Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

Given Harold Ford Jr.’s peculiar voting pattern in recent weeks (last month, he voted in favor of the Bush administration’s bankruptcy bill), the congressman’s failure to vote at all for the budget measure passed by the House last Friday might be considered by many Democrats — who are the majority in his district — as something of a plus. That Republican budget, of course, includes clauses that pave the way for oil drilling in parts of the Alaskan wildlife refuge, as well as a new round of tax cuts balanced on the backs of the poor, who in turn get huge cuts in Medicaid and other entitlements.

The budget was passed by a narrow 214-211 margin, with Congressman Ford one of just 10 members who failed to show up for the vote. The Congressman told The Commercial Appeal that his absence was the result of “a previous commitment to be in Tennessee” on the night of the budget vote. He did not mention that that commitment involved attendance at Tennessee House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh’s Coon Supper in Covington, a city outside the boundaries of his Ninth District.

It is no secret that Ford has set his sights on Bill Frist’s Senate seat in 2006, and that his quest for that position is currently taking him far and wide across the state. Fair enough. But when his attempts to further his political career involve failing to register a vote on a critical measure in Congress on behalf of his Memphis constituents, he does every citizen of the Ninth District, Republican or Democrat, a disservice.

Let us clarify somewhat the nature of this disservice — in which Ford, to be sure, had company. There were 10 absentees; six of them, besides our own congressman, were Democrats. Presumably, a majority were opposed to the budget. If Ford and the others had been in Washington to cast a vote, the budget would have presumably failed.

Alternatively, if Ford — who prides himself on his accessibility to the folks across the aisle — had been there and had been able to talk a single Republican into a change of heart, the vote would have been tied.

By such action — and inaction — is history made.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

For many of us of a certain age, that sentence — the opening line of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — reverberates like a great gong, tapping slightly addled memories of another life, 30 years gone, another universe. The news of his suicide this week, brought it all back.

It was a time when the weekly arrival of Rolling Stone meant “Do not disturb” for the next three hours. Nothing published today compares in terms of pop culture impact to RS in its prime. It was the bible of of the counter-culture, an absolute must-read. We devoured Lester Bangs and Ralph Gleason because what they wrote about the new Neil Young album meant something, because Bob Dylan’s lyrics had mythic importance, because the music, like the world, was ours.

And when the magazine published one of Thompson’s insane “reports,” accompanied the equally bizarre illustrations of Ralph Steadman, well, hipness could get no hipper. It was like we were all in on the same stony joke — all of us, reader, writer, artist, publisher.

Interview Nixon? No problem. Pass me that joint, first.

I lived in San Francisco then, and like so many other aspiring “gonzo” writers there and elsewhere, I fell under Thompson’s spell. Thankfully, very little of what I wrote in those days remains. The truth is, no one else could write like Thompson because no one else who imbibed illegal substances the way Thompson did could sit up at a typewriter long enough to put a sentence to paper. He didn’t just write gonzo, he lived gonzo.

In the mid-1980s, it was my strange fortune to encounter Thompson by phone on a number of occasions. Initially, I was involved in co-writing a book in which Thompson was profiled. Our conversations were brief and mostly about fact-checking. A year or so later, however, I was assigned to track Thompson down for a Saturday Review magazine cover photo. “Cover of Saturday Review? Sure, I’d kill for that,” he said. And I believed him. But then he dodged my follow-up calls for weeks.

Finally, someone in his entourage called to say he would cooperate and that he was holed up at the Drake Hotel in New York under an assumed name. The name? The agent wasn’t sure. That was our problem. The photographer, being a resourceful sort, called the front desk and asked for “Mr. Raoul Duke,” Thompson’s Doonesberry alter ego. Contact! Thompson told the photographer that his “office hours” were from 2:00 to 4:00 — a.m! — and not to come back until then.

Using a fifth of Wild Turkey and the negotiating skills of a Grisham hero, the photographer finally got Thompson to pose for a startlingly closeup cover shot. Thompson hated the picture, and after the article came out he was quoted as saying he couldn’t say the word “Saturday” anymore without retching. We never had occasion to speak again.

In recent years, when I saw Thompson in photos or when I read his columns, it seemed to me he’d become something of a parody of himself. Running around stoned out of your mind is edgy stuff at 30; it loses its charm at 67. It also tends to lead to acts of anguished desperation, like shooting yourself and leaving your wife and son to find your shattered body. It was inevitable, I suppose, but sad, nonetheless. The man was a brilliant writer. He even wrote his own epitaph:

“… No explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. … There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. …”

R.I.P, Duke.

(Bruce van Wyngarden is editor of the Flyer.)

LOW-CAL JOURNALISM

After Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between vice president Dick Cheney and Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards, the instant pundits were split. The general consensus, except for a classic case of group-think on MSNBC, where Chris Mathews, Joe Scarborough, and Andrea Mitchell swallowed Cheney’s act hook, line, and stinker, was that the debate had been essentially a toss-up.

Most commentators said Cheney’s best moment was when he slammed Edwards for his attendance record in the Senate: “You’ve got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate,” Cheney growled. “Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”

What a knockout punch! Mathews, in particular, swooned. “Cheney went hunting and found a squirrel,” he smirked.

Too bad the entire paragraph was a lie.

Within minutes of Cheney’s making the charge, bloggers had posted photos of Cheney and Edwards together, and had googled around and found at least two other occasions when the two men were together at events, including when they shook hands before an edition of Meet the Press. MTP host Tim Russert confirmed the meeting on the Today the next morning.

But even more egregious was Cheney’s contention that on “most Tuesdays” he presided over the Senate. In fact, in his three and half years in office, Cheney has presided over the Senate exactly twice –the same number of times Edwards presided over the Senate in the vice president’s absence. Again, Cheney had offered up a whopper. Again, the blogoshere caught him dead to rights within hours.

The next morning, even Mathews admitted he’d been snookered by Cheney’s lies. By Wednesday evening, even the major networks were examining Cheney’s distortions and pointing them out to their viewers.

So why oh why would the Memphis Commercial Appeal run a column by Cal Thomas –written the day after the debate and which contained the known falsehoods –on Thursday?

From Thomas, obviously written in the immediate afterglow of the debate: “And then there was this devastating line from the Vice President: ‘In my capacity as Vice President, I am the president of the Senate, the presiding officer. I’m up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they’re in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.’

“This is the way real debaters deconstruct the credibility of their opponents,” Thomas added. “That’s the way debates are won,” Thomas crowed, “and Cheney won this one. Big time.”

Thomas went on to repeat Cheney’s false assertions about Edwards’ attendance record, which, over the course of his Senate career is an exemplary 95.6 percent. In other words, he’s missed 4.4 percent of Senate votes while in office.

Running Thomas’ column would have been understandable on Wednesday, the day after the debate. But to publish such absurd lies and flawed analysis 24 hours after the vice president’s charges had been widely debunked is irresponsible journalism.

Either the CA‘s editors were clueless about post-debate fact-checking, or they just didn’t care if falsehoods were published in the paper.

I can’t decide which is worse.

(Bruce VanWyngarden is the editor of the Flyer.)