The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved (1970)
liamk.org
liamk.org
Firstly, the Kentucky Derby is this weekend.
Secondly, Hunter S. Thompson was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame last week:
http://jat.uky.edu/ky-journalism-hall-of-fame.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/hun...
The inspiration? A recent article questioned the accuracy of some the story (certainly parts are exaggerated). The article's author, a fan of HST, believed that many placenames had likely been changed. And from that, 'who knows what else'. When I found the address for the hotel mentioned, the story seemed more plausible (rightly or wrongly) and more tangible to the Derby of today. I felt these details were important context and that their inclusion could be, as you suggest, a significantly different experience. But, and I do hope this is the case, perhaps their presence could result in the reader/user being more likely to believe the author.
I decided sidebars, inline/side footnotes, endnotes (even in printed products) and tooltips are too distracting. The least distracting seemed to be hyperlinks in a somewhat subdued but still accessible style. (Having them hidden until interaction--like in the focus modes of some text-editors--was tempting but I wanted to avoid hover states.) Ideas from anyone on less intrusive ways of including asides are appreciated!
So I wanted to give context but, as TVTropes and Wikipedia demonstrate, links can lead a reader away from the primary text. Knowing this, I decided to go ahead and create a flawed experience and intentional demonstration...
This was the first article to be called 'Gonzo'. The word was coined after its publication and so it represents the beginning of a style, widely imitated, that HST would stick with for much of his career. If this is a foundational text for the genre, what characteristics make it 'gonzo'? I guess one of the main characteristics is that rather than give a detailed play-by-play of the horserace, HST instead gives details about the spectators and his own misadventures (resulting in a frank admission of unprofessionalism). These details are specific: rather than say he had a beer, its a Colt45 malt beer, just as a suspect might overcompensate with details in an interrogation with police. And he goes on to namecheck company after company (after Ian Fleming but before Tao Lin). I wondered: what would it look like if HST were drunk at the Kentucky Derby today? His namecheckings and frustrations might be expressed as at-replies on Twitter. This Gonzo post might be lost in the millions of blogs. This struck me as funny (tragic?). To allude to the odditiy of seeing a written work designed for another era and its mediums be tied and fragmented in hypertext, I linked 'Hertz' to @hertz (kinda absurd, but a fairly common practice) as well as a few others like that. It does seem harder to take the words seriously as a whole when there are basic (maybe ironic?) links.
So I had hoped to provide context and I still think much of it is useful, but based on design limitations surrendered to the idea that this was desecrating an experience many are used to. I ultimately found it incredibly amusing to picture HST crafting hyperlinks in some bloated Soviet CMS to link to a YouTube video of teenagers signing as perhaps the HST of today is currently doing.
And was once jailed for rape in Louisville.
"I went out there and sat for 21 days, 14 hours a day, waiting to shoot a tiger that had killed 117 villagers in the surrounding countryside."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1...
[1]http://s3.amazonaws.com/eob_texts-production/texts/22/129780...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Hells-Angels-Strange-Terrible-Saga/dp/...
Letters -> Journalism -> Fiction
Largely due to his inability to focus on long works due to his (hilariously) reckless lifestyle. He was brilliant in small short pieces. I learned this having read nearly all of his work over the last 5 years. I recommend his collection of letters, published across a 3 book series, which he preserved over the years from being teenager in the 1950s to becoming a famous journalist in the late 60s.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Proud-Highway-Desperate-Gentleman/...
For example one of his letters that went viral recently, written while he was 20:
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/04/hunter-s-t...
Also highly recommended — "The Great Shark Hunt", a collection of his pieces through the 60s and 70s. "Hell's Angels" is marvelous, "Fear and Loathing” is probably his best-known, but nothing quite covers the range of HST's work like this book.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Shark-Hunt-Strange/dp/074325...
I don't know much about marriage patters on Southern states in the 70's, but I find it amazing that Jews, Chinese, Africans etc. manage to mostly avoid race-mixing, but also avoid the opposite extreme of literal in-breeding.
What is it about White people that, unlike every single other ethnicity, who produce rich, vibrant cultures when left to their own devices, White people turn into crazy inbred rednecks? I mean, I've never read a similar article about close-knit Jewish communities in Brooklyn, or African immigrant communities. Somehow those people manage to retain a distinctive culture and lifestyle (and even some of the conservative values that the author describes), without becoming the caricature the author describes.
EDIT: this post was a parody of anti-White sentiment such as the part of the article that I quoted. I don't actually think White people are special in the way I described. What is unique is the ridicule to which White culture and White communities are subject by the mainstream media.
I don't know how many of you here have South or South East Asian parents, especially those who are first generation immigrants. I live in Canada (in Toronto!), so I get to talk to fellow immigrants about this all the time. It's pretty much accepted that many of our parents are racist. I have a Tamil friend who will only date other Tamils because of her parents. My Korean friends know that their parents will disapprove of them dating non-Koreans. My Chinese friend caused a stir in her family when she dated an African.
