundamentality and subalternity ofthe current state of academic discourse, and clearly places you inthe destabilized category of ever-postponed semiotic consonance that is required for truly post-authentic participation in a self-undermining community of mutual empowerment through ennui: theproto-Baudrillardian construct of "je ne sais quoi," which has been tragically reframed through the underlying para-metaphor of illusory Thing-ness, already so clearly shattered in the very act of cloacal performativity that even a pre-Foucaldian theorist could have self-evidently perceived in the Heideggerian Dasein.

It left me as speechless as a colonized other in a courtroom.

Red Sox to Dr. Chuck: Get fucked - and pay us for it.

===========================================================
REDSOX.COM NEW YORK YANKEES/PATRIOT'S DAY TICKET PURCHASE OPPORTUNITY ===========================================================

Thank you for registering for a chance to purchase tickets for a future Red Sox home game. Unfortunately your entry was not selected for this New York Yankees game/Patriot's Day game ticket offer.

Please be advised that if you registered for the opportunity to purchase either Green Monster or Right Field Roof Deck tickets (or both), you are still eligible for these drawings which will take place over the next few weeks.

As a fan, your loyalty to the Red Sox is unparalleled and we would like to thank you by offering you a 10% discount at the Red Sox online store.

The * Era

How many different hundreds or thousands of sportswriters were in ballclubs' locker rooms over the last 15 years? I suppose none of them overheard a single ballplayer mention steroids. It couldn't be that they were too afraid of never getting quotes from any player ever again to sayanything about it.

Where were the networks and their outrage when they were making hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue off the 1998 Single Season Home Run Race? I suppose none of them noticed how strange it was that TWO guys knocked out more home runs in the same season than anyone had in 37 years. It couldn't have been the money - just a coincidence - and besides, baseball NEEDED McGwire and Sosa's race. How many times did we hear that?

Just how many individual 50+ homer seasons had to happen in a four-year span before someone started using the word "unnatural," instead of "magical," to describe the power surge?

How many pitchers had to throw 98-mph fastballs fresh out of high school before someone noticed it? And why the heck didn't the geek draft-day reporters ever think to speculate on why so many more high school prospects at all positions, who came from a world where steroids were unregulated, were developing so much faster than prospects drafted out of college, who should have had edges in both age and baseball experience but came from a world regulated by the NCAA's steroid prohibitions?

It couldn't have been a conspiracy - just a coincidence. Maybe the players are right when they talk about how stupid the people who control the content of baseball coverage are; in fact, they must be right: only the worst kind of idiots in the world could be immersed in the daily life of baseball for the last 15 years and truly have been caught off guard by this mess.

Isn't it about time that the sports media who've been so scathing of late in their attacks on baseball and the MLBPA admit their own culpability in the Steroid* Era fiasco? The public's trust in baseball has been violated, sure, but if someone doesn't go on TV and address this issue, we'll lose our trust in baseball journalists, too.

Looking for Sox Tickets

Oh my Lord...

Sometime in the future, when I haven't posted anything in more than two weeks and feel resplendently guilty about my neglect of this blog, I may tell the story of how I, a kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma, became a die-hard, hopelessly obsessed fan of the (now) World Champion Boston Red Sox. For now, let it suffice as proof of my devotion to the Sox that I reveal to you my willingness to sell almost everything of value that I own in order to buy a pair of tickets to this year's home opener.

For it is at this game that the Red Sox will raise a World Series Championship pennant for the first time since 1918. With the New York Yankees, the most vile bunch of overpaid miscreants in baseball, most memorable and deserving victims of 2004's inexorable march of Sox National Destiny, watching from the visitor's dugout while the Fenway Park crowd rains derision down on their damned ears.

My Christmas gift from my parents was the right to use their credit card to buy tickets to this game when they become available, which they will on February 19th. As you might imagine, demand for these tickets is rather high. So high, in fact, that some of the best seats that have already been released (or will be released to season ticket holders) are being bid on for as much or more than five thousand dollars on eBay. There are other seats available on eBay for closer to five or six hundred bucks, and I would gladly pay as much for them, but what I really want is to get them from the box office, where the most I'll pay is $85 bucks a pop.

And the Sox haven't e-mailed me yet to tell me whether or not I've been selected for the opportunity to buy those tickets. Woe, oh woe is me.

