I actually met Hunter Thompson on a plane. I was a flight attendant in first class and he was there. The man was such a mess that he couldn’t discern what was the flush button and what was the call button. I had to save the man from the first class lav. As we had a passenger manifest and I had also enjoyed his Rolling Stone article I knew it was him. I asked him, “Are you okay Mr Thompson” and was met with “DOCTOR Thompson”.
He drew a picture of me on a napkin and signed it. What I ever did with it is a mystery. I’m just not a collector of signatures and he just gave me the napkin cuz I rescued him from the toilet I guess.
All of them were, the exceptions being Stevie Wonder and Fagen&Becker. I don't think any other of the "superstar" figures in 60s/70s pop was born after 1945. Maybe Mick Taylor, whom I wouldn't class as iconic.
New journalism was an interesting complement to the mainstream, but the problem was that a whole generation decided it should replace all other forms. New journalism only works when it has the mainstream to contrast against. Without that, it quickly becomes self-parody.
I'd also argue Hemingway was the original "New journalist" ...
If you read his published correspondence, he was actually a pretty thoughtful guy. I thought Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Curse of Lono were entertaining reads, but his later essays in the 1980s were just the angry lashing out of someone who had misread the tea leaves and had no insights into the appeal of Reagan - and so nothing to contribute to the national conversation, making him irrelevant. I doubt there was anything he hated more than being irrelevant ...
In my life, have met many a strange or odd person, what made Hunter S. Thompson different from them was he could write. It is said, that one should write something worth reading or live a life worth writing about, Hunter S., did both, a rare and exceptional combination.
Hunter Thompson was right on target when identifying and skewering the absurdity inherent in many aspects of American life at the end of the 1950s and through much of the 1960s. By the 1970s, with the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, the stakes suddenly became far more serious. The absurdity was no longer something to laugh about. Hunter Thomson didn't change. The country did.
Fun little tidbit, recently, at the La Jolla Playhouse, I watched a musical called The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S Thompson Musical. I went in not knowing what to expect. It was fantastic. And showed with great attention to detail his rise and fall.
"Hell's Angels established Thompson’s public persona, but if you read it (as I did) after first consuming his later work, it seems cautious by comparison. In the early pages, the author works hard to establish his credentials as a respectable journalist—offering up statistics, quotes from government reports, and paragraphs filled with names and facts. But even at this early stage, Thompson must have grasped that his readers wanted something more. So as the book progresses, it gets weirder and weirder."
It was during the research for this book that he came up with the name Raoul Duke and Thompson even inserted it into Hell's Angels. On the publicity tour, he began acting out in ways that were strange to his friends--wearing loud clothes, being obnoxious, etc. Over the next few years, he would increasingly lean into this Duke persona before becoming trapped by it in the late 70s.
Never thought about this before. Was he the first pop culture character to adopt a hyper-real persona? Hip-hop artists all do it now. Jay-Z/Hov. Kanye/Yeze. Kendrick/Kung Fu Kenny. Eminem/Slim Shady. I can go on. Did HST invent this?
Even in the era before newspapers could properly reproduce photos, news media always loved big personalities. Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde.
I think the film era kicked it into high gear. Mae West. Errol Flynn, John Wayne.
That is an interesting question. He certainly wasn't the first to have an alter ego but he perhaps pushed it to a greater extreme than anyone before him. Thompson tended to build upon the innovations of others and radically expand them.
Hm.. wheres our hst for today? Drowning in the bloated sea of online writing, no doubt.
Maybe somebody should write something good and *not* put it on the ol interwebs. Make everyone buy the book. Some of the kids these days might really dig that(or so some recent article i read seemed to suggest).
Thats a million dollar idea right there, if someone can pull it off. Write something really good *and* make people work to get it?(i cant believe im calling buying a book "work", but such is the world)
Ofc, i hear getting a book published is a pretty stupid business these days.. so maybe somebodies gonna need to start a new publishing house.
Idk, could be done. Somebody needs to come up with *something* different, thats for sure
first you have to get more people to actually keep reading books. A problem that predated the Internet, at least in the US. It's a country full of people whose acquaintance with longform creative nonfiction began and ended with Hunter S. Thompson.
Really, people. The now-departed Charles Bowden is at least as good as Hunter Thompson. Bowden also had, oh, twenty times the work ethic. (Probably an underestimate.)
