James Wolcott puts it aptly in I’m a great admirer of Louis Menand’s take on things — usually. This morning I’m not so crazy Well, Schwartz must still be having nightmares. I remember him as a teenage freak who used
\nbecome indivisible.” (The stimulus is Ann Coulter’s comment<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>
\nin re: Gannon\/Guckert: “Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that
\nold Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.”) Meantime, Bob Herbert reminds us
\nthis morning in his column: “It’s Called Torture.”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A><\/P>
\n
\nabout his lukewarm take on Hunter S.
\nThompson<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> <\/FONT>in the New Yorker, but I can
\nlive with it. Not so with Stephen Schwartz’s hatchet job<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> in The Weekly
\nStandard, which is something else entirely. It concludes: Thompson “was flattered to be described
\nas chronicler of ‘the death of the American dream.’ In reality, he described a nightmare from which
\nAmerica awoke years ago.” <\/P>
\n
\nto come into the City Lights Bookstore in 1966 and ’67, spouting Surrealist doctrine and
\ndeclaring himself the San Francisco incarnation of a Surrealist movement that didn’t exist. His
\nfreakishness consisted of a three-piece suit, not some hippie garb, the intense babble of an
\nacademic proselyte and a self-regard bordering on the autistic. (He eventually converted to
\nSufism.) He was wrong then. He’s wrong now. And my bet is he’ll always be wrong.<\/P>
\n