Thursday, September 08, 2005

Hell is . . .

Excellent piece on Hunter S. Thompson at Godspy.

1 comment:

Jim Berrettini said...

Dancing Ox,

It's hard to know how to respond to an argument of the form, "I haven't read X, and I don't really intend to. But I really think critic Y missed the boat when discussing X." If you're completely uninterested in reading Hunter Thompson, if Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas just isn't your thing, there's not much sense in going through the essay.

Frankly, much of your criticism is oblique: how does the article "segment grace and the redemptive power of Christ"? What does that even mean? Nor is your assertion that Griffith holds that "All authority is right subject to rebellion; any military endeavor is wrong" comprehensible. Did we read the same article?

Griffith seems clearly to write from a Christian POV. Is there any reason to question his good faith? You vacillate between accusing him of being a naif and accusing him of being a crafty closet secularist. His comparisons to Dante and Augustine may have been apt or not; surely they deserve to be treated more seriously than to merely dismiss them as "a smattering of Christian references, but barely so."

To find the value in an argument, one must be willing to engage it.

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