Fear and Loathing in America

by Hunter S. Thompson

  I guess we should deal with this on the phone, but in the meantime, for christ’s sakes disabuse yourself of the idea that a major publisher should have to ask a gang of hyenas for the privilege of watching their candidate in action. Fuck them. Without the press, nobody’s candidate would ever get beyond New Hampshire. And I’m all in favor of that; the primaries are a corruption of everything that might be possible in politics.

  Well … I seem to have gone out of control here, and, as always, it’s late. It’s always late when I write letters. I just read over what I’ve said in this one and it occurs to me that it doesn’t sound as Friendly Ho-Ho as I meant it to be. That’s a language problem. I’m trying to be nice, Jim … but it’s hard.

  Anyway, I’ll try to call sometime soon on the Violence focus. Or maybe you should call here. If it’s up to me, I’ll put it off as long as I can. Life is too pleasant here… and that, I suspect, is the hangup. But then you and every other editor would be on the breadline if all writers were happy and in good shape, right? So bear with me; it can’t last. I’ll be miserable soon, and I’ll write you a money-song. Ciao …

  Hunter

  TO LYNN NESBIT:

  Thompson’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, had proposed an article by him to Esquire magazine.

  July 15, 1968

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Lynn …

  Thanks for the Esq/NRA possibility. It came just as I was about to resign my NRA membership with a vicious letter. Actually, I just joined and I haven’t paid yet, so they’ve been dunning me. Between the NRA, Human Events and the Conservative Book Club, I’ve been taking a real beating in the mails. I thought I’d subscribe to all these things, as part of the AmDream research, but it’s driven me to a near-suicidal depression. These swine should be …well, ah … this may sound funny, but …yes …I think they should be … KILLED!

  Anyway, I like the idea of a chat with the NRA. I’m not sure what [Esquire managing editor Don] Erickson wants, but one aspect that interests me is what the NRA does with all that money. Dues are $5 a year, and with 900,000 members, that adds up … and all you get for your $5 is 12 issues of the American Rifleman, one of the dullest and least informative screeds in the history of printing. Members are also offered the opportunity to buy NRA tie-clips and Zippo lighters at retail-plus. I once bought a set of glasses from them at some brutally inflated price, and the NRA emblem flaked off the first time I put the glasses in hot water.

  Maybe a good angle would be something like “Why I Quit the NRA,” …by A. Gunn Freake. The thrust of the thing could be that the NRA is a hype, that they’re using their 900,000 members, rather than representing them. I own about a dozen guns, but as far as I’m concerned the NRA is blowing my gig. That waterhead president (Orth?) doesn’t speak for me. So, speaking as a badlands gun freak, I have to wonder what they’re doing with my $5. I don’t read their magazine, I don’t have access to “military ammo,” I don’t get weapons at a discount … all I get is a lot of stupid grumbling about maintaining an armed militia, or something like that. They send me form letters that I’m supposed to sign, or rewrite, and forward to my congressman. Fuck them. “My congressman” is a senile bag of pus and he agrees with the NRA, anyway.

  *The question is, “Who does the NRA really represent?”

  This leads to other twisted questions … like, who does Tom Dodd81 represent? I’m not sure what he’s pushing just now, but at one point he was trying to ban all mail-order gun sales. One of the facts of the gun business is that 99.9% of all guns bought by mail are foreign guns. Mail-order guns are bargains, they’re cheap. They have to be, or nobody would buy them sight-unseen with payment in advance. American-made guns are available in sporting goods stores, gunshops, drugstores, etc., and always at fair-trade prices. No discounts, no bargains. So the availability of cheap foreign guns cuts into the “buy American” market, and Connecticut is the capital of the U.S. commercial arms industry. The 1967 Gun Digest contains a comprehensive “directory of the arms trade.” Thirty-six companies are listed under the heading of “GUNS, U.S. made.” Eleven of these are in Conn., four are in Mass. (Smith & Wesson, Savage, Iver Johnson and Harrington & Richardson). The other seven (of the top 11) are in Conn. (Winchester, Sturm-Ruger, Remington, Mossberg, Marlin, High Standard and Colt).

  * —& how many of those 900,000 members really support the wild-eyed bull-shit that spews out of NRA hq.?

