How long, O Lord, how long? Where will it end?
All I ever wanted out of this campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squalor in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach, with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and no neighbors.
Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a “vicious misanthrope” . . . or maybe it was a “cynical misanthrope” . . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. Everything that is wrong-headed, cynical & vicious in me today traces straight back to that evil hour in September of ’69 when I decided to get heavily involved in the political process . . .
But that is another story. What worries me now — in addition to this still unwritten saga of the California primary — is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as Governor of American Samoa.
I coveted that post for many years. For a while it was my only ambition. I pursued it relentlessly, and at one point in either 1964 or ’65 it seemed within my grasp. Larry O’Brien, now the chairman of the Democratic Party, was the man in charge of pork-barrel/patronage appointments at the time, and he gave me excellent reason to believe my application was on the verge of bearing fruit. I was living at the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, when the good news arrived. It came on a Wednesday, as I recall, by telegram. The manager of the Inn was ecstatic: he called a cab immediately and sent me downtown to a dry-goods store where I bought six white sharkskin suits — using a Sinclair Oil card, which was subsequently revoked and caused me a lot of trouble.
I never learned all the details, but what was finally made clear — in the end, after a bad communications breakdown — was that O’Brien had pulled a fast one on me. As it turned out, he never had any intention of making me Governor of American Samoa, and when I finally realized this it made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Don’t know about anyone else, but I can totally relate to that, and not merely because of Thompson’s gonzo sarcasm about O’Brien promising him a gig in American Samoa. (The actual 1964 correspondence between Thompson and O’Brien is included, pp. 454-455, 457, in Thompson’s first volume of collected letters, The Proud Highway.) Frazzled after months covering the 1972 Democrat primaries, and once more up against a deadline to supply what he called “The Final Wisdom” of it all, Thompson was hinting at a basic truth about politics:
A small number of people reap whatever direct benefit is gained by the labor of many thousands.
Well-connected insiders are appointed to cushy diplomatic jobs. Campaign consultants cash in their contracts. Lobbyists get paid to hustle the politicians to provide special consideration to interest groups. The rest of us — the field hands of the political plantation, as it were — have only the pleasure of gazing at that big Greek Revival mansion with its Ionic columns and saying to ourselves: “We’ve got our guy in there.”
This is true whether we are Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. “We” win, but “they” govern.
Sic semper hoc. Continue reading ‘That Evil Hour …’ →