I bet most of you have never even heard his name. Gonzo Journalism fans might consider starting with Murder City, or Down By The River.
I was editing and writing in the early '70s, and was initially impressed with Thompson, although there were much better examples of the New Journalism found in the VOICE, Esquire and New York Magazine that inspired more than HT. His writing could be brilliant, but when he became too much a part of the story his work became more entertainment than journalism, more huckstering than any other writer of his generation. Thompson became too enamored of Thompson and in the process lost his way as a journalist.
The slide from HST's early correspondence in the 1960s to the mid-1990s Better Than Sex is pretty drastic. In the 1960s, Hunter's letters to friends, colleagues, and editors--not written as professional pieces for publication--sometimes go on for pages, and they speak for the times more deeply than almost anyone else in that era. Writing for the sheer reward of communication, with a preternatural feel for the Zeitgeist and a finely crafted sense of style.
Good to be reminded about Ralph Steadman, I met him at his house once playing for a gig for the Victims Of Torture charity. He was pretty drunk by the end and showed us his ink blot symphony, a musical
Score with his trademark splashes of ink across the staves. After considering it a while, he began conducting the score to the music in his head. These kind of people are what keeps the world interesting, perplexing....alive!
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Ted. The 1960s still hold a great fascination for me, and while I don’t want to be under illusions about it, I still believe it held a promise that, had we gone down further the road with it, would’ve resulted in a different country than what we have now. There’s no question that we could have had different problems emerge, but they may have been less intractable than the ones we now have.
once the best minds of the generation and tens of millions of Americans were preemptively disenfranchised by criminalization for smoking weed and using psychedelics, the Establishment housed and defused any threat of looming political challenge to its entrenchment. Some say that was a process begun with the assassination of JFK. But the practical ramifications of the drug laws are what sealed the deal.
Criminalization also made the rise of Dope Dealer Culture inevitable, with its lucrative parallel economy. Dope Dealer Culture is not a challenge to inertial hypercapitalist materialism and militarism. It's a celebration of it.
I've seen that, and on those terms, it becomes easier to understand why so many from that generation ended up shifting to the right and, in some cases, the extreme right.
If the biggest complaint among many in that generation was that their parents were authoritarian and indifferent to them, it is undeniable that some of them have turned out to be just like their parents, and in some cases, worse. Did the road to Reagan run, at least in part, through Yasgur's farm? That Max Yasgur himself was more liberal than many of them who eventually reached his age, and older, is telling as it paved the way to Trump.
What I feel, though, is the promise that got vanquished. The most dedicated of that movement were committed to social justice, to challenging the existing capitalist dynamic, to expanding our moral and social imaginations. But America is too big, too reactionary, too backward, too in love with finding those to kick around, for that promise to have taken hold. But that promise was a sign that such imagination was, and still is, possible.
ah, what a mess that era was, politically. I don't blame "America"; anything anyone can say about America is true, in some way or another.
I understand the mix of noble but terribly naive and confused intentions and horridly cynical practice that accounted for the revival and escalation of the War on Drugs, with its inadvertent--yet quite explicitly official--ascription of tens of millions of youthful Americans to Criminal status, ordaining a society-wide fracture largely along generational lines that was previously unknown in human history. I notice the reactionary hangover that accounted for Dixiecrats shifting their substantial Congressional and electoral clout to the Republicans after their regional regime of white supremacist apartheid collapsed. I've become aware of the complacent patronage politics of the 1970s supermajority of Congressional Democrats. I realize how Reagan was well-positioned in 1980 to take advantage of the split between that Congress and President Carter, leaving the Democrats powerful yet rudderless. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, the interregnum pick of the Dems in 1976, who was too introverted and isolated to effectively galvanize the popular support required to turn his promises of idealistic reform into Presidential achievement, ultimately undone by bad breaks, blunders, missteps, and reversals in both domestic and foreign policy.
I also get the mix of callow naivete and baneful Marcusean incoherence that marked the superficial and performative (albeit quite militant) radical Left politics of the era. Opposing the Status Quo of Institutional Power ("the Establishment") is easy; successfully bidding to prevail politically is a much heavier lift. Actually bringing a visionary new agenda to fruition requires adult competence at governance as well as idealism and incorruptibility. I don't want to indulge in counterfactuals, but in that regard the Assassinations left an absence of leadership that was not satisfactorily filled. The toppling of Nixon was not followed up by a groundswell of Boomers uniting in a quest to clean both Houses and inaugurate a new order of the ages. We were all just kids.
