1930 - 2005

Gene Scott AND Hunter Thompson both gone in the same week -- two of the Grand Grotesques of our age... they leave a hole in our consciences.

During Sunday sermons, Scott admonished his congregation not to seek God's blessing from a priest, the Pope or a place of worship. "And you're sure not going to get it from a motel with Jimmy Swaggart," he cracks.

"I'm not selling forty-pound Bibles, or water from Jordan, or 4,000 plastic crosses made by the Japanese and sold to Arabs. I don't send out 'healing cloths' or tear up my shirt. I say: what's what I've done worth? Whatever the meal I've fed you is worth, pay up. I'm not trying to save anybody. I think if you reject Christianity, you should do it intelligently."

I watched him off and on for around 30 years ... Pyramid inches, Atlantis, UFO's, scribblings on the clear plastic board in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic.. all of it. Maps and diagrams of the Hittites going this way and the Moobie-woobies going that way ... biblical geography.

And when he said, so many years ago: "There are a lot of preachers out there that think the first thing you get when you bring Jesus into your heart is a blow-dryer."

Well, there it was.

Enough has been said this week about Hunter Thompson, the most ludicrous of which has been to compare him to the story-fabricating chickenshit-wannabees -- Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. To think that is to miss the whole point, something journalists who don't know they're writing total bullshit do with regularity.

Hunter Thompson never pretended to or aspired to be anyone but who he was. To compare him with craven story-schemers without the balls to stand up for their own form of bizarre truth is to compare Thomas Jefferson with George W Bush.

Neither one -- Thompson or Gene Scott -- backed off an inch from what he believed was true nor what believed was the Right Thing To Do.

If today's crop of columnists thinks any of us thought to confuse Thompson's TRUTHS with FACTS, they're even dumber than they appear.

To say, today, for example, that George Bush is a reptile in disguise is TRUE whether or not it's a FACT. Get the difference?

We'll miss both of them.

And for those who didn't know the Reverend Dr. Scott (Ph.D from Stanford -- same as Condoleeza Rice, but Dr.Scott was a hell of lot more intelligent, even if he never actually wore high black spike heel boots), tapes of his shows still run on late night local TV stations.