  The Digest has another heading for “GUNS, foreign.” Fifty-one companies are listed, and not one is in Conn. The only Mass. entry is Savage, which appears on both lists because the bulk of the guns sold by Savage (as “U.S. made”) are made in Europe. Winchester should also have appeared on the “foreign” list; all their rifles, since 1964, have been made in Japan. This has caused them such trouble in the marketplace that my well-used 1960 Winchester rifle is now worth more than I paid for it, new, eight years ago. The new Winchesters won’t sell.

  Christ, this is beginning to sound like Oil Shale. Why does the president of Rumble Oil agree with John Galbraith? Why does Tom Dodd, the senator for the gunpowder state, want to ban mail-order gun sales? How does the NRA feel about Dodd—who represents Winchester, Remington, Colt, etc.? Or does he? Bangor Punta, a huge cartel, controls Olin Mathiesen, which in turn owns Winchester-Western. Jesus … These swine should be killed.

  Somewhere in that factual outburst I lost my original point—which was, as I recall, that maybe the NRA is conning its own membership. Who really runs the NRA? What are their salaries? What are they doing for the people who chip in $5 a year?

  The answer to that last question, appearing in Esquire, might pique the interest of those people who finance the NRA by proxy, and without really giving a damn. The NRA’s big stick is its ability to flood the congressional mails with menacing letters, and pound various desks with a sign that says “900,000 Strong.” But how strong? Hell, one of those 900,000 is me—and as far as I’m concerned the NRA is a corrupt and devious lobby that doesn’t even understand my interests, much less represent them.

  When I say “me,” I’m speaking, very loosely, for A. Gunn Freake—a man who quit the NRA because he decided that it wasn’t what it claimed to be, and that its “spokesmen” were either dangerously stupid or consciously sold out—to somebody. There may or may not be a valid argument against nationwide gun registration, or even against guns. I’m not sure and I don’t really care, because I don’t think those are the issues. But I’ll admit it’s an interesting argument. My own position is hazy, mainly because I can’t make any sense of the “gun control” controversy. It sounds like a Nixon-Humphrey battle. I can’t believe, for instance, that Dodd and the NRA are really on opposite sides of the fence. Dodd is so corrupt that he makes Franklin Orth seem like [late Cuban revolutionary leader] Che Guevara; Dodd reminds me of that Dick Tracy character who was always surrounded by a horde of flies. I can believe Ted Kennedy’s (D.—Mass.) gun-control speeches, but I can’t believe Dodd’s. And everything Franklin Orth says reminds me of Roy Cohn’s bastard sister, who now runs a white-slave house in Silt, Colorado. I have documents to prove that.

  My real point, I guess, is that a frontal attack on the NRA won’t make the nut. They’re geared for frontal attacks; they wave the flag, sound the rape-warnings and quote the Constitution … which makes perfect sense in a nation where (according to the latest Gallup poll) 54% of the population thinks “looters in riots should be shot, rather than dealt with in some other manner.”

  Given the current national atmosphere, I don’t see much sense in mounting another reasoned, liberal and humanistic attack on the NRA. That’s playing on their terms. They’ve spent the past 50 years designing bear-traps for liberal journalists … and most of the public evidence suggests that they’ve done pretty well. They have put Dr. Pavlov’s theories82 to such good and massive use that the membership hears nothing but bells when the NRA is “attacked.” So maybe the way to go is not to attack them, but to chronicle the efforts of a gun-owning member to find out h
ow the fight is going. Consider the possibilities: A man claiming to be the president of the Woody Creek, Colo. Gun Club goes to Washington to find out how the NRA is doing in this time of anguish and dread possibility for all gun freaks … he asks where the battle-lines have formed, and how much the battle will cost … and who are the generals?

  Well … that sounds like a bad joke until you remember that humor first declines and then freezes as it approaches the “Conservative Pole.” There is absolutely no humor, for instance, in the Oil Business. I have been dealing, for months, with the walking rich dead. Their nerve-ends are rubber; they don’t understand why I smile when they tell me obvious, deliberate lies … at first I thought they were hyper-cool, but now I suspect they don’t even realize they’re lying.