It could have been worse. We could have flocked en masse to the red banner of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and plunged the country into civil war in the name of Revolution. Speaking of Marcusean incoherence.
The 1970s was a great party. But a resurgence of reaction was in the cards, and the strategists of the New Right had studied the institutions of democratic political success--from coalition politics to manipulation and propaganda--well enough to elevate Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Whereas Democratic Party liberalism had ossified. And it was certainly much more amenable to collaborating with Reagan's shiny happy prosperity gospel than summoning the sobriety and foresight required to follow Jimmy Carter's soft-spoken wisdom on the advisability of shifting away from the full-spectrum dominance of the petroleum industry over the American--and global--economy.
When it comes to political campaign strategy at the national level, the Democrats have always been timid and temperamentally conservative. At least in my lifetime. The Baby Boomers carried a lot of weight in the 1970s and 1980s--but only as a voting demographic. It isn't as if there were any Democratic Party leaders with the gravitas, dynamism, and integrity required to chart a new course. The news media pigeonholed Jerry Brown as Governor Moonbeam early on, and the Democratic Party Establishment only ever wanted him as a fund-raiser, a loyalist mouthpiece. Democrat powerbrokers were much more comfortable with their selected Boomer Proteges, like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, inside the corridors of Beltway power, the Friends of Roger Stone were burrowing their way into the woodwork. The Cold War against the Soviet Union remained the top foreign policy priority and deficit-financed military expenditures fueled the Reagan economy, even though the Russians and Eastern Bloc nations were quietly imploding from the contradictions of their own ideological rigidity and corruption, with a clandestine profit economy in diverted and smuggled goods that eventually approached 25% of their economy by the 1980s.
That's my take on those decades, anyway. With the advantage of abundant hindsight. Very few of those observations were apparent to me in the moment. At the time, the Gatekeeper Media wasn't even putting most of those topics on the table for discussion--and when they did, the uh "guardrails" were typically as tight as a cattle chute.
It's been said (by whoever) that "the Americans can be counted on to do the right thing--after they have tried everything else." I'd like to think that's true. But it's too early to tell, because we're still in the process of trying everything else.
Sadly, I couldn’t agree more. When you look at the full history of the U.S., this is nothing truly new. The drug war wound up being yet another gambit to marginalize a swatch of the population, with marijuana being the focus of the “combat” as it was the symbolic drug supreme of the counterculture. I came of age in the ‘80s and served in the Navy, and vividly remember the anti-drug (and viciously homophobic, though that’s another story altogether) hysterics of the military, with its moralistic dread-mongering enforced by senior personnel, a fair number of whom had the more agreeable, establishment addition of alcohol, twinned with a corporate culture that enacted mandatory drug testing policies schemed up by a not-inconsiderable number of coke-addled executives swimming in the profit margins of the corporate raidings and downsizings of the day.
America has always hankered for some “other” to marginalize and kick around in some form. That’s why, in looking at this moment, I don’t buy the fascism arguments - it supposes that we’ve been this pure, innocent country all along that has had Trump thrust upon us. If you look at the full sweep of the scene, our history has mostly been illiberal and undemocratic to huge swathes of the populace that aren’t white and/or conformist. No American on the right needed to read Mein Kampf to get an idea of how to leverage self-pitying, provincial loathing of people or things they didn’t understand into policy-making; it was the Nazis who looked to Jim Crow as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws. The unwritten story of a lot of immigrants has been how to position themselves as white-proximate, and it’s so easy to forget that Italians and other southern Europeans were once not considered white. I see the same process happening now with Hispanics and South Asians. They now seem to be the agreeable, acceptable “others” that the GOP can handle, so long as they don’t have “funny” accents, and on cue, reliably spout extremist gibberish about immigrants (the irony of the pot calling the kettle black is completely lost here).
America’s real problem is that it has no political imagination for anything other than shitting on some designated other - not content to keep at it with Black people, it’s constantly sought out other “others.” The targets du jour are now immigrants (legal or illegal - they can’t tell the difference, and all the proof for the former is to be dismissed), liberals, and trans people. Tomorrow, it’ll be someone else.
Was it Hunter S. Thompson who said along those lines, “today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon”?
