‘Hey, Rube’

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

When I was a cub reporter at the Associated Press, stationed in the bowels of the pre-renovation Idaho Capitol, circa 2003, we had a CRT TV bolted to a wall in the office, à la prison rec room. On the TV that night, I saw George W. Bush standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. 

He said: “Mission accomplished,” ostensibly declaring victory in the “War on Terror” that began under such ludicrous and mendacious auspices with the “shock-and-awe” bombing of Iraq as a proxy target for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on our biggest buildings of banking, finance and military-industrial might. 

One of my coworkers, the late-great AP Idaho Bureau reporter Chuck Oxley, swiveled in his squeaky chair toward me on that day and asked, “Whose mission?” 

It was an honest newsman’s question — devoid of partisan animus or editorializing. I was 22-going-on-23, and Chuck was in his early 40s. He died in a car crash in 2009 at the age of 47. Meanwhile, he was one of the finest journalists that Idaho has ever had, and I was lucky to learn at his elbow. (He was also the first person to tell me “journalism is the first draft of history” in earnest.)

His question, “Whose mission?” has haunted my understanding of everything that has happened in this shitheap of a century, which I’ve had the dubious opportunity to experience almost entirely as a working reporter.

I have not altogether enjoyed that experience, nor always been as good a reporter as Chuck — he was among the tail-end members of a news business that held objectivity as a lodestone. I learned a lot from him, and also from my many other mentors — all of whom are or were better reporters than me.

Hunter S. Thompson is one of those — sort of — and he was keenly aware of the answer begging after Chuck’s question.

If you’ve sat at the bar with Reader Publisher Ben Olson and me for more than a few sessions, you’ll have heard of the time we drove through the night from Sandpoint to L.A. to meet HST at what turned out to be his second-to-last book signing. It was for Hey, Rube — his last (and mostly mediocre) offering, which was a collection of essays he’d written for ESPN on the subject of “sport.” It was his last book because he shot himself in February 2005. 

That’s a whole other story, and it doesn’t bear repeating. TL;DR: We didn’t meet him, but did receive a salutary “Fuck you!” shouted by the great man to the crowd gathered at the steps up the backend of Book Soup on West Sunset Boulevard.

What’s important is that any passing fan of Thompson knows he applied the notion of “sport” to every avenue of human endeavor. Especially politics, and the twain often did meet.

I re-read his “author’s note” to Hey, Rube the other day, and it struck me as it always does as a time capsule of Cassandra-like prescience — the kind of canary-in-a-coal mine insight that journalists work so hard to cultivate, but which no one ever seems to listen to.

Buy your own copy and read the whole thing; but, I’ll quote a bit for you for free: On “rubes,” Thompson wrote that they are defined as: “Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Day traders in Portland, fools who buy diamonds from gypsies and anyone over the age of nine in this country who still believes in his heart that all cops are honest and would never lie in a courtroom.

“These people are everywhere,” he wrote. “They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day.”

Thompson went on to pontificate on P.T. Barnum — the bullshitter-in-chief of U.S. history, unsurpassed until the present occupant of the White House — and connected his impulse to bamboozlement with the then-imminent reelection of George W. Bush to his second term in 2004. 

“How long, O lord, how long?” he wrote. “This blizzard of shame is getting a little old, isn’t it? Just how long do we have to fall before the voters catch on?”

Then he went right for the jugular: “Indeed. How many times can a man be robbed — on the same street, by the same people — before they call him a Rube?”

Every person who ever cast a vote for Donald J. Trump must, if they hope to retain whatever intellectual and moral integrity they have left after even considering such an intellectually and morally bankrupt act, ask themselves that question. 

I suspect that an honest answer would reveal “whose mission” they’ve been serving and the rubes they’ve been to do so. As HST wrote, it’s getting a little old.