As I was perusing today's installment of Gary Trudeau's magnificent tribute to the recently departed Hunter Stockton Thompson, I realized how all the major characters have betrayed their generally sixties left wing ideology to become sucessful achievers in the free enterprise system they once rebelled against.
(Just as many of their real-life contemporaries have found happiness in the embrace of competitive capitalism.)
Michael Doonesbury is the greatest achiever of them all. Founder of a dot com company and riding it from bubble to bust. His stockholders lost a lot of money, but Doonesbury is fixed for life.
But it was the senior citizen among them, Uncle Duke, who, in retrospect, consistently set a splendid capitalistic example for them all.
With the zeal and persistence of the great robber barons of old, and with a lofty disregard of the harm done by his own unhelpful habits, disdaining to analyze a consistent pattern of defects in an unending cycle of career changes, Uncle Duke keeps a going like the Energizer Bunny.
And it is Uncle Duke who was prototyped in Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".
I have always had a liking for Uncle Duke, but the current tribute to his original originator is perhaps his finest hour.