But here’s nothing unique about the US in that respect. It’s more like a common tendency in human groups. Whenever societies, systems, governments, institutions run into obstacles or failures, scapegoating has very often been the preferred “remedy.” It’s often the first resort: purge the impurities by driving them all into one victim or victim class, and then do them in. This happens so often that in some societies, scapegoat and sacrifice rituals get incorporated into social organization as a preventive measure.
Once you start looking, you find evidence of the popularity of scapegoating and scapegoat sacrifice all over the place: read Frazer’s ethnographic historiography The Golden Bough. Or novels like Lord Of The Flies, Darkness At Noon, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Watch what happens to a manager if a sports team is losing to much to suit the owners. Read Rene Girard. Studying and reflecting on that phenomenon was his specialty. Scapegoat sacrifice is a palliative ritual purging that appeals to the mute, hidden Shadow of human insecurities.
In November 1974 HST was invited to a "Major Speakers" gig at Duke. I guess he had an agent and the agent booked him into it. The Duke nerds who invited him knew nothing about the man, so they couldn't imagine that he would 1) repeatedly kick the dashboard of the poor student assigned to to pick him up at the airport (didn't like Steely Dan); 2) insist the poor student stop at one of our wonderful state liquor stores and score him a bottle of bourbon; 3) hole up in his Holiday Inn room with said bottle, keeping a very stoned, increasingly pissed Page Auditorium crowd waiting for nearly 2 hours; 4) finally show up, only to answer crowd-sourced written Q&A; 4) respond to a question about "Rockefellers and cannibalism" by throwing a full Solo Cup of booze toward the rafters - soaking some fine Duke proscenium work; 5) be hustled off-stage and 6) end the evening sitting around a dry water-feature behind Page with this Duke Chronicle reporter (yeah, me) and a few others, passing bottles and bongs until well past 2 am. I missed my deadline. HST went from Durham straight to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight for RS. He got too messed up and missed the fight entirely, turning in a crap piece Wenner published anyway. The whole thing made me happy I'd run across "Hells Angels" and "Las Vegas" and the campaign stuff earlier, when he still had it.
I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this. I supported Carter in 1976 based on Hunter’s Rolling Stone piece, and later had the opportunity to discuss Hunter with President Carter. You’re recapturing my youth!
I actually met Hunter Thompson on a plane. I was a flight attendant in first class and he was there. The man was such a mess that he couldn’t discern what was the flush button and what was the call button. I had to save the man from the first class lav. As we had a passenger manifest and I had also enjoyed his Rolling Stone article I knew it was him. I asked him, “Are you okay Mr Thompson” and was met with “DOCTOR Thompson”.
He drew a picture of me on a napkin and signed it. What I ever did with it is a mystery. I’m just not a collector of signatures and he just gave me the napkin cuz I rescued him from the toilet I guess.
You should have kept it!!! It would be worth a first class flight to anywhere!
Ending reminds me of how many of the iconic figures of the 1960s - early 70's were actually Silent Generation folks. Worth exploring sometime.
All of them were, the exceptions being Stevie Wonder and Fagen&Becker. I don't think any other of the "superstar" figures in 60s/70s pop was born after 1945. Maybe Mick Taylor, whom I wouldn't class as iconic.
Bowie and Freddie Mercury, but that's all I can conjure
You're probably right. But I think of them and of Elton John, who is probably a Boomer, as being "second generation iconic," if that makes any sense.
Absolutely, the second wave that came after the first of "Rock" performers (Dylan, Beatles, Stones, etc)
New journalism was an interesting complement to the mainstream, but the problem was that a whole generation decided it should replace all other forms. New journalism only works when it has the mainstream to contrast against. Without that, it quickly becomes self-parody.
I'd also argue Hemingway was the original "New journalist" ...
Thompson would probably agree with you.
Yes. Taken in a vacuum, HST's writing actually came off as pretty juvenile. He wasn't nearly as clever as he thought he was.
His writings on Nixon number amongst the finest political coverage ever. He also lead me to rediscover Josef Conrad.
If you read his published correspondence, he was actually a pretty thoughtful guy. I thought Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas and Curse of Lono were entertaining reads, but his later essays in the 1980s were just the angry lashing out of someone who had misread the tea leaves and had no insights into the appeal of Reagan - and so nothing to contribute to the national conversation, making him irrelevant. I doubt there was anything he hated more than being irrelevant ...
