We don’t have enough righteously angry people here on the internets. Oh, sure, we’ve got a surplus of screaming ravers and foaming polemicists, but real Swiftian anger is a bridge too far for most of us, most of the time. It’s damned hard work, and you wouldn’t believe the pay.
I’ve been trying and failing to adequately explain why Bats Left, Throws Right was one of the first blogs I checked every morning, so I’ll outsource to Roy Edroso:
As Lance Mannion said today, “Weird this internet world we’ve built. Didn’t know Doghouse but feel like we’ve lost a old colleague with an office just down the hall.” After I got over the shock of hearing Doghouse Riley, aka Douglas Case of Indiana, was dead, I suffered an aftershock to realize that I’d not only never met him, but had only read his blog and corresponded with him a few times; his last email was an appeal to help some other blogger who was down on his luck. Yet I felt as if I knew him, because his presence as a writer was so vivid.
It helped that he wrote long. He could be quick and slashing, as he often was in the comments section here. But usually when he got into a subject, he’d stretch out comfortable and give, along with needed details and logical abutments, a sense that he was talking to you, rather than composing some polemic that would wow the wide world. And even if his talk led, as often, to some scorched earth, his was in the main a friendly voice, one you could listen to awhile….
Scott, at World O’Crap:
He was a master of the mot juste, able to poleaxe either a national brand punditaster* or a comment thread troll with a single deft blow, as though he’d spent his entire career working on a particularly urbane kill floor. He was a sly purveyor of praeteritio and a puncturer of apodictic certainty. And above all else, he was a gentleman, who didn’t assume that history began when he was born, who always referred to s.z. as “our hostess,” and who never walked past a question-beggar without dropping a fistful of whoop-ass in his or her tin cup.
Ave atque vale, Mr. Case. I imagine you in the afterlife, exchanging rude hand signals with General Stuck, while Tunch sits in your lap purring loudly.
A selection of some of my favorite Doghouse clips, finishing with the deeply-incorrect-under-the-circumstances one-liner that I want on my tombstone, if only I believed in tombstones:
…The GOP hasn’t “moved from the mainstream”. It’s gained more power. The “center of power” hasn’t gone much of anywhere. It may have followed Goldwater West and South, thanks to the evil genius of Nixon, but it’s not exactly a seismic shift from Joe McCarthy to Jesse Helms, from John Wayne to Glenn Beck. When th’ hell was it Chuck Hagel’s party? When was it Nelson Rockefeller’s, for that matter? They called Truman a commie, for chrissakes….
Okay, sure: the Republican party has become increasingly dilatory and obtuse in the halls of power, but that’s not a change of the last four years. Had Republicans had the power in 1981 they would have dispensed with all the Reagan sainthood bullshit and just rammed through their radical agenda, instead of getting Democrats to agree to do it for them. And there’s no question this has been facilitated, both by a venal and cowardly Democratic party, and a venal and cowardly Press. But, really, enough of this stuff. I’m not gonna make common cause with Democrats, or rueful Republican centrists, who suddenly notice what the GOP has become, and expect a medal for saying so. The time to speak up was thirty years ago, when this stuff was just as plain, and was being covered by a transparent rewrite of unpleasant history, and a clear retrenchment on individual rights. Y’know, when Reaganism was the Wave of the Future the Republican platform had no more chance of actually governing than it does today. David Stockman was just as big a liar as Paul Ryan. I’m going to settle for having been right about this shit all along, and hope we don’t kill too many innocents when it all blows up. Don’t offer to help me shovel now. You’ve already done enough.
