Fear & Loathing?

Great article from The New Republic on the punishing

Originally uploaded by juffrouwjo

four-yearly journalistic ritual that is an election campaign. Perhaps this is why journalists are called ‘hacks’, because this beat is a long hack, an unbearable slog that breaks men, ruins relationships, skews career trajectories and emotionally rapes journalists who are pegged to it for the duration.

It’s enough to make you down tools. From a height.

Last week, Lizza, who was banned from the Obama plane in July, found his way back on and thought he had stumbled on a lost colony. “It felt like the Lord of the Flies in there,” he says. “The people who have been there for a long time have all of their little decorations and knickknacks all over the back of the plane. Everyone’s a little grumpy and territorial, and there’s this sense of people thrown together who have been with each other way too long. I got the sense that I was dropping in on a hostage-captor situation.”

Reminds me of the plane scene from Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, where candidate George McGovern’s ‘Zoo Plane’ was a flying media circus (for Hunter at least), with an open bar and no shortage of stimulants. There’s no mention of wholesale consumption of drugs, of course, in the TNR bit. Just trinkets, greying hair and failing senses of humour.

Maybe Robert Shortt will be relieved that The Bird is replacing him, ‘though it’s probably too late to get some proper Charlie on the plane.