In my life, have met many a strange or odd person, what made Hunter S. Thompson different from them was he could write. It is said, that one should write something worth reading or live a life worth writing about, Hunter S., did both, a rare and exceptional combination.
Hunter Thompson was right on target when identifying and skewering the absurdity inherent in many aspects of American life at the end of the 1950s and through much of the 1960s. By the 1970s, with the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, the stakes suddenly became far more serious. The absurdity was no longer something to laugh about. Hunter Thomson didn't change. The country did.
Ted. You might appreciate this poem. I wrote it the morning Hunter died:
Goodbye, Hunter
Does death become you?
Do the pigs of quack still
Eat you in your long and endless deep?
Are they chomping at your kneecaps,
Twisted midgets, lost in sleep?
Goodbye, Hunter
You cranky mother.
Decapitation
Of the psyche
Not a concept
That the short
And glued of mind can understand.
But then you know that
Those steely eels
Still swam around you
Even when you were
Hard-hunkered in your bunker.
The sound of owls
As they swept along the tree line, crystal-mythed
Was not enough to fade the
Stain that left a hole
Inside your eardrums.
It’s a shame
That nothing stops them
From reacting,
Not even death.
Their sneaky tear ducts
And leaky bomb guts
But enough now said of that,
Their stars are fleeting.
Though we can’t see this.
Goodbye, Hunter
The silent enemy
Inside you
Is inside us,
This you knew.
What you didn’t know
Is that we feel it too,
You weren’t alone.
Where are your peacocks?
Did you sail them to an unfamiliar star?
Where are your dream clocks?
Did your time hit stop, no pass, retract the light, concede the war?
Where are our sleeping pills?
Did too much Xanax shoot our will between the eyes?
Where are our satirists?
In serious times
The big top clown within us cries
To be released into the ring, into the din, into the light.
Goodbye, America
Goodbye to all we said you’d be
Before we sold you for a piece
Of altared pie
To a weapon addict
Rapt dogmatic
Sleek reactive
Sly
Old bat
Whose grand design
To fix the stars
So we can
Only see
His stiffening light,
Is just another dirty eel around our spines.
Big Surprise.
Residual starlight
That’s what I call it
And the dead beliefs of brittle men
Are all that fuel its weak and bitter flight.
It’s shot its wad.
And a whole head's still
A better weapon
Than a man who flogs
The log of rigid concepts.
Goodbye, Hunter
All is not lost here.
But you know this, don’t you
Even while you sift between the stars?
Now nothing but a memory
For men
To shift in bars and oily stadiums
Or acid flashbacks
Sweet hungry tomcats
Still yearning for a time
Beyond this time
Beyond this slow and restless night.
Go now, my friend,
Find peace in everything
You knew could be
But wasn’t here in sight.
Eat whole the spleen
Of energetic waves
Eat fast the particles,
I hear they're good with Ketchup.
Residual starlight.
My friend, remember it.
It all becomes and ends
Repeating once
Straight round our bends
Kabam kapow hello, or did you say goodbye?
I think I’ve been here
This seat's familiar
I ate this hot dog
OK, alright
I think I'll linger here a while
Anyway.
This kind of systematic soft chaotic circle
Just reminds me of another time
When I hit the desert
Doing 90 in the shade.
Fun little tidbit, recently, at the La Jolla Playhouse, I watched a musical called The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S Thompson Musical. I went in not knowing what to expect. It was fantastic. And showed with great attention to detail his rise and fall.
"Hell's Angels established Thompson’s public persona, but if you read it (as I did) after first consuming his later work, it seems cautious by comparison. In the early pages, the author works hard to establish his credentials as a respectable journalist—offering up statistics, quotes from government reports, and paragraphs filled with names and facts. But even at this early stage, Thompson must have grasped that his readers wanted something more. So as the book progresses, it gets weirder and weirder."
It was during the research for this book that he came up with the name Raoul Duke and Thompson even inserted it into Hell's Angels. On the publicity tour, he began acting out in ways that were strange to his friends--wearing loud clothes, being obnoxious, etc. Over the next few years, he would increasingly lean into this Duke persona before becoming trapped by it in the late 70s.
