According to Bill Buckley, Hunter Thompson wasn't funny and couldn't write. Apparently the correct way to write is to dress up a thinly veiled version of yourself as an action hero, give him the name of a gay pirate and have him navigate 300 pages of blunt implausibilities to save the Queen of England-punctuating the plot along the way with the tweedy aphorisms of your favorite Yale professor.
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God, that's just funny, funny stuff. And directly on target. A bottle of my finest Andorian ale to Mr. Taibbi for this.
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Speaking of Buckley....
I remember being a stupid young fellow.
Not the usual kind of stupid young fellow who, by way of example, insists his girlfriend have sex with him while she's suffering from a migraine. No, I wasn't that sort of idiot.
I was the sort of idiot who'd carefully watch that talk show Buckley hosted on PBS for years and years and years that seemed to stretch back to the time of Charlemagne...if not before.
There he'd be, in his swivel chair (perhaps like the Bond villains the hero of his novels might face from time to time) mumbling and mumbling some more. The trick seemed to be to throw in as many references to things a properly educated lad should know as possible -- perhaps comparing your guest's comment on Latin America or cheese sandwiches to an obscure passage from Aquinas.
After a while, these piled on obscurities would form a sort of force barrier protecting Buckley from the land of useful discourse. He'd mumble a farewell and a recorded string quartet would take us away from the hallowed halls of subtle knowledge.
I believed, for a time, that I was learning something from all this. After a point, when it became clear that all I was learning was how to detect bullshit (a useful skill but there are more enjoyable ways to hone it) I moved on and became a little less stupid.
.d.