As ridiculous as the whole affair must seem to rational observers, no true Red Sox fan is capable of being rational when it comes to this subject; so I can't really be angry about the prospect of paying close to a thousand dollars to watch a baseball game. The symbolic importance of the moment when the championship banner is revealed could not be expressed by Shakespeare himself. For the last eighty-six years, that "1918 World Champions" banner looked down on the fans of New England, signifying our wretchedness beneath the sword of an intractable oppressor - seemingly inescapable Fate - who twisted it a fraction further in our collective belly with each passing year. Shortly after 3:05 pm on April 11th, we will have a new symbol, a new flag for a new Red Sox nation, born again and free of that cruel Leviathan, Fate. Her sword will be beaten into Win Shares. Tens of millions of people have waited their entire lives to see it happen. It is the final act in the Nation's liberation saga. With only 35,000 seats available in the holy park, it would be more perplexing to see a good seat going for anything less than five grand.

My car is a 1995 Mitsubishi Montero LS. 3.5L V6 engine, 210 horsepower, new brakes, new CD/Stereo, 102,000 miles. Tickets to the Red Sox home opener constitute the only possible best offer.

Midnight on Monday

Is there no market for Mencken in this republic?

I went to the mall today. I wanted to buy a new pair of running shoes and a collection of H.L. Mencken's writing. Any collection would have been suitable; I simply wanted it to have around. The man's legacy is to American prose what Shakespeare is to everything else. But there was no collection to be found. All such volumes listed in the computer directory were out-of-print. Such a damned shame. I'll put a link to one of his most famous pieces at the bottom of this post.

I did manage to buy a snazzy new pair of running shoes. Asics GT 2100s, to be exact. They sound like Italian compact cars. They run a little bit better - good shock absorption in the heel, which is an indispensible asset when you've been noticing a little soreness in your Achilles' tendon while running in your old shoes. I ran a different route today - down Cayuga Heights road and back again. On the return leg, I decided to run up the Thurston Avenue hill. Nearly killed me, but damn if I didn't feel good when I got to the top. I looked up the total mileage of my run when I got back to the apartment. Only three miles, and it took me nearly thirty minutes, which is a pathetic pace. If I'm going to get serious about this running thing, I'll have to quit smoking. Lord help me.

I made one more purchase today - the Special Edition DVD of Raging Bull. My God, what an incredible movie that is. DeNiro rose to the highest level in my personal aesthetic pantheon with that performance: he made me want to act. Most of my experiences with movie watching leave me thinking that I could have done it better than the actors in the film. Not Raging Bull - it's one of those rare acting performances to whose level I can only hope to rise someday: an incredibly perfect blend of subtlety and raw, visceral intensity; a character portrait so truly, precisely detailed, the actor etches it into the core of the celluloid itself. I don't know how even to begin approaching that kind of effort.

Actively Hating Apathy, Part III will appear later in the week. I'm feeling a distinct lack of passion for the subject and I'm not going to look for it right now; but writing the is great, engrossing fun and I hope I can find the discipline to finish it.

Here's a link to H.L. Mencken's obituary of William Jennings Bryan - it is one of the most vicious, surgical eviscerations of a public figure's reputation ever written. I only wish Mencken were alive today to cover the goings on within the GOP.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/menck05.htm#SCOPESC

This piece was written hours after Bryan had died, mere days removed from his infamous Waterloo: humiliated under cross-examination by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes Monkey Trial. More to come later, as always.

Actively Hating Apathy, Part II

Note to the readers, should there ever be any: this is the second part of a piece that I'm writing in sections. You may want to scroll down the page and read Part I before you read what follows; God knows how damned hard it is to find context these days. When the whole thing is finished, I'll reorganize it so it reads continuously from top to bottom.

Dr. Chuck, 2/11/05, 3:55 pm

6:02 pm: Please keep in mind that this is a blog - a stream-of-consciousness record of my impressions - which should not be read as my attempt to make a subtantial contribution to any literary, historical, or philosophical canon. I know I might be completely wrong, so please disagree with me all you'd like - in fact, I'd love it if enough people read this to start a real debate - but don't call me a charlatan: nothing in this blog makes any claim to legitimacy, and I believe it should stay that way.


I want to propose two reasons to reject the narrative that concludes Part I.

1) It's so influenced by my own passion (and reverence for Dr. Thompson's style) that it would make a fine theatrical monologue if anyone who didn't earn his living writing daytime TV scripts wrote melodrama anymore. Perhaps, then, it's an emotionally accurate portrayal, but it's a simplistic failure as actual history. There were countless subplots at play during the period referred to, and barely three of them - drugs, the coming of the Yuppie Ethic of Public Life, and the corporate capitalization of the popular counterculture - are covered therein.

2) It is premised an ideological distortion, to-wit: the protest era of the 60's encompassed a real, youth-driven political movement.

Bullshit. As far as I know, the only thing that the student protestors succeeded in doing, other than a whole lot of drugs, was getting on the national news. Their stated goals were an end to the Vietnam war and the reform of American society. In my opinion, they failed at both. The U.S. didn't leave Vietnam because the protestors made it politically untenable to do so; it left Vietnam because the whole boondoggle had become too expensive to continue.