Never thought about this before. Was he the first pop culture character to adopt a hyper-real persona? Hip-hop artists all do it now. Jay-Z/Hov. Kanye/Yeze. Kendrick/Kung Fu Kenny. Eminem/Slim Shady. I can go on. Did HST invent this?
Even in the era before newspapers could properly reproduce photos, news media always loved big personalities. Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde.
I think the film era kicked it into high gear. Mae West. Errol Flynn, John Wayne.
That is an interesting question. He certainly wasn't the first to have an alter ego but he perhaps pushed it to a greater extreme than anyone before him. Thompson tended to build upon the innovations of others and radically expand them.
Am I crazy or wasn't Anthony Bourdain an avid fan of Mr.Thompson???
I believe that he was. Miss that guy.
I was born two years before Bourdain so I would imagine we were both reading Hunter Thompson’s articles/books and so on at roughly the same times.
Hm.. wheres our hst for today? Drowning in the bloated sea of online writing, no doubt.
Maybe somebody should write something good and *not* put it on the ol interwebs. Make everyone buy the book. Some of the kids these days might really dig that(or so some recent article i read seemed to suggest).
Thats a million dollar idea right there, if someone can pull it off. Write something really good *and* make people work to get it?(i cant believe im calling buying a book "work", but such is the world)
Ofc, i hear getting a book published is a pretty stupid business these days.. so maybe somebodies gonna need to start a new publishing house.
Idk, could be done. Somebody needs to come up with *something* different, thats for sure
first you have to get more people to actually keep reading books. A problem that predated the Internet, at least in the US. It's a country full of people whose acquaintance with longform creative nonfiction began and ended with Hunter S. Thompson.
Really, people. The now-departed Charles Bowden is at least as good as Hunter Thompson. Bowden also had, oh, twenty times the work ethic. (Probably an underestimate.)
I bet most of you have never even heard his name. Gonzo Journalism fans might consider starting with Murder City, or Down By The River.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/47385.Charles_Bowden
I was editing and writing in the early '70s, and was initially impressed with Thompson, although there were much better examples of the New Journalism found in the VOICE, Esquire and New York Magazine that inspired more than HT. His writing could be brilliant, but when he became too much a part of the story his work became more entertainment than journalism, more huckstering than any other writer of his generation. Thompson became too enamored of Thompson and in the process lost his way as a journalist.
The slide from HST's early correspondence in the 1960s to the mid-1990s Better Than Sex is pretty drastic. In the 1960s, Hunter's letters to friends, colleagues, and editors--not written as professional pieces for publication--sometimes go on for pages, and they speak for the times more deeply than almost anyone else in that era. Writing for the sheer reward of communication, with a preternatural feel for the Zeitgeist and a finely crafted sense of style.
Then he Made It, and became a Star. And from there, another casualty of what Robbie Robertson refers to as "American Roulette." https://www.songlyrics.com/robbie-robertson/american-roulette-lyrics/
A man whose reputation more than proceeded him… and ultimately tipped him over the high-watermark!
Good to be reminded about Ralph Steadman, I met him at his house once playing for a gig for the Victims Of Torture charity. He was pretty drunk by the end and showed us his ink blot symphony, a musical
Score with his trademark splashes of ink across the staves. After considering it a while, he began conducting the score to the music in his head. These kind of people are what keeps the world interesting, perplexing....alive!
Thoroughly enjoyed this, Ted. The 1960s still hold a great fascination for me, and while I don’t want to be under illusions about it, I still believe it held a promise that, had we gone down further the road with it, would’ve resulted in a different country than what we have now. There’s no question that we could have had different problems emerge, but they may have been less intractable than the ones we now have.
once the best minds of the generation and tens of millions of Americans were preemptively disenfranchised by criminalization for smoking weed and using psychedelics, the Establishment housed and defused any threat of looming political challenge to its entrenchment. Some say that was a process begun with the assassination of JFK. But the practical ramifications of the drug laws are what sealed the deal.
Criminalization also made the rise of Dope Dealer Culture inevitable, with its lucrative parallel economy. Dope Dealer Culture is not a challenge to inertial hypercapitalist materialism and militarism. It's a celebration of it.
I've seen that, and on those terms, it becomes easier to understand why so many from that generation ended up shifting to the right and, in some cases, the extreme right.
If the biggest complaint among many in that generation was that their parents were authoritarian and indifferent to them, it is undeniable that some of them have turned out to be just like their parents, and in some cases, worse. Did the road to Reagan run, at least in part, through Yasgur's farm? That Max Yasgur himself was more liberal than many of them who eventually reached his age, and older, is telling as it paved the way to Trump.
