Sherry Chandler » 2005 » February » 23
at Silliman’s Blog:
I was never a big fan of Thompson’s writing. It struck me as too undisciplined, the wrong lesson to have taken from the work & life of William S. Burroughs, Thompson’s other obvious source of inspiration. Yet I felt that Thompson, more than any other single individual, was responsible for Jimmy Carter becoming president in 1976. Thompson was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone back when Rolling Stone still mattered. It was obvious that Thompson felt that all the other Democratic candidates were professional weasels, or worse. And yet here was this one-term Georgia governor who seemed to be the squarest human being on the face of the planet. That was the person who struck Thompson as an honest human being. Thompson’s reporting catapulted Carter into becoming something like the Howard Dean of his day in an era when the combination of “early capital” and cable news didn’t exist to overwhelm any outsider candidacy the instant the candidate made one mistake. What a weird model of Diogenes Thompson made.
This post was written by sherry
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