…[T]here is a large, relatively well-remunerated employee type in this country known as “sales personnel” whose salaries are largely contingent on how much money they bring in for their bosses. There’s your comparison to what has happened to [baseball] player salaries over the past thirty, forty, or sixty years. Media revenues exploded. The Reserve Clause was overturned. Cable television gained, with an assist from the Rehnquist Court, the same sort of anti-trust protection that Major League Baseball has had for over a century, so that a cable system has, say, a billion fucking dollars to throw at the Dodgers. In 1946 the average player’s salary ($5000, 1946 dollars) was 0.2% of the value of his franchise. In 2011 it is 0.5%. That’s not astonishing exponential growth. It’s the power of collective bargaining, aided by a changing legal status (and blocked by collusion for most of the 80s) to gain a more equitable distribution of revenues which depend entirely on the players. Nobody goes to the ballpark to see an owner. Except maybe Slate writers. Well, and Reason.
Worst Video Game Ever. Figures.
• Run for governor of Texas, or move to an island and found your own colony of Jebus-mazed explosion fanciers?
• Fakey Texas drawl, or Cagney impression?
• Run for President, or do something for your country for once?…
HERE’S the thing about D’ines’h D’Souza: he found himself a nice little sinecure in America defending the Raj. That comes with a price, of course. Not in swallowing the understandable anger and disgust the Anglo-American Man’s Burden must engender in its erstwhile subjects; that sort of thing seems to go down easy with second or fifth-generation mandarins. It’s just that, inevitably, someone with D’Souza’s rh’torical gifts has got to figure (and rightly so) that These People Are Dumb As Stumps, and go looking for further fields of plunder.
Lacking Hitchens’ gifts, D’inesh had to settle for life as a Toolbelt to the neocons, and pan for gold among the evangelical dross, jettisoning his Catholicism somewhere along the way. Sorta. (Again, fortunately for D’Souza, in those circles one can now be a best-selling Christian apologist without taking sides on the Reformation, which has apparently been relegated to the intellectual dung pit alongside the Trinitarian debate, the question of translation, and the George W. Bush administration….
“It can’t be stressed enough: the modern garbage disposal is not powerful enough for human remains.”
liberal
OT: on right-wingers not empathizing those who live paycheck to paycheck:
Just moved to a new area, made a small career change. Haven’t sold house yet. Big pain in the a$$ to find a rental in the new place (since looking for a single family house). Finally found one today.
I’m blessed to be able to throw some money at problems. And the point that Jesus, can you imagine how much more awful this would be if we were really tight for money seems pretty obvious, even if we’re not poor and most people we know aren’t poor.
The people who don’t understand this aren’t isolated from teh poors, they’re just stupid.
Jerzy Russian
@liberal: One only needs to ride the bus or trolley, or go to the thrift store to see what living paycheck to paycheck is like. I am lucky to have a job I love, and I never complain about the pay, since I know many people make much less.
Chris
In its early years, with Lincoln? That’s about it, though. The party sold its soul in the Tilden-Hayes compromise in 1877, and it’s mostly sucked ever since. But it used to have a reform-minded minority that occasionally managed to challenge the assholes’ grip on the party. Lately, though, that minority’s completely disappeared.
Felonius Monk
R.I.P. Doghouse. You will indeed be missed by this reader.
ShadeTail
He was very good at pithy phrasing. Not so good at analysis, but sometimes how you say something is more important than what you’re saying.
burnspbesq
God’s recruiting quite a lineup for the op-ed page of His local rag. Molly Ivins, Steve Gilliard, and this guy.
Dead Ernest
In a sincerely most heartfelt lament; I do miss him terribly. And I will suffer and grieve his absence quite actively for some time to come.
With no rancor ShadeTail, I really don’t understand what you found lacking in his analysis. He responded passionately (and with wit and tooth and nail). Perhaps I too fail at some sort of analytic precision but so be it.
The man did ‘speak for me.’
I’m sad to have lost him.
BGinCHI
I already posted on this as a born and raised and recovering Hoosier, but fuckity fuck I loved Doghouse.
Fuck the Indy Star and the Quayle and Marilyn families.
Fuck Mitch Daniels.
Fuck people who don’t respect people on bicycles.
Fuck Tony Bennett and Rick Scott.
