What Is Gonzo Journalism?
Survival of the Funniest or They Kill the Klownz in AmeriKKK on Whine.
Before I get going with my first mixed media presentation here , I want to thank @Caitlin Johnstone for making me aware of this platform and strongly recommend her newsletter. I’m a blacklisted life scientist who has been shot for my writing and receive death threats regularly. I’ve been writing non-fiction with photos, and now videos, most of my life. My first essay, written in 1967 was entitled “Atoms For Peace”. Since 1999, I’ve been targeted for interdiction by a team of professional cyberterrorists who are feeding a gang of fetishistic cyber stalkers tons of misinformation about me and no, I never raped a child or fucked a dog, nor do I want to today. But, because there are gullible people in the world, these people have succeeded in getting me run off of every social media network except Facebook and you tube and they keep me blocked more than I can post at Facebook.
I’m hoping that @Substack will be different, since I’m in control of my audience. I already deleted the first two free subscription registrations because it was obviously these two infantile imbeciles.
From the Wikipedia:
Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire.[1] It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.
Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that concerns the reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism, which favors a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly-edited product favored by newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a piece is as important as the event or actual subject of the piece. Use of sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity is common.
Thompson, who was among the forefathers of the new journalism movement, said in the February 15, 1973, issue of Rolling Stone, "If I'd written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism."[2]
Gonzo is an Italian word meaning foolish and you have to be a bit of a fool to insert yourself into a news story involving violent people, like Thompson did for his book on The Hell’s Angels. Mass quantities of drugs and alcohol seem to give many great writers their strange courage.
Thompson wasn’t even my first role model. That was a different drunkard; Mike Royko, the muckraking Sun Times columnist who kept the Chicago democratic machine on it’s toes in the 60’s and 70’s and got hammered after work every day in the iconic Billy Goat Tavern in the basement of the building. I studied this book like I would if I was going to have to take a test on it, learning the down and dirty side of crony capitalism and machine politics, which all really boils down to “if you grease my palm, I’ll scratch your back”.
Fortunately, I never liked being drunk or the effects of any pills, am too manic for white powders and have too much respect for opium to abuse that, so those demons were never a factor for me, but I smoke way too much tobacco and weed and that’s catching up to me now. I also destroy a lot of keyboards, t-shirts and shorts with ashes and hot cherries falling on them.
Out front in my thinking about life in general are things said by Albert Einstein, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Eleanor Roosevelt. Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Farmer, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury were all huge influences on the way I look at things to write about them; the three words coming to mind are wonder, awe and skepticism, with a certain lighter hearted approach to the really deep conundrums, like the hot messes Vonnegut served up in Sirens of Titan with the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and Bokononism in Cat’s Cradle. I was blessed with attending a talk given by Ray Bradbury in 1992 he gave in Waukegan when I was staying in a campground in Lake County.
The writers inspiring the resistance to crony capitalism into taking their grievances to the streets in my life among them, like Jack Herer, Ben Masel, Steve Wessing, John Penley, Dana Beal, Aron Kay and AJ Weberman, all lived hand to mouth, relying on their own ingenuity to raise every penny they spent on political pursuits. Weed and LSD profits financed a fair bit of it for the hippies. Dana did time in Iowa transporting medical marijuana through there. Drugs certainly were a huge factor in the revenues of Real Things Artisans Cooperative supporting the American Cannabis Society in the 90’s, because my partners had a contract with the feds to distribute the Afghani hash were getting in payment for the stinger missiles they were giving to the Mujahideen they had stockpiled in Fort Knox, mainly because Prez Bob Kundert needed it to stay alive. I was just very pleasantly surprised when I went looking for this image to discover that his son has revived it and is now Prez Jeff.
This is where the Occupy Movement actually started, not in Zucotti Park, but in the Madison state house, where Ben Masel organized an occupation of the capitol rotunda and establishment of a free speech area in support of state workers. I spent a week with him camped out on the Madison City Hall plaza in the freezing cold during Desert Storm. Tobacco finally took him all the way down.
The boots on the ground people, rarely had patrons who flipped them more than a few hundred dollars at a time and had to self publish and distribute all of their media. Nobody I know has ever had anybody like George Soros, Sheldon Adelson or the Koch brothers walk up to me and hand me fifty thousand dollars to spend on printing signs, buttons, t-shirts and ball caps like somebody surely did for the failed insurrection, but those hundreds have come to me at critical moments numerous times.
To the best of my knowledge, the late William “Doubting” Thomas, who sat down in LaFayette Park 40 years ago on June 3, 1981 to lobby the government for nuclear disarmament, lived strictly on free will donations and his widow, Ellen, still does, carrying forward their anti-nuclear advocacy.
One revolutionary gonzo I admire very much for his courage, integrity and work ethic is Frederick Fratiello, AKA “Grateful Fred”, founder of the New World Rising eco-village building collective and published of the paper of that name, distributing it from a little old lady shopping cart he schlepped around the parking lot at Grateful Dead shows. We met somewhere between Alpine Valley and Buckeye Lake in 1989 and reconnected at Facebook some years ago. We share a lot of history in our comments on each other’s posts.
I wanted to go on a bit more about how the advent of cell phones and the Internet has changed the face of gonzo journalism and is threatening the “Evil Empire’s” narrative control over the hearts and minds of the media consuming, tax paying debt slaves providing the capital for the war toys industry and their codependent petrochemical and mining industries to kill us slowly with and sucker us into committing mass murder on little brown people in exotic places to make the ground safe for Halliburton, Siemens, Exxon and Monsanto to come in and rape , pillage and plunder the natural resources, but I’m getting an email size limit warning, so I’ll cut it off here. I’ll pick this up in the next edition, with more photos of old school gonzos and a discussion of the current gonzo coverage on the streets with BLM, in the woods with the water protectors and in the war zones of the Middle East and elsewhere.
Thanks for reading
Happy Day
Peace
Tommie Jayne