Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

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

Posted by: BadTux / 8/20/2005 11:21:00 AM

Comments:

Don't scare me like that. I thought Gonzo of the muppets was dead and would never chase chickens around no more!
# posted by georg : 20/8/05 11:53 AM

Amen Brother!

"There was a definite satisfaction in knowing that, even if we lost, whoever beat us would never get rid of the scars, It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise until the next election."

HST, Great Shark Hunt
# posted by Anonymous : 20/8/05 5:30 PM

Good work, BT. Some don't make it through the pain.
# posted by The Heretik : 20/8/05 7:59 PM

Honor Roll

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Liberated Iraqis

Children celebrate liberation of parents
More pics of children celebrating
Liberated baby
Liberated women and children
More liberation, yessiree
More to follow, after I finish cursing SOB chickenhawks and get my breath back...

"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

-- Plato

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