What I feel, though, is the promise that got vanquished. The most dedicated of that movement were committed to social justice, to challenging the existing capitalist dynamic, to expanding our moral and social imaginations. But America is too big, too reactionary, too backward, too in love with finding those to kick around, for that promise to have taken hold. But that promise was a sign that such imagination was, and still is, possible.
ah, what a mess that era was, politically. I don't blame "America"; anything anyone can say about America is true, in some way or another.
I understand the mix of noble but terribly naive and confused intentions and horridly cynical practice that accounted for the revival and escalation of the War on Drugs, with its inadvertent--yet quite explicitly official--ascription of tens of millions of youthful Americans to Criminal status, ordaining a society-wide fracture largely along generational lines that was previously unknown in human history. I notice the reactionary hangover that accounted for Dixiecrats shifting their substantial Congressional and electoral clout to the Republicans after their regional regime of white supremacist apartheid collapsed. I've become aware of the complacent patronage politics of the 1970s supermajority of Congressional Democrats. I realize how Reagan was well-positioned in 1980 to take advantage of the split between that Congress and President Carter, leaving the Democrats powerful yet rudderless. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, the interregnum pick of the Dems in 1976, who was too introverted and isolated to effectively galvanize the popular support required to turn his promises of idealistic reform into Presidential achievement, ultimately undone by bad breaks, blunders, missteps, and reversals in both domestic and foreign policy.
I also get the mix of callow naivete and baneful Marcusean incoherence that marked the superficial and performative (albeit quite militant) radical Left politics of the era. Opposing the Status Quo of Institutional Power ("the Establishment") is easy; successfully bidding to prevail politically is a much heavier lift. Actually bringing a visionary new agenda to fruition requires adult competence at governance as well as idealism and incorruptibility. I don't want to indulge in counterfactuals, but in that regard the Assassinations left an absence of leadership that was not satisfactorily filled. The toppling of Nixon was not followed up by a groundswell of Boomers uniting in a quest to clean both Houses and inaugurate a new order of the ages. We were all just kids.
It could have been worse. We could have flocked en masse to the red banner of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and plunged the country into civil war in the name of Revolution. Speaking of Marcusean incoherence.
The 1970s was a great party. But a resurgence of reaction was in the cards, and the strategists of the New Right had studied the institutions of democratic political success--from coalition politics to manipulation and propaganda--well enough to elevate Ronald Reagan to the presidency. Whereas Democratic Party liberalism had ossified. And it was certainly much more amenable to collaborating with Reagan's shiny happy prosperity gospel than summoning the sobriety and foresight required to follow Jimmy Carter's soft-spoken wisdom on the advisability of shifting away from the full-spectrum dominance of the petroleum industry over the American--and global--economy.
When it comes to political campaign strategy at the national level, the Democrats have always been timid and temperamentally conservative. At least in my lifetime. The Baby Boomers carried a lot of weight in the 1970s and 1980s--but only as a voting demographic. It isn't as if there were any Democratic Party leaders with the gravitas, dynamism, and integrity required to chart a new course. The news media pigeonholed Jerry Brown as Governor Moonbeam early on, and the Democratic Party Establishment only ever wanted him as a fund-raiser, a loyalist mouthpiece. Democrat powerbrokers were much more comfortable with their selected Boomer Proteges, like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, inside the corridors of Beltway power, the Friends of Roger Stone were burrowing their way into the woodwork. The Cold War against the Soviet Union remained the top foreign policy priority and deficit-financed military expenditures fueled the Reagan economy, even though the Russians and Eastern Bloc nations were quietly imploding from the contradictions of their own ideological rigidity and corruption, with a clandestine profit economy in diverted and smuggled goods that eventually approached 25% of their economy by the 1980s.
That's my take on those decades, anyway. With the advantage of abundant hindsight. Very few of those observations were apparent to me in the moment. At the time, the Gatekeeper Media wasn't even putting most of those topics on the table for discussion--and when they did, the uh "guardrails" were typically as tight as a cattle chute.
It's been said (by whoever) that "the Americans can be counted on to do the right thing--after they have tried everything else." I'd like to think that's true. But it's too early to tell, because we're still in the process of trying everything else.
