Wednesday, August 31, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt ten)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

George Wallace is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy. What McGovern sensed in Florida, however—while Wallace was stomping him, along with all the others—was the possibility that Wallace appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel. The frustration was there, and it was easy enough to convert it—but what then? If Wallace had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate—as a Democrat or anything else—he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler.

McGovern, on the other hand, had put together a fantastic organization—but until he went into Wisconsin he had never tried to tap the kind of energy that seemed to be flowing, perhaps by default, to Wallace. He had given it some thought while campaigning in New Hampshire, but it was only after he beat Muskie in two blue-collar, hardhat wards in the middle of Manchester that he saw the possibility of a really mind-bending coalition: a weird mix of peace freaks and hard-hats, farmers and film stars, along with urban blacks, rural Chicanos, the “youth vote” . . . a coalition that could elect almost anybody.



Tuesday, August 30, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt nine)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

Sunday is not a good day for traveling in the South. Most public places are closed—especially the bars and taverns—in order that the denizens of this steamy, atavistic region will not be distracted from church. Sunday is the Lord’s day, and in the South he still has clout—or enough, at least, so that most folks won’t cross him in public. And those few who can’t make it to church will likely stay home by the fan, with iced tea, and worship him in their own way.

This explains why the cocktail lounge in the Atlanta airport is not open on Sunday night. The Lord wouldn’t dig it.



Monday, August 29, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt eight)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

George never mentioned it, and when I suggested to Gary Hart that the Senator might like to take the machine out for a quick test-ride and some photos for the national press, I got almost exactly the same reaction that Mankiewicz laid on me in Florida when I suggested that McGovern could pick up a million or so votes by inviting the wire-service photographers to come out and snap him lounging around on the beach with a can of beer in his hand and wearing my Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Looking back on it, I think that was the moment when my relationship with Mankiewicz turned sour. Twenty-four hours earlier I had showed up at his house in Washington with what John Prine calls “an illegal smile” on my face—and the morning after that visit he found himself sitting next to me on the plane to Florida and listening to some lunatic spiel about how this man should commit political suicide by irreparably identifying himself as the candidate of the Beachbums, Weirdos, and Boozers.



Sunday, August 28, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt seven)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible, and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey really is until you’ve followed him around for a while on the campaign trail. The double-standard realities of campaign journalism, however, make it difficult for even the best of the “straight/objective” reporters to write what they actually think and feel about a candidate.

Hubert Humphrey, for one, would go crazy with rage and attempt to strangle his press secretary if he ever saw in print what most reporters say about him during midnight conversations around barroom tables in all those Hiltons and Sheratons where the candidates make their headquarters when they swoop into places like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis.



Saturday, August 27, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt six)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

For the next two hours I was locked in a friendly, free-wheeling conversation with about six of my hosts who didn’t mind telling me they were there because George Wallace was the most important man in America. “This guy is the real thing,” one of them said. “I never cared anything about politics before, but Wallace ain’t the same as the others. He don’t sneak around the bush. He just comes right out and says it.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen Wallace in person. There were no seats in the hall; everybody was standing. The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert. Anybody who doubts the Wallace appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back… it was a flat-out fire & brimstone performance.



Friday, August 26, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt five)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

The Florida primary is over now. George Wallace stomped everybody, with 42 percent of the vote in a field of eleven. Ed Muskie, the erstwhile National Front-runner, finished a sick fourth, with only 9 percent… and then he went on all the TV networks to snarl about how this horrible thing would never have happened except that Wallace is a Beast and a Bigot.

Which is at least half true, but it doesn’t have much to do with why Muskie got beaten like a gong in Florida. The real reason is that The Man From Maine, who got the nod many months ago as the choice of the Democratic Party’s ruling establishment, is running one of the stupidest and most incompetent political campaigns since Tom Dewey took his dive and elected Truman in 1948.



Thursday, August 25, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt four)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

We are not a nation of truth-lovers. McGovern understands this, but he keeps on saying these terrible things anyway… and after watching him in New Hampshire for a while I found myself wondering—to a point that bordered now and then on quiet anguish—just what the hell it was about the man that left me politically numb, despite the fact that I agreed with everything he said. I spent about two weeks brooding on this, because I like McGovern—which still surprises me, because politicians, like journalists, are pretty hard people to like. The only other group I’ve ever dealt with who struck me as being essentially meaner than politicians are tight ends in pro football.



