To follow in the foot steps of the honorable essayists and comic pundits Mark Twain, Hunter Thompson, Jon Stewart, Saint Stephen Colbert and Lewis Black, the Cold News will report on the counter-intuitive nature of Americans' love of contradiction, i.e., the less we see of Kim Whatshername, the more there is of her. I don't know...maybe it's existential thinking...or not.
When I took my one and only journalism course at Georgia State University, the associate professor warned us sternly about “going gonzo.” Aspirations were crushed immediately—“there would not be any more rogue journalists” allowed to exist in the industrial media. Really?
Hunter S. Thompson or Raul Duke or Dr. Gonzo, whichever you prefer, was paid to punctuate—the screeds of insight were free. They were high velocity blasts at the Evil One, Richard Nixon, and his War on Drugs, which Dr. Gonzo took personally.
Mark Twain went gonzo over 19th century Jingoism. Widely regarded as America's best spokesperson when he wrote about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn's life on the Mississippi. But he fell out of grace with the Hearst empire over the Cuban and Philippine wars.
Jon Stewart took on both Fox News and George W. Bush. Stewart made the entire propaganda machine squeal like a war pig.
When Walter Cronkite declared the Viet Nam war over, it was all over. When Saint Stephen Colbert told the Washington press corp and W to their faces that the Bush presidency wasn't at all “like sailing on the Titanic, it was more like flying on the Hindenburg,” it was pretty much over for Iraq.
So, as Twain said, “There is no defense against laughter.” Really!