I would argue that the leaders in any democratic government during times of war could give a damn about whether or not the war is popular if they think the war still needs to be won. (See The American Civil War, history of) American leaders thinks that way because most of the American people think that way, too. It's a mistake to read the term "unpopular war" literally: an "unpopular" war isn't a war to which there exists actual, popular political opposition; it's a war whose end can be a politically popular move, if it's done right. The most popular act that a politician can possibly perform is achieving victory in an unpopular war.

Remember Nixon's appeal to the "Silent Majority"? He was right on the money with that one: sure, the majority of his constituents wanted the war to end, but they still wanted to win. They had damned good reasons to want to win, and I don't mean stopping the spread of Communism.

Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!
...There greet in silence, as the dead are wont,
And sleep in peace, slain in your country's wars!

-Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act I, Scene 1

No nation would willingly endure the blow of mourning thousands of its youth, senselessly murdered, if it were possible to believe that those thousands achieved something by dying. A nation at war desperately, sometimes irrationally, wants to hail its victorious dead, not mourn those who died defeated. The latter option is too painful to be accepted.

And because the student protestors didn't get that, because they viewed the war as an abstraction - without any visceral connection to the pain of losing someone you love to a murderous foreigner, no chance to say goodbye or offer comfort or aid - they were first and finally a purposeless society of bored children of privilege, who would do anything to feel wise and righteous - and that goddamned Silent Majority of the American body politic, even in its flawed wisdom, knew them for it. The only reason they achieved any kind of significance was their numbers, which were primarily the result of the conflation of legitimate anti-war rhetoric and popular culture.

Of course, even that illegitimate significance was enough to make a lot of people very scared of them, which is why the student protest "movement" was eventually crushed. That, and its brief flirtations with the Black Panthers and the Hell's Angels, which really scared the hell out of people, even if the Panthers and the Angels thought the students were nothing but a bunch of dillettantes, too.

So much for the student protestors being a legitimate anti-war movement, or posing any threat at all to any kind of status quo injustice.

But what of their other stated aim (here an admittedly broad generalization on my part) , the reform of American society? What of the civil rights movement? Can it be taken as a youth-driven political movement? Not really. I almost made the mistake of saying, "Not at all. I've never seen any newsreel footage of white college students getting blasted with firehouses." Then I thought of the black students who started the sit-in movement, and the Freedom Riders, and I realized that, oh yes, there certainly was a real youth-driven component within the civil rights movement, but I'd almost forgotten it in my bias. The larger movement itself, however, was neither youth-led nor youth-driven. But I'll say this for those of its members that are of concern to me in this essay: they were heroes for a real cause. When the cause was gone, however, well... see the end of Part I, taking into account the history of the economic attacks on the black community since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

I've been at this for more than two hours now, and I'm getting a bit peckish, so I'm going to call it a day. Many things still beg consideration. This project began as a subjective, mainly philosophical attempt to explain the phenomenon of my generation's widespread political apathy, but as it's progressed, I've begun thinking about the history of the relationship between political life and American kids. I'm about to wrap up the history lesson by talking about 60's feminism and the growth of a new counterculture, but the point I'm trying to get to with all this analysis is the realization that there has never in our history been a real youth-driven political movement.

Whether or not the historical persistence of political apathy means it is an intractable feature of being young in this country remains to be considered. For my part, I will be making the best attempt I possibly can to remain unconvinced.

Actively Hating Apathy, Part I

I read an article in today's Cornell Daily Sun that 44% of the respondents in a recent poll of Americans regarding their views on different issues pertaining to civil rights in the post-9/11 era were in favor of "restricting the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans." How would you expect a reasonable person to react to such news: with outrage, disgust, fear, or a determination to do something about it before some hypothetical fool, perhaps a neo-con wonk assistant to the National Security Adviser, who has always believed our country's A-rab population ought to be kept safely in their place, manages to bring the poll's results to the President's attention? Perhaps, if the reasonable person whose reaction concerns us isn't an university student. If you take me as a representative example, an university student reading the poll merely feels a brief twist in his guts, which passes in the time it takes him to wonder where they put the crossword puzzle today. Soon, even before he's given up on the crossword, it's time to go to class.

I'm enough of a strange fish that perhaps I shouldn't be so quick to proffer my own story as a representative example of the American student's way of living, but when it comes to his level of political interest, I think that the relevant details of my daily life prove damned near the middle of the bell curve. Study after study shows that Americans in my age group are the most politically apathetic generation of American youth in history: we'd rather watch TV than vote. They said so on The West Wing, after all, right before those Nazi punks tried to murder President Bartlett.