  Anyway, the Oil croakers and the NRA footmen were all born under the same rock—by Jay Gould out of Amy Snopes83—so if you can convince Erickson to go for a sort of Open (or Simple-Minded/Devious) approach on an NRA piece, I think we could make something of it. I’m not naive enough to think they’d believe I was a worried cowhand from Woody Creek (the first thing these right-wing freaks do is check with whomever you claim to be writing for), but I think I might be able to convince them that I, as the owner of 12 weapons worth anywhere from $2500 to $3000 (disregarding the Riot Market, where prices are wildly inflated) … that I, a taxpayer (and landowner if Ballantine pays me), am personally concerned with the role of the NRA in the current “gun-law controversy.” I want to know if they’re getting the job done; and if so, How? And who’s getting the juice?

  … Hold on there, fella! What do you mean by JUICE?

  Nothing, nothing at all—that’s only a western-slope colloquialism; out there, you know, we’re all pretty nervous about water rights—“juice rights,” we call them. Yeah …

  They’d throw me out of the building unless Erickson could assure them that Esquire had indeed sent an authentic NRA member to Washington, to check on the hierarchy—the true-hearted president of the Woody Creek Gun Club, where a recent fast-fire shotgun competition featured 2′ × 3′ target-photos of J. Edgar Hoover. The official FBI target is a half-torso silhouette, and the WC group wanted to be as authentic as possible—so the obvious choice for the official FBI target was The Director, himself. That’s authenticity. (Photos will be available, pending return of signed releases from participants—not all of whom were happy to have been photographed in the act of firing at J. Edgar.)

  All of which brings us back to your question: Could I “get in to talk to people involved in this”? The answer is “Yes,” but I can’t guarantee what they’ll tell me. A hand-carried letter from Esquire would be a crucial tool, I think. It should be a letter to me, saying that Esquire wants an article from me on, say, “The Embattled NRA.” Orth and his people should have no warning; ideally I’d show up with the letter (wearing my Eddie Bauer trapshooter’s dress coat) on a Wednesday, just before lunch—which will put them in a position of having to cope with me very quickly, just as all the secretaries and flunkies are leaving for lunch. With a bit of luck, and the leverage of a letter from Esquire, I won’t have any trouble compelling some “spokesman” into a 2-hour drinking bout. The sudden appearance of a major publicity opening, just before lunch, will prevent any structured response and deprive them of any employment-agency, desk to chair interview-style advantage. People who left their imaginations in junior high school tend to ramble when they drink—and not all of them blow it. I ran into one fellow on the Oil Shale gig who was surly and sluggish all afternoon of the conference, but after two hours of gut-prodding in the Brown Palace Bar he was counter-punching like a man who’d just remembered what he really enjoyed doing.

  Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, as I crested the great hump … but I doubt it … and in any case I think I’ll finish this letter tomorrow. Two acid freaks are scheduled to arrive in a few hours, to build a new deck/porch on the house. They tore the old one off yesterday. And—for an unexpected footnote—I suspect the creation of this porch will end my preoccupation with the physical end of life in the Rockies. I am very conscious of eras, and all I need to finish this one off is a quick action on the either/or purchase of this property … which seems, for the moment, at least as important as publishing another book. I suspect, now and then, that I’m off on a bad and atavistic track, but in the hot sun of these Woody Creek afternoons, stone sober and reading the newspapers, watching the TV news, offering a beer to a local reporter who drives out from Aspen to tell me the sheriff says he’s going to “get” me because of what I said about the local magistrate, or wailing flat-out on the motorcycle past the District Attorney’s horse-barns and going too fast on the gravel road to hear what he’s screaming at me … yeah, that’s life in Woody Creek, and I’m beginning to wonder if there’s room enough here for me and all the others who want to Get Out, Off, Away … that aging version of the teen-age hippy’s dream of The Peaceful Valley, man & nature in harmony … right, and Aspen merchants forming vigilante committees to shave the head of any long-haired freak who looks transient and “without visible means of support.”

  I think I’ll offer to trade the Boston University library all my “papers” in exchange for a windowless apartment in the sub-cellar of the library building. That would finish the circle, all the way back to my basement hole on Perry Street in New York City ten years ago,84 before I understood that I was living on the verge of the Fourth Reich.

