Volume 3, Number 4
April, 1998
What's Left?
We will kill the ones that eat us and eat the ones we kill...Hello kids, Skip here with you again. I am once more among the masses, bringing nuggets of wisdom to lighten your daily load. Thank the Lord that he has seen fit to provide you with me, to give you direction in the dull gray haze that is the nineties. It was a near thing I can tell you. I am, even now, just moments from my deathbed, writhing in pain while I felt the juices in my brain pan boil with fever. Luckily for all of you, my loyal, bleating sheep, that I was able to beat back the virus which raged in my system lo these many days.
H.S.T.
In my fever induced dementia I was comforted by the half-mad ramblings
of a former hillbilly drunk named Hunter. Indulging in the apocryphal
prose of the good doctor is not wise even for the healthiest of minds.
Grown men have been known to weep openly upon gazing at his screeds.
Young mothers have spontaneously combusted after merely being told
about some his dark and twisted stories. To dive into his world while
in the clutches of an hallucination-inducing fever is at best unwise.
I did this though, for you, for all of you who look to me to make
sense of the world around us in a way that even you can understand.
I think that Hunter must be tired now. He has fought the good fight for
oh so many years against the hacks and the fixers and against the
politicians who in his immortal words "are so crooked that they need
a brace of secret service agents to screw their pants on in the
morning." He has illuminated the darkness, he has exposed corruption
and he has always set a reasonable betting line for those of us who
like to pick up a little cash with our punditry. In short, to once
again steal from the good doctor, "He stomped on the terra" and Lord!
it was a sight to behold.
But it is hard to carry on the doctor's work nowadays. HST had targets
like Johnson and Nixon and Muskie and Reagan and Bush. The crimes he
railed against were corruption and secret police forces and selling
arms to terrorists. Compared to that, what do we have? The possibility
that the skirt-crazed redneck currently residing on Pennsylvania had sex
with an intern who was over 18 at the time? The twisted ramblings of
the failed hack author who is the Speaker of the House? An uninspiring
collection of misfits and lightweights who even now are lining up to
take a shot at becoming the most powerful figurehead in the world?
These are sad days for pundits, my friends. Oh, for the days when there
were true and obscene criminals in the halls of power. Men for whom
it meant nothing to trample the civil liberties of the populace at
dawn and then use the constitution to start the breakfast fire.
Dangerous nitwits like Ollie North and Adm. Poindexter who thought
it a capital idea to sell a few missiles to terrorists to help out
the freedom fighters in Nicaragua. (whatever became of the Sandinistas
anyway?) Full-on insane operatives like G. Gordon Liddy and his
parlor trick of lighting his own hand to prove a point. (what was
that point, Gordo?) The crazies and the nut jobs and out and out loons
have all gone away. Replaced by bright-eyed nice boys who know what's
best and are bound and determined to do it.
Who am I to rage against? Am I supposed to care that the president
got blown by an intern? Am I supposed to care that he told her to
keep it quiet? Am I supposed to rail against the right wing for how
they want to spend the budget surplus? The single most frightening
specter on the horizon is that Dan Quayle will crank up a presidential
campaign in the year 2000. Read that again - is this how far we've
fallen? Dan Quayle as the national bogeyman? Nixon is rolling in his
grave, if in fact he is dead, but that's another story altogether.
Yes, Nixon is probably dead. Reagan is well on his way to becoming a
vegetable. Bush is a harmless old man. Liddy is a talk show host and
North...seems to have disappeared entirely after the whipping he
received in his Senate attempt. All of the villains are long gone
now. The front is quiet, the guns are stilled, the populace on the
whole is prosperous and content. That is all well and good for Joe
Sixpack, but it wreaks hell on those of us that need something to
rail against.
Sleep well Dr. Thompson, you have earned a long and peaceful rest...
Res ipsa locquitor