And yes, Fuck Kentucky. Excluded folks you know who you are. Especially Wendell Berry and My Morning Jacket and Louisville music scene types.
erlking
Always enjoyed doghouse’s posts–anywhere–whether I agreed or not. The man had style. I’ll miss him.
Spaghetti Lee
@BGinCHI:
You mean they’re excluded or fuck them extra hard?
Spaghetti Lee
What a writer he was. What a way with words. He was so great at mixing despair with absurdity with straight-up facts and presenting it as humor. I honestly don’t think it’s a stretch to compare him to Mencken. I really don’t. They had the same vicious wit.
joel hanes
@burnspbesq:
Now that made me smile.
Don’t forget that “Jon Swift” has also shuffled off thiss mortal coil and joined the blogroll eternal.
handsmile
@burnspbesq:
One of your more estimable qualities is your repeated invocation of Steve Gilliard when the occasion warrants (as it certainly does here). A fearless (and close to peerless) pioneer of Left Blogistan. The premature stilling of his inspirational voice remains a great loss.
johnny aquitard
I’m sad. I’m going to miss Doghouse Riley, for that’s how I knew him, and like always when missing someone who had a bigger impact than you ever knew, it’s going to take a while to feel the emptiness, the lack of being there.
I realized I probably read DR’s posts at least once a month. And they were worth reading.
Loviatar
Doghouse said it better than I ever could.
This is why you’ll never get me to trust John Cole and his fellow travelers. The most you’ll get from me is ill disguised tolerance and loathing.
BruinKid
Oh dang, RIP.
Batocchio
Thanks, Anne Laurie. Great tribute. I linked your piece and some others.
danielx
As with so many others, I’ll miss D. Riley’s commentary immensely. It was regular as clockwork when some new political/financial scandal aired here in the great state of Indiana (where the unspeakable are governed by the insufferable): check Bats Left/Throws Right for a couple of days thereafter and be reduced to tears of laughter. I’m still grinning over his description of Mitch Daniels as the Bantam Menace. Even his labels were glorious; a personal fave being Midwestern States Governed by Surly Megalomaniacs with Napoleonic Complexes – hard to tell who, that particular arena being a fairly target-rich environment. And you just had to love a guy whose blog’s theme photos include Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.
So here’s to you, Mr. Case. We need more like you.
Gregory
He was essential in documenting the malfeasance of Republican governence in Indiana and the dishonesty of the once-grand old party in general. His voice will be missed.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
His post many years ago about his old cat Hoover passing remains one of the greatest tributes to a pet ever written.
Wow, I had no idea he was gone.
p.a.
He will be missed.
gogol's wife
I did not know this blogger, but may he rest in peace. But I was startled last night while watching The Big Sleep, when Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe comes into a house and a young hottie asks him what his name is, and he says, “Doghouse Riley.” I assume that’s where the nym came from — I never knew that.
MazeDancer
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
As an admirer of both Doghouse Riley’s skills and cats, had to go look up the post. Thanks for mentioning.
It is, indeed, a beautiful tribute to all his cats, and a lovely read for all pet – and word – lovers. A not uncommon combination here at BJ. Think that many will appreciate:
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2005/05/hoover.html
joan grim
One of my favorites was Doghouse’s take down of David Brooks on Romney’s global biddness experience:
http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2011/08/with-luck-capitalists-will-innovate-new.html
Doghouse could sniff out the stench of these fools like no other. I will miss him.
Mr. Longform
As a fellow oxymoronic “Indiana liberal” I have long loved Doghouse’s hilarious wisdom. I often wished he had a bigger forum, and anticipated him doing something like Charlie Pierce at Esquire. God, I wish he were able to have his say on our former Indiana head of schools and his latest corruptions.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
That made me tear up and smile all at the same time. Even on my best day my writing wasn’t worthy of being Doghouse Riley’s toilet paper. He will be missed.
StringOnAStick
He was a master of long form and short form. I loved his long form work just so I could sit back and immerse myself in the velvet of his style, but for short form, his comments at Roy’s place put me on the floor more than once. RIP, sir.