The Lurkers Oppose Him in Email

Harry Shearer, filling in for Josh Marshal at Talking Points Memo, has evidently taken flak in the email responses to this post early Friday morning:

Sudden thought #2: reflecting on the other loss to journalism widely subjected to elegaic remembrance in recent days, I couldn't help thinking: Didn't Ann Coulter learn everything she knows about toxic political rhetoric from Hunter S. Thompson?

Because TPM doesn't allow comments, readers who are moved to respond have to send emails. (Unless, that is, they are so divinely inspired as to write blogs of their own.) And according to Shearer, they've been overwhelmingly in Hunter Thompson's defense:

[O]ne emailer said this thought had been thoroughly blogified within hours after Thompson's death. If so, I missed it. Most have been appalled that I would compare the sainted Hunter with the devilish Coulter.

I missed it, too. I did some googling around, and could only find this mention in No More Mister Nice Blog:

It occurs to me that you can go from Hunter Thompson to Ann Coulter in two moves (via P.J. O'Rourke).

Maybe that's not surprising. In the end, a lot of what Thompson wrote about was just pure individualism – thwarting enemies you regard as vermin, getting away with as much as possible, not giving a shit about hurt feelings. That's a fairly good capsule description of what the Right stands for now, albeit with a different enemies list.

That Thompson's writing might have been toxic is not actually a new thought. More than twenty years ago, Richard Bergeron wrote something to the effect that Hunter Thompson's writing actually made him feel sorry for Richard Nixon (whom Bergeron despised). And to be fair, Thompson was by no means the only source of political venom in the alternative press of the time. Without reaching very far, for example, I can pull off my bookshelf a copy of Harlan Ellison's The Other Glass Teat, television criticism originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press, containing an attack on Vice President Spiro Agnew as vicious as anything Thompson ever wrote about Nixon. (According to Ellison, e.g., Agnew "masturbates with copies of the Reader's Digest.")

The 60s were a different time. Back then it was left-wing extremists, not right-wingers, who blew up buildings; and it was Democrats, not Republicans, who started wars half-way around the world on pretexts that turned out to be thin tissues of lies.