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The doctor will see you now
–Kenneth Patchen BOULDER–Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson pleaded no contest to spraying a man in the face with a fire extinguisher after the charge was reduced to a petty offense… Thompson, who entered a plea to petty disorderly conduct Friday, was initially charged with misdemeanor assault in the April fire extinguisher episode at Boulder’s Fox Theater… At public speaking appearances, Thompson sometimes sprays a fire extinguisher toward the audience to close shows. He was showing some people the technique in his dressing room when…. –Las Vegas Review-Journal That was back in 1997, the last time Thompson made a foray into Boulder. From patchouli-smeared activists to spike-haired punks, country trash to white-collared reptiles, it was a rare appearance, and the venue was packed. As the evening rolled on, what began as a Q&A session turned into an orgy of mayhem. At one point a woman leapt up to the stage with a wrinkled copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, yelling "Spill some Chivas on my book!" As Hunter drenched the volume, the woman bared her breasts and the audience groaned in ecstasy. Later, some guy offered Thompson a whiff of ether from a flask that he’d brought along. Shunning the rag, the Doctor began sniffing the fumes straight from the bottle. Months later the author was in Denver doing a book-signing for his release of The Proud Highway, and nearly 300 fans attended the event. Anyone who bought a copy could do a shot of Chivas Regal with Hunter. At one point a shy 12-year-old kid walked up to Thompson, shook his hand, and began walking away in teary-eyed bliss. "Hey kid, wait!" Thompson held the bottle up. "Don’t you want a shot?" The outlaw journalist has become a spokesman for several generations of disenfranchised Americans, and his words are buoys of truth in the flotsam of a dying democracy. His fans are those who never bought into the program, and they are many. Drug-crazed menace? Serious scribe of American letters? Hunter S. Thompson has become a simultaneous postmodern hero and modernist antihero in one sweep; as much an epiphany as an enigma to the American public; a voice of reason in absolutely unreasonable times. The Doctor’s new book, Kingdom of Fear, comes as the author’s autobiographical pummeling of the senses that dates back to his childhood when, at 9 years old, the FBI grilled him for destroying a mailbox and he called their bluff. "And I learned a powerful lesson," writes Thompson, "Never believe the first thing an FBI agent tells you about anything–especially if he seems to believe you are guilty of a crime. Maybe he has no evidence." Although Kingdom of Fear is billed as a memoir, the volume is more a salad of the author’s personal battle with his own talent, which begins to take shape during a stint as an Air Force sportswriter. The style is fragmented, jumping from prophecy to flashback, and segues through some of the most impacting events of the 65-year-old’s life as a journalist, author, and now icon. The volume ends at Thompson’s first encounter with his assistant (and now fiancée) Anita, one of the inspirations for the book, who enlightens Thompson with the words, "You have the soul of a teenage girl in the body of an elderly dope fiend." In high Thompson fashion, during the interview, the Good Doctor was getting ripped, writing his column, and gambling all at once. BC: What are you watching? HST: Yeah, hold on, you caught me at a… Kentucky/Butler. Hold on just a second… Goddamn, Kentucky 25 straight wins! This is gonna go on for about three minutes or so, uh, Indiana/Pittsburgh. Yeah, I’m predicting these games. I write the column for ESPN on Sunday nights. BC: You’re writing the column right now? HST: Yeah, yeah. Holy shit. Well, I also have a significant financial investment in these games. Yesterday I was No. 2 of all the ESPN people predicting it. I did well yesterday. BC: How much did you win? HST: Oh, Christ that was about a $5,000 investment. And I have others. But boy, it looks like Louisville and Butler fucked me up today. (To himself) Let’s see, Irvine/Michigan State, oh boy, that’s tough. Texas/Connecticut… I think Texas will win there. I don’t know. Fuck. I haven’t seen Connecticut play. BC: What’s the most you’ve ever won? HST: I can’t remember. I remember losing $4,000 to Ed Bradley one time. Somehow I don’t remember the wins quite as well as I do the horrible losses. He was out here for this year’s tournament too, and then he got called off to the fucking war. BC: So what’s your status with Rolling Stone these days? HST: I don’t really like talking about Rolling Stone. People ask me all the time. Well, you know, that was a great run for me. Rolling Stone was one of the… well, maybe the best magazine of the time. But things changed drastically. The attitude’s changed. I didn’t fit in there anymore, and I still wouldn’t now. It got very corporate. BC: They probably wouldn’t be around today if you wouldn’t have written a lot of that stuff. HST: Yeah, you’re probably right. A lot of people have said that. I think you’re all right. I don’t like to uh… Well, fuck why not? Wenner is a pig. Yeah, he actually turned into one. BC: With your new book, why the title Kingdom of Fear? HST: That’s what I perceived this country to