  It occurred to me the other night that I should probably concentrate all my current efforts on The Rum Diary, because I doubt I’ll recognize any part of it if I wait another year. As a hopelessly American writer, I’d be foolish to waste that moment of high drama and terrible understanding, that “high white note,”—as Mr. Fitzgerald heard it, that has to die on the way up, because there’s no way it can come down. It’s a note that, after a certain point in time and action, you never hear again … which is why nearly all good American novels are written by … WATERHEADS!

  Christ, it’s 5:40 a.m. and I just heard the dogs barking so I went outside and, goddamn, there was a huge white truck backing into my driveway with about 100 twenty-foot strips of pure California redwood—a whole truckload of wood that I had to help unload. “You’re up early,” the man said. “Fuck early,” I told him, “I’m still working and what in hell are you doing in my driveway at this hour? I should blow your head off with my special hair-trigger .44 Magnum that I have here on my hip, as you see. …” But I let him off when he said the boss told him to be at the sawmill by sun-up. Jesus—Starkweather85 was right; this poor fool makes $70 a week, he’s 50 years old, he works from dawn to dusk six days a week, and he’s going to vote for Nixon or maybe even Wallace because he’s worried about LAW AND ORDER. Holy shit!

  Which reminds me that I told a friend of mine named Lee Berry to contact you. He’s in Spain, I think, tracking echoes he can’t explain. He’s free-lancing and selling nothing except huge, full-page $20 features to the Albany Times-Union. Berry won’t be worth a penny to you for quite a while, if ever, and I told him most agents really detest broke writers … but I gave him your address. No harm in it, eh? I pay for my own paper, and Ballantine owes me five times as much money as I owe Random House. Every time I try to work myself into one of those good old-fashioned adrenaline fits—like I did in the old days, when I actually wrote things—I remember the paperback royalties and I know they’re going to fuck me when the Big Split comes. There’s no question about this: they’re going to do me, for sure. I’ve been filing my nerve-ends for months, getting braced for it. They say it’s coming in August, the Big Grip, when they finally come out of their hole and snarl at me, “Well, now you know—we screwed you to the grill of an Edsel and sold you, as an icon on wheels, to the Arab Commandos. Don’t worry, they’ll pay you well … for your services. …”

  Of course … like all those Hell’s Angels foreign rights we sold. Jesus, what a ball I had with that money … well, why kick that goat again? It blows my mood, which was pretty
good until now. But it tones me up for the coming Rape of August. That’s a good opener: “Well, you see, Hunter, the reason we didn’t sell even $10 worth of foreign rights—regardless of those query letters—was because Marvin Watson86 said he was going to close the 4th-class PO’s and we knew you lived in Woody Creek—so we figured What the Hell, you’d never get the check anyhow, so … we told them to jam it. Besides, we know how you feel about Nazis, Slants, Wops, Frogs, Micks, Spics, Poles and Rubes of every other description … We know how you feel: Buy American, Sell American, and keep a stiff upper lip when your sloth and stupidity catch up with you … why not?”

  Yessir, the countdown is on us. I can feel it. A snow-balling rage that has long since shadowed reason, an iceberg of loose ends—a mountain of floating hair, moving south toward the Sea Lanes. …

  Hunter

  TO JIM SILBERMAN, RANDOM HOUSE: July 19, 1968

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Jim …

  Thanks for the $424.62. You’re two-up now, so I guess it’s my move. I can’t bring myself to read my last letter, but I recall the gist of it, and this is the way I’ve refined that hazy thinking since I wrote … to wit:

  The massive “American Dream” filing system that I started building on my return from NY is a bummer. The brute weight of it all has paralyzed my head, flooded my drawers and caused me to initiate a vast shelf-building program … which is not so crucial as the vicious depression that I’ve pulled down on myself by using this awful focus. There is absolutely no humor in the Death of the American Dream. I can’t get out from under it; we are caving in, I’m sure of it, and it’s happening so fast that only the daily papers can really keep up. There is no good news, none. All these vicious publications I subscribed to on the “RH expense tab” have caused me to chew my fingers down to the main knuckle. Human Events, Business Week, the Conservative Book Club … Jesus! I saw these people at the ’64 GOP convention in SF and my uncontrollable reaction caused my final split with The National Observer. I think the ’68 conventions may be the last of their kind … the continued existence of the Electoral College will mean the 1972 conventions will be held at the bottom of the sea. You can quote me on that.