Sadly, I couldn’t agree more. When you look at the full history of the U.S., this is nothing truly new. The drug war wound up being yet another gambit to marginalize a swatch of the population, with marijuana being the focus of the “combat” as it was the symbolic drug supreme of the counterculture. I came of age in the ‘80s and served in the Navy, and vividly remember the anti-drug (and viciously homophobic, though that’s another story altogether) hysterics of the military, with its moralistic dread-mongering enforced by senior personnel, a fair number of whom had the more agreeable, establishment addition of alcohol, twinned with a corporate culture that enacted mandatory drug testing policies schemed up by a not-inconsiderable number of coke-addled executives swimming in the profit margins of the corporate raidings and downsizings of the day.
America has always hankered for some “other” to marginalize and kick around in some form. That’s why, in looking at this moment, I don’t buy the fascism arguments - it supposes that we’ve been this pure, innocent country all along that has had Trump thrust upon us. If you look at the full sweep of the scene, our history has mostly been illiberal and undemocratic to huge swathes of the populace that aren’t white and/or conformist. No American on the right needed to read Mein Kampf to get an idea of how to leverage self-pitying, provincial loathing of people or things they didn’t understand into policy-making; it was the Nazis who looked to Jim Crow as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws. The unwritten story of a lot of immigrants has been how to position themselves as white-proximate, and it’s so easy to forget that Italians and other southern Europeans were once not considered white. I see the same process happening now with Hispanics and South Asians. They now seem to be the agreeable, acceptable “others” that the GOP can handle, so long as they don’t have “funny” accents, and on cue, reliably spout extremist gibberish about immigrants (the irony of the pot calling the kettle black is completely lost here).
America’s real problem is that it has no political imagination for anything other than shitting on some designated other - not content to keep at it with Black people, it’s constantly sought out other “others.” The targets du jour are now immigrants (legal or illegal - they can’t tell the difference, and all the proof for the former is to be dismissed), liberals, and trans people. Tomorrow, it’ll be someone else.
Was it Hunter S. Thompson who said along those lines, “today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon”?
But here’s nothing unique about the US in that respect. It’s more like a common tendency in human groups. Whenever societies, systems, governments, institutions run into obstacles or failures, scapegoating has very often been the preferred “remedy.” It’s often the first resort: purge the impurities by driving them all into one victim or victim class, and then do them in. This happens so often that in some societies, scapegoat and sacrifice rituals get incorporated into social organization as a preventive measure.
Once you start looking, you find evidence of the popularity of scapegoating and scapegoat sacrifice all over the place: read Frazer’s ethnographic historiography The Golden Bough. Or novels like Lord Of The Flies, Darkness At Noon, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Watch what happens to a manager if a sports team is losing to much to suit the owners. Read Rene Girard. Studying and reflecting on that phenomenon was his specialty. Scapegoat sacrifice is a palliative ritual purging that appeals to the mute, hidden Shadow of human insecurities.
In November 1974 HST was invited to a "Major Speakers" gig at Duke. I guess he had an agent and the agent booked him into it. The Duke nerds who invited him knew nothing about the man, so they couldn't imagine that he would 1) repeatedly kick the dashboard of the poor student assigned to to pick him up at the airport (didn't like Steely Dan); 2) insist the poor student stop at one of our wonderful state liquor stores and score him a bottle of bourbon; 3) hole up in his Holiday Inn room with said bottle, keeping a very stoned, increasingly pissed Page Auditorium crowd waiting for nearly 2 hours; 4) finally show up, only to answer crowd-sourced written Q&A; 4) respond to a question about "Rockefellers and cannibalism" by throwing a full Solo Cup of booze toward the rafters - soaking some fine Duke proscenium work; 5) be hustled off-stage and 6) end the evening sitting around a dry water-feature behind Page with this Duke Chronicle reporter (yeah, me) and a few others, passing bottles and bongs until well past 2 am. I missed my deadline. HST went from Durham straight to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight for RS. He got too messed up and missed the fight entirely, turning in a crap piece Wenner published anyway. The whole thing made me happy I'd run across "Hells Angels" and "Las Vegas" and the campaign stuff earlier, when he still had it.
I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this. I supported Carter in 1976 based on Hunter’s Rolling Stone piece, and later had the opportunity to discuss Hunter with President Carter. You’re recapturing my youth!