A lot of these parents will not have a problem with other ethnicities or whatever. They're not going to call anyone a nigger, or a gwielo, or a towelhead or whatever. They're not going to avoid talking to someone of a different skin color. They'll happily go out and be real and true friends of whoever. But they'll want their children to 'keep the tradition' or whatever.
This is a real thing. And it is a real racism. Whether or not we think its an acceptable thing is one thing. But if we let the Korean immigrants get away with it, then we can't get too upset at when the 'white people' do it.
Exactly the same qualities are described in very different terms, e.g. a tight knit community which upholds their traditions and values in the face of modernity, vs inbred, ignorant bigots.
The main difference between my viewpoint and others who make similar arguments, is that I'm not saying this is an actual contradiction. There are many differences in context which mean that the two cannot be directly compared. However, there is what I would call a discrepancy. The author of this piece never made a logical argument, that what is good for White communities isn't good for others. He simply painted a picture, which many people might find compelling. If I can expose this discrepancy, people might find these narratives less compelling.
Hunter S Thompson's narrative IS compelling, because that racism was and is still rampant in the United States.
1. (Sociology) the belief that races have distinctive cultural characteristics determined by hereditary factors and that this endows some races with an intrinsic superiority over others
If I know another high school is equal or better to my alma mater, but prefer my son go to my old stomping ground, is that wrong?
If I prefer my son date someone from our geographical region, with similar cultural upbringing, is that wrong?
Not wrong, that just sounds nostalgic.
If I prefer my son date someone from our geographical region, with similar cultural upbringing, is that wrong?
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose you're of "Race A" and your son is dating a person of "Race B" from your geographical region, with similar cultural upbringing (perhaps she was adopted, perhaps her family moved abroad when she was a baby)?
Details don't matter - the point is that she's exactly the same culturally, religiously, on all other axes that matter, except that she's of a different ethnic group, "Race B", compared to the majority which is "Race A".
I'd say, if you don't mind that scenario, then you're not a racist. If you do mind that, then you are a racist. Just trying to factor out race/ethnicity and culture to make sure that one is not being used as a proxy for the other.
Most "racism" is a problem with culture and politics, not with skin color, which is not racism.
This statement so hilariously misses the point of the "token black friend" comment that it almost looks like parody.
As soon as his whining started about how horribly "White culture" (whatever the hell that is) is treated in America, we knew what we were dealing with.
Please don't post, or respond to, this kind of off-topic flamebait on HN.
And my subsequent posts clarified my viewpoint, and weren't written in inflammatory language. It's not my fault that some people immediately associate the use of the term "White" with a crazy Stormfront posting neo-Nazi. How else am I supposed to refer to the subject matter? Using White in a negative context seems to be fine.
If a lot of people think that using terms like "White culture" makes you a neo-Nazi, then that precisely confirms that the viewpoint I was parodying in my first post is alive and well.
The discourse is fragile. This kind of thing harms it. Whether it's arson or just pyrotechnics doesn't much matter.
Please don't do it again.
A more direct version would have gone something like "Imagine if the author had portrayed Jews, Chinese or Africans living in the US using the same insulting caricatures, or conflated their relative ethnic homogeneity with literal inbreeding..."
If you would prefer the latter style of presentation, I will try and avoid satire/parody as a stylistic device.
HN's rules aren't about propriety—they're about trying to stave off lameness. HN is an experiment in trying to remain interesting, so anything whose effects, compounded over time, make the site less interesting counts as bad.
It took me a long time to figure this out in my own posts. I hate dreary language, so I'd try to make comments that were interesting rather than lukewarm. I slowly learned that, no matter how "interesting" they seemed to me when I wrote them, provocation that leads to noise only lowers the quality of the thread. We have to avoid that here. Unfortunately, the cost of that is a certain blandness—but the alternative is so much worse.
We're not demanding that people behave themselves for convention's sake—that would be tedious and lead to a backlash. Rather, it's an optimization problem: given this system called HN, what will make it more interesting and less lame over time? Whatever the answer is, it doesn't have to do with the quality of individual comments but with their systemic effects.
The spirit in which we're asking people to work on this is not a finger-wagging one. It's more like giving a hard problem to a team.
Inbreeding exists in many cultures. It's just that we're familiar with our own cultural referents (American in this case), whereas we're not as familiar with the sub-populations of other nations or ethnic groups that might be known for it.
For example, there's a large city in Saudi Arabia called Dammam where first-cousin marriages are unusually common for reasons which have to do with tribal history [1]. It's quite possible that people in other parts of Saudi Arabia make jokes or critiques of people from that city, but they would be lost on anyone who hasn't studied the subject.
1. http://www.as.wvu.edu/~kgarbutt/QuantGen/Gen535_2_2004/Inbre...
As for complaining about how poorly white culture and communities are treated by the mainstream media, get back to me when the comment pages of most news sites are no longer awash with the toxic rantings of racist idiots.
I don't know which "mainstream media" you mean, but a lot of mainstream media I read are awash with the toxic rantings of PC idiots.
I find that it's useful to take 'potentially' racist screeds and see if they would still sound racist if you mixed up the groups being criticized.
In this case, yes, it still sounds racist.
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08...