Mike Hollihan or Michael Roy Hollihan, as he normally signed himself, has passed. And that means that two other sobriquets adopted by the former freelance journalist and blog-meister have gone with him. One was “Mr. Mike,” as in “Mr. Mike’s Rumpus Room of Science,” the most enduring of his two blogs; the other, which for obvious reasons, first got my attention, was “Half-Bakered,” as in “halfbakered.blogspot.com.”
This last-named and first-launched venture — Hollihan’s most famous or notorious effort — had been his calling card to the newsreaders and political junkies of the Mid-South when he began it in 2002, intending it to be corrective to what he saw as the adversaries of his own homegrown libertarian-conservative-populist political consciousness. He began that blog at a time when Tennessee was in a permanently convulsive condition over the prospect of a potential state income tax, and he meant to do what he could to head one off.
Several journalists offended him with their coverage of the issue, since they — “we,” I should say because he settled on me as chief offender, hence the “honor” of my name in the title of his blog — insisted on referring to the matter as “tax reform” and took seriously the efforts of then Republican Governor Don Sundquist and various, mainly Democratic legislators to devise a fair-minded, less regressive alternative to the ever-rising state sales tax. This was at a time when Tennessee was having grievous difficulties paying its due bills, not to mention funding major programs like education and healthcare.
Hollihan saw us all as conspirators, liberal pointy-heads out to steal the public’s money, and his polemical style was as unkind to us as he could make it. I will forgo repeating any of the epithets he used on me. “The crone” was how he referred to the estimable lady who was then writing a competitive column for The Commercial Appeal. He depicted a colleague of mine as having developed a permanent brown ring around his nose from nuzzling into the good graces of the establishment. And for reasons I never understood, he reserved some of his viler invectives for rabidly right-wing talk show host Mike Fleming, whom you would have thought he should see as a lodge brother.
Hollihan was, in a sense, beyond ideology, though it is fair to say he tilted Republican.
His saving grace was that he tried to function also as an all-purpose media critic, and he had a good eye for that circus, able to divine the derelictions and failings and foolishness of everybody in the public weal, save himself.
Perversely enough, we got to be friends of a sort with a real degree of mutual respect. And I almost took offense when — with an apologetic grace note to me — he announced, in 2011, that he would no longer call his then intermittently appearing blog “Half-Bakered” but instead would designate it as “Mr. Mike’s Rumpus Room of Science.”
For several seasons, Hollihan did some newswriting for the Main Street Journal, a local periodical run by youthful entrepreneur Jonathan Lindberg.
And he nursed a whole host of physical problems, which eventually, it would seem, wore him down. Hollihan was a loner, basically, but he belonged to an unofficial fraternity of board game enthusiasts, and his recent passing, which went virtually unnoticed among members of the local media and political tribes, was duly observed with a special wake put on by the frequenters of the Board to Beers bar on Poplar Avenue.
Hollihan’s last moment as a blog crusader, this time on behalf of the MAGA movement, occurred last November when, after a several-years’ absence, he lit up the Mr. Mike’s Rumpus Room space with six posts in the wake of the presidential election, all examining possibilities that recounts might still enable a reversal of the election’s outcome. The last one, on November 12th, was entitled “Don’t Give Up Hope … Yet.” He was still flailing away.