Come to think of it, those Nazis were the most politically active youth in the whole episode.

That little irony isn't too far off the mark, if at all, in describing the state of my generation of Americans. The only ones of us who seem to give a damn about anything are the clean shorn neo-Hitler Youth and scraggly-haired and -bearded enviro-anarchists. Not even Fox News would mistake these gangs of idiots, throwing their wayward souls into annihilating enemies on the fringe of the body politic's consciousness, for a real youth-driven political movement.

Can anyone point to the cause of this mess? People who buy into the Hunter S. Thompson view of American political history argue that the last such movement was killed in two stages: first by Bobby Kennedy getting shot, and finally by Richard Nixon getting elected, then re-elected - by a landslide, no less - while running against a Democrat who based his primary campaign on galvanizing the Youth Vote and then turned his back on it during the general election, making a mad dash back to the Party establishment that was responsible for alienating The Youth in the first place - back in 1968 - when the main Party burgher ordered the Chicago riot police to crush The Youth in the streets.

It's at the very least a plausible scenario: The Youth were stunned, then shot at, then betrayed, then crushed, and so they just stopped giving a shit. They stopped thinking that it was cool to care about who and/or what runs the government, and so their little brothers and sisters never got a chance to think that being political was cool. They started doing coke and listened to overproduced, soulless garbage that masqueraded for music. Eventually they embraced the Star Wars aesthetic as their preferred mode of dramatic representation. Not long after that, they bought BMWs and voted for Ronald Reagan, twice. They discarded their idea of a nation's greatness as measured by the quality of the lives of its least fortunate members and decided that how well you could do for yourself had to be more important (Who could blame them? Look where giving a shit about other people got them when they were The Youth). Pretty soon their kids started to grow up watching the MTV whose programming choices were all made by their parents' old friends.

And those kids grew up to be my peers, and I gave up trying to change their minds and just bitched about them.

I actually don't agree with all of that argument, but I've got to go play pool now. I'll finish this up later.

The Final Word from the Online Bookie

And finally... For the record, here's the official result of my first ever wager on a football game:

LOST: INTERNET 2 Team(s) Parlay risk 48 win 124

WON: 102 Eagles +6½ (+105) Side (NFL) (INTERNET) Score: 21-24
LOST: TOT OVR 101 Patriots 47½ (-110) Over (NFL) (INTERNET) Score: 24-21

McNabb will have to wait a while

This post was supposed to be a musing on the officially shunned but insipidly persistent notion that black quarterbacks are somehow never able to perform as well as their white counterparts in big games. However, it's really late and I'm going to leave that one for another time. For now, I hope it will suffice to point out that Donovan McNabb was able to put up 21 points on a Patriots defense that didn't allow Peyton Manning's overrated cracker ass to throw a single touchdown pass three weeks ago.

At this particular moment, my real reason for posting is to share the following quote from Curt Schilling, God among mortal ballplayers, on the Patriots' third championship in four years:

"They're the Yankees of the NFL, but without being greedy bastards."

And to reflect that, somehow, the pain of losing 50 bucks on a dumb parlay bet disappeared when I read that.

Gambling on the Super Bowl

This is a morning when I feel like we should start applying higher standards to the Patriots' performances, like, "They didn't really win in my mind since they couldn't cover the point spread," or "They didn't really win in my mind since they couldn't kick a garbage field goal at the end so that all the folks who had the Eagles +6 1/2 PARLAYED with an over/under number of 47 1/2 could turn off the TV a little bit richer."

THREE MORE POINTS, GODDAMNIT! How the heck do the bookies figure out that fifty percent of the drives in the first half are going to self-destruct? Not that the defenses are going to hold, but that both offenses are going to take their sweet time acting like they're in the Super Bowl? I'll officially have an Ivy League education in five more months, and I can't figure this out.

By the way, this was the first bet I ever placed on a football game in my life. Should I take the loss as an omen and give up gambling on football? or should I simply take it as a sign that doing a thing like parlaying one's side bet with the over/under is a fool's gambit?

Ahh, but the odds were so tempting... risk $48 to win $128. Which should serve as the bettor's version of one of the few classic bits of Good Old American economic folk wisdom that still holds true:

"No such thing as easy money."

Even when you know in your SOUL that the Pats aren't going to cover the spread. Even when, in addition to your SOUL's infallible input, three touchdowns and a field goal for each team seems eminently reasonable, though perhaps not in your SOUL.

"Trust your gut."

There's another one. It's amazing how gambling provides us with a means to sort through the bullshit-mined field that is the realm of cliched wisdom, to-wit:

If it ain't true of gambling, it probably ain't true of life.

So go out to the local track and drop a dime on the ponies sometime soon. Just don't bite on the parlay.