Wednesday, August 24, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt three)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

One of the favorite parlor games in Left/Liberal circles from Beverly Hills to Chevy Chase to the Upper East Side and Cambridge has been—for more than a year, now—a sort of guilty, half-public breast-beating whenever George McGovern’s name is mentioned. He has become the Willy Loman of the Left; he is liked, but not well-Liked, and his failure to make the big charismatic breakthrough has made him the despair of his friends. They can’t figure it out.



Tuesday, August 23, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt two)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

McCarthy’s gig was finished. He had knocked off the President and then strung himself out on a fantastic six-month campaign that had seen the murder of Martin Luther King, the murder of Bobby Kennedy, and finally a bloody assault on his own campaign workers by Mayor Daley’s police, who burst into McCarthy’s private convention headquarters at the Chicago Hilton and began breaking heads. At dawn on Friday morning, his campaign manager, a seasoned old pro named Blair Clark, was still pacing up and down Michigan Avenue in front of the Hilton in a state so close to hysteria that his friends were afraid to talk to him because every time he tried to say something his eyes would fill with tears and he would have to start pacing again.



Monday, August 22, 2016

the last book I ever read (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, excerpt one)

from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson:

Flug had gone far out of his way to help me with that research. We talked in the dreary cafeteria in the Old Senate Office Building where we sat down elbow to elbow with Senator Roman Hruska, the statesman from Nebraska, and various other heavies whose names I forget now.

We idled through the line with our trays and then took our plastic-wrapped tunafish sandwiches and coffee in Styrofoam cups over to a small formica table. Flug talked abut the problems he was having with the Gun Control Bill—trying to put it into some form that might possibly pass the Senate. I listened, glancing up now and then toward the food-bar, half-expecting to see somebody like Robert Kennedy pushing his tray through the line… until I suddenly remembered that Robert Kennedy was dead.



Friday, August 19, 2016

How A Career Ends: Olympic Bronze Medalist Patricia Adura-Miranda at Excelle Sports



"My mother passed away when I was 10 years old, very suddenly. She died of a brain aneurysm. And I think that the way that my brain tackled it was sort of, you know, assuming that I was going to die young, too. That was sort of the natural assumption, and so I got to thinking, Well, what is it that I want to do? What do I want to do with my short time here?"

Our Summer 2016 How A Career Ends series for the fine folks at Excelle Sports ends with the United States' very first Olympic medalist in women's wrestling, Patricia Adura-Miranda.

Thanks for reading.



Thursday, August 18, 2016

How A Career Ends: Two-time Olympic Bronze Medalist Kate "The Great" Schmidt at Excelle Sports



"When I was 13 I asked my parents for a javelin for Christmas. I mean, you have to feel some sympathy for them."

The totally awesome former world record holder and two-time bronze medalist Kate "The Great" Schmidt is the seventh interview in an eight-part How A Career Ends series for Excelle Sports.



Thursday, August 11, 2016

How A Career Ends: Olympic Gold Medalist Pat Spurgin Pitney at Excelle Sports



Shooting!!!

In 1984, at the age of 18, Pat Spurgin became the first Olympic gold medalist in the Women's 10-meter Air Rifle. By the time she retired from competitive shooting, she was an eight-time All-American at Murray State, where the shooting range is now named in her honor.

Pat Spurgin Pitney currently serves as the Budget Director for the State of Alaska.



Tuesday, August 9, 2016

How A Career Ends: Olympic Gold Medalist Luann Ryon at Excelle Sports



Archery!!!

Four-time national champion, and the last American woman to medal an Olympic medal in archery, Luann Ryon is featured in this fourth installment of How A Career Ends at Excelle Sports.



Friday, August 5, 2016

How A Career Ends: Olympic Gold Medalist Jennifer Chandler at Excelle Sports



Water, water everywhere . . .

Fellow Alabamian Jennifer Chandler, the last American woman to win Olympic gold in the springboard, takes us through her competitive diving days in this third installment of How A Career Ends interviews for Excelle Sports.



Monday, August 1, 2016

the last book I ever read (James Baldwin's Another Country, excerpt ten)

from Another Country by James Baldwin:

By and by, he was still. He rose, and went to the bathroom and washed his face, and then sat down at his work table. She put on a record by Mahalia Jackson, In the Upper Room, and sat at the window, her hands in her lap, looking out over the sparkling streets. Much, much later, while he was still working and she slept, she turned in her sleep, and she called his name. He paused, waiting, staring at her, but she did not move again, or speak again. He rose, and walked to the window. The rain had ceased, in the black-blue sky a few stars were scattered, and the wind roughly jostled the clouds along.