Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson
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That is an unacceptable failure for hardballers like Rove and Dick Cheney. On the undercard in Cleveland against John Edwards, Cheney came across as the cruel and sinister überboss of Halliburton. In his only honest moment during the entire debate, he vowed, “We have to make America the best place in the world to do business.”
Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought up to date in Florida that night—except this time the false prince turned back into a frog.
Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush—Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain—all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.
That is why George W. Bush is president of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November.
The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early and he had no response to “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the military-industrial complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day—especially a presidential election—is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major Election Days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.
Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.
That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public.
Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.
That is the nature of high-risk politics. Veni Vidi Vice, especially among Republicans. It’s like the ancient Bedouin saying, As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn.
Indeed, the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics.
I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional gambler, especially when I’m betting real money on the outcome. Contrary to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with 5 points as a recommended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about 46 percent, plus 5 points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court—which seemed to equal 51 percent. Nobody really believed that, but George W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.
It was the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany. Karl Rove is no stranger to Nazi strategy, if only because it worked, for a while, and it was sure as hell fun for Hitler. But not for long. He ran out of oil, the whole world hated him, and he liked to gobble pure crystal hiphetamine and stay awake for eight or nine days in a row with his maps & his bombers & his dope-addled general staff.
They all loved the whiff. It is the perfect drug for War—as long as you are winning—and Hitler thought he was King of the Hill forever. He had created a new master race, and every one of them worshipped him. The new Hitler Youth loved to march and sing songs in unison and dance naked at night for the generals. They were fanatics.
That was sixty-six years ago, far back in ancient history, and things are not much different today. We still love War.
George Bush certainly does. In four short years, he has turned our country from a prosperous nation at peace into a desperately indebted nation at war. But so what? He is the president of the United States and you’re not. Love it or leave it.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no man’s land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them.
Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
—Richard Nixon, Real Peace (1983)
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?
If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a “liberal” candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today—and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once proud, once loved and widely respected “American people”) don’t rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2.
Nixon hated running for president during football season, but he did it anyway. Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for—but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.
You bet Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a ginsot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.
I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day, and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite of what it says: “U.S. Transfers Sovereignty to Iraqi Interim ‘Government.’ “ Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election. It is a deliberate cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi people than we are about to stop killing them.
Your neighbor’s grandchildren will be fighting this stupid, greed-crazed Bush family “war” against the whole Islamic world for the rest of their lives, if John Kerry is not elected to be the new president of the United States in November.
The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government, but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. We are down to nut-cutting time, and millions of people are an
gry. They want a Regime Change.
Some people say that George Bush should be run down and sacrificed to the Rat gods. But not me. No, I say it would be a lot easier to just vote the bastard out of office on November 2.
Bulletin
KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT: DR. THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH “THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT”
“Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,” the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. “Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush,” Dr. Thompson warned. “He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November.
“I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago,” he said, “and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States.”
Which is true; I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart—which is more than even the president’s friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oilmongers. He hates music, football, and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush’s vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn’t. Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.
That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn, and I was trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president’s lawn.
We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon—which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.
That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.
__ __ __ __
Postscript:
Letter from HST to JSW
March 11, 1998
Hunter S. Thompson
Woody Creek
Dear Jann,
Please re-send the Playboy Interview fax I just received from you. Only one page of it came through, and the top of it is illegibile.
Also, what issue of Playboy is this from? I am about to do some business with Joe [Eszterhas] & I need to know what he’s saying about me in print.
Of course I’m curious. Just seeing you and & Joe mentioned in the same paragraph gives me an atavistic rush. My memory of those days is mainly of tremendous energy & talent & rare commitment running (almost) amok, but not quite. It was like being invited into a bonfire & finding out that fire is actually your friend. Ho ho . . .
But just how hot can you stand it, brother, before your love will crack?
That was the real question in those days, I think. Or maybe it was about how much money you were being paid. Or how much fun you were having. Who knows? Some people were fried to cinders, as I recall, while others used the heat to transmogrify themselves into heroes. (Which reminds me that you still owe me a vast amount of money—and you still refuse to even discuss payment for my recent politics memo.)
Anyway, my central memory of that time is that everything we were doing seemed to work. Or almost everything. What the hell? Buy the ticket, take the ride, eh? Like an amusement park, or the Circus-Circus casino: It depended on yr. personal definition of “acceptable loss.”
I know Joe considers his days at Rolling Stone to be an utter waste of time & talent, or maybe he just says that for his own vengeful reasons. Some people are too weird for their own good. But not me, Jann. I say thanx for the rush.
Yr. buddy, Hunter
Acknowledgments
It’s important to once again acknowledge the Rolling Stone staffers who were—quite truly—in the trenches with Jann Wenner when Hunter filed his copy on many a midnight and beyond.
Associate editor David Felton probably logged more Thompson hours than anyone else, beginning with “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,” continuing through much of the campaign trail and Watergate coverage, and the landmark two-parter on Muhammad Ali. Ditto associate editor Charles Perry, who manned the Mojo Wire and copyedited every HST word in the San Francisco years.
Managing editor John Walsh took the reins for “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” Hunter’s dream assignment. Managing editor Terry McDonell lured Hunter out of a prolonged absence from Rolling Stone to cover the sensational Roxanne Pulitzer divorce trial. Managing editor Bob Love led the dawn patrol for Hunter’s later pieces, most notably “Fear and Loathing in Elko.”
A special shout-out goes to Corey Seymour and Tobias Perse, Hunter’s aides-de-camp and hands-on assistants in the 1990s. Both were front and center for any number of HST antics, as well as the marathon run-up to “Polo Is My Life.”
David Rosenthal, editor in chief of Simon & Schuster for thirteen years, proffered contracts and cash advances that kept Hunter afloat during his less productive periods. He handled Hunter’s abuse as well as anyone, and set this anthology up at S&S.
Lynn Nesbit, Hunter’s literary agent for more than thirty years, was devoted to him and played an essential role in his relationship with Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone. She was very much a part of the inner circle that ran the HST train.
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* we’ve just rented a large mid-town office—a log building with huge windows
* Deleted at the insistence of Rolling Stone’s attorney.