(Original photo by Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC)
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened....There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3 comments:
Drifty--
I've always liked that quote of Thompson's, althought it has always struck me as rather depressing. He was a helluva writer. He had a short passage in an article, "Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises", in the "Great Shark Hunt" collection, that made me have to set the book down. It was just a few-sentence thing about near-drowning, but having just had a near-drowning experience at that point myself, it caught me off-guard and shocked me at how precisely he had captured the feeling.
The meme I see all the time now, being repeated over and over, is that the dirty hippies were wrong! wrong! wrong!...about everything.
...but the fact remains that on a societal continuum, all humanity experiencing total bliss all the time on one side, and everyone experiencing total suffering on the other, one group is clearly pushing it toward alleviating suffering for as many as possible, and the other is pushing twice as hard in the other direction.
Underestimating the powerful motivating factor of hate must have kept Hunter awake nights, after the tide rolled back out, and never came back....
Excerpted from "A Generation of Swine" and also published in his San Francisco Examiner column...
"[....] It is an acquired taste, they say, and I have never had much luck with it. There is a lot of ritual involved, and you are always dealing with foreigners who may or may not take care of you, once the dragon begins to sing. You want to have a lot of disposable income and plenty of free time on your hands before embracing a serious opium habit. It is not a productive drug as a rule.
But some of the exceptions have been spectacular. The poet Samuel Coleridge was one; he got into opium for a few years and wallowed crazily in the Behavioral Sink -- but while he was down there he also wrote the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan."
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
How's that for a lead, Jack? Yeah. A lot of sober people will move instinctively to the back of the bus to make room for whatever dope fiend wrote that one. Ronald Reagan could live another 200 years and never even dream lines like that. There are some jobs you can't hire out.
If George Bush could find a speechwriter who could write like Sam Coleridge, he would hire him immediately and never mind his bad habits. On the fast tracks where you run without brakes, all of God's creatures are welcome. Nobody ever asked Gen. MacArthur how he came up with that "Old Soldiers Never Die" speech -- yet it ranks with the highest ravings of Coleridge and Poe and whatever king-hell loon wrote the "Book of Revelation. [….]"
In the same column, addressing the "war on drugs", he noted that every government in China since the Chang Dynasty had sworn it would crush the opium trade, yet the price of opium on the streets of Singapore is roughly the same as in 900BC.
I clipped and saved the column at the time, but that was at least four total losses of all possessions ago. So I am so glad I was able to find the above part of it on the internet, because it seemed like it would go well here.
-Doug in Oakland
Post a Comment