Trump and the American Dream: Come Back Hunter S Thompson - Your Country Needs You!

Forty years ago, when I was a skinny broke hippy spending my days travelling around the world, living off a dollar a day, one of my great pleasures was finding Hunter S Thompson books in roadside bookstalls and looking forward to a few days of dipping in and out of one of the greatest writers in the English language, the originator of ‘gonzo journalism’, and inspiration for Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke.

Quite by chance, last weekend my eye caught a book in the corner of a charity shop – and there was Thompson’s collection of journalism articles ‘The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time’. I bought it (of course), and settled down with a cappuccino to re-read the stories, and in many ways, re-live my life from forty years previously.

The first two stories were ‘Fear and Loathing in the Bunker’ a review of President Richard Nixon’s previous five years in the White House, and ‘A Southern City with Northern Problems’, a look at the issue of race and power in Louisville, a supposedly liberal southern city which had managed its race issues in a way that it felt set a model for the rest of the country. Both are so current that they could have appeared in this morning’s newspapers.

A few quotes from the first article (published in the New York Times on 1st January 1974) will give the flavour of Thompson’s approach, which normally consisted of a three day drug-binge (acid by choice, anything else if that wasn’t available) and alcohol (lots and lots and lots of alcohol) followed by a single spew of stream of consciousness invective in which he railed against a mindless universe, human stupidity and the absolute venality of anyone who came the slightest bit close to even the smallest amount of power. And that was about the people he liked, or at least, didn’t intend to shoot immediately (for Thompson, that was much the same thing). For Richard Nixon, however, it got personal……

‘Nixon….was blessed with a mixture of arrogance and stupidity that caused him to blow the boilers almost immediately after taking command. By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the government, he was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mind-bending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both….but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long…..

‘If any of those six hundred fools who rode in the Charge of the Light Brigade had any doubts about what they were doing, they kept it to themselves. There is no room in crusades, especially at the command level, for people who ask ‘Why?’. Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan [a senior Nixon adviser, who has also recently supported the Trump candidacy] had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing. They were Good Soldiers, True Believers….and when the orders came down from above they did what had to be done: Execute.

‘Which is admirable in a queer kind of way…. Except that Sisyphus got mashed, the Light Brigade slaughtered, and Pat Buchanan will survive in the footnotes of history as a kind of half-mad Davy Crockett on the walls of Nixon’s Alamo – a martyr to the bitter end, to a ‘flawed’ cause and a narrow atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more to damage itself and the country in six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades.

‘When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon’s  five years of unrestrained power in the White House, it will show that he had the same effect on conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hell’s Angels had on hippies and flower power…. And the ultimate damage, on both fronts, will prove out to be just about equal.

‘Or maybe not – at least not on the scale of sheer numbers of people affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trip affected very few people directly, while the greedy, fascistic incompetence of Richard Nixon’s presidency will leave scars on the minds and lives of a whole generation – his supporters and political allies no less than his opponents

‘…..This is the horror of American politics today – not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted disgraced and even jailed – but that the only available alternatives are not much better: the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.

‘….This is not a cheerful prospect, for Mr Nixon or anyone else – but it would be a hell of a lot easier to cope with if we could pick up a glimmer of light at the end of this foul tunnel of a year that only mad dogs and milkmen can claim to have survived without serious brain damage.

‘Or maybe it’s just me. It is ten below zero outside and the snow hasn’t stopped for two days. The sun has apparently been sucked into orbit behind the comet Kohoutek. Is this really a new year? Are we bottoming out? Or are we into The Age of Fear?’.

Come back Hunter S Thompson – your country needs you!

Full article available here