Bye bye, Gonzo

Going out with a bang. Goodbye, Gonzo. We won't see your like again. The world has moved on, become a meaner, harder place, a world where gonzo merely gets you killed rather than famous and would never be published anyhow by the tame press poodles of our land who would fear offending someone with prose not politically approved by the Ministry of Truth (or Pat Robertson, same difference). A world where the wide open spaces of the mind have been compressed and tamed as the huddled masses of America cringe in fear, fear of strangers, fear of their darling Tammy or cute Curtis falling down and getting hurt, fear of everything as they bundle themselves into six-ton tanks to be "safe", safe I say! There is no place for the unsafe, the outrageous, the daring in this new America of poodles and cowards and law and order. The most anybody can muster is the occasional breath of outrage, swiftly co-opted for political purposes by the craven and the cynical.

Your time was over, and you knew it, and you checked out. Perhaps that was all you could do, the one, last, gonzo thing left in the decaying body that was a 67 year old man in the decaying body that is America, where the roads are crumbling and the bridges are falling down and the vaunted military disintegrating in the sands of Iraq and the jobs moving to China as the country swiftly becomes Mexico North with a super-rich elite and hordes of poorly-educated peasants working on the elite's plantations being the only two classes allowed. It must have broke your heart, seeing what America had become over the course of your lifespan, going from a nation of adventurers and can-do optimism to the current state of cynicism and can't-do pessimism. It is perhaps fitting that your last act will be giving the finger (literally) to the nation...

-- Badtux the Reminiscing Penguin