be at the time. From any direction you look at this country, everything that’s happening is motivated by fear and terrorism and war. It’s a national panic encouraged by these low-rent, evangelical punks in the White House. In two years Bush and his crowd–or rather, his crowd and Bush–have turned this country from a prosperous nation of peace into a broke nation at war. In two years they’ve destroyed the economy, our place in the world, and the future of the children. And the next three generations are going to be paying for this war. BC: Why the subtitle "Loathsome Secrets of A Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century?" HST: The American century ended in 1999. Well, let’s say 2000. And that’s what it was called, "The American Century." A man named Henry Luce came up with that. But this isn’t the American Century for sure, and it has nothing to do with the American Dream at all. The country has gone back to the worst of its kind of evangelical right-wing freaks. And what really bothers me is that the voters keep voting for Bush, even though they’re going broke more so everyday. We’ve raised several generations of stupid people. Ignorant and stupid. And I really can’t understand that. Hell, it happened so fast. BC: How did you get into doing your Hey Rube column for ESPN? HST: John Walsh, the managing editor at ESPN, is an old friend of mine. He was an editor at Rolling Stone when I was there. We became good friends, and one day he asked me if I thought I could write a sports column for ESPN. I was in a decent mood and said, "Yeah, of course." The column is one of my favorite things. It keeps me on deadline and it’s a relief to get the column to write. Just pure writing. BC: Well, here’s my favorite one. I want to read a segment and maybe get some comment. This is from Feb. 11, 2002, titled "Terrorism at the Superbowl": The news out of Washington is getting darker and weirder by the hour. On some days it has the look of a full-bore Terrorist cell operating out of the White House basement, spewing fear and desperation on a nation of suddenly impoverished patriots. Where is Bill Clinton now that we finally need him? HST: Jesus Christ. Well, I hate to say it, but it seems to be all accurate and prophetic even. I mean it’s not that difficult to be prophetic with this country and this administration. You can imagine your worst fears, and then figure they’ll probably come true. BC: That’s pretty edgy stuff. Especial-ly written only five months after Sept. 11. Nobody was criticizing Washington yet. You seem to make a career of taking a sports writer’s approach to politics. HST: Well yeah. That’s an interesting mix, writing a sports column and politics. Being a sportswriter, I guess I’ve kind of brought that style to everything I’ve done since then. And I’m still a sportswriter. But I branched out–heh heh. Excuse me a second. [To Anita] I’m looking for that pipe. Where is that goddamned…. BC: So we have bin Laden and Saddam, and then we have the American propaganda machine. Who exactly are the terrorists here, and why should we fear them? HST: Well, we should fear the White House I think more than the terrorists. In the Kingdom of Fear, people tend to be a lot more obedient. Fear makes people behave differently. BC: What do you think about the anthrax letters being sent to Congress? HST: I think that was bullshit, and they were probably planted. My feeling from the beginning was that the tragedy at the World Trade Center was also rigged. I can’t say that for sure, but I’ve had that uneasy feeling from the very beginning. I haven’t been convinced of anything otherwise. They haven’t done a goddamn thing yet to convince anybody that bin Laden actually did that. I never believed that a gang of Arabs sitting around a fire in Afghanistan cooked this up and pulled it off. [To Anita] Where’s that thing that was in the New York Times today? Here’s a story out of the Times. "Reporters Respond Eagerly to Pentagon Welcome Mat." (from the March 23 edition.) Carefully devised by the Pentagon to counter years of complaints by news organizations about restrictions on combat coverage, the new policy of (embedding) more than 500 reporters with invading troops has produced riveting images of fighter jets on carriers and tanks plowing across the Iraqi desert, accompanied by household faces like Ted Koppel… and of surrendering Iraqi soldiers with their hands held high. [To himself: Oh goddamn!]… Pentagon planners have also reached out to diverse outlets where public opinion is shaped by including reporters from MTV, Rolling Stone, People Magazine and Men’s Health, and foreign journalists running the gamut from Al Jazeera, the Arabic language television channel, to Russia’s Tartusk news agency. News organizations have expressed satisfaction with the arrangements. BC: What do you think? HST: Jesus Christ, that’s absolute bullshit. I’ve covered wars. By being embedded, it’s almost like being captured. You’re given access to whatever they want to give you access to, and they make you really grateful for it. It’s like doling out the access. That happened in the Vietnam War a lot. But the Pentagon decided journalists would never have access to another war. BC: So what access do they have now? HST: They don’t have access. That’s the point. By embedding them, they totally co-opt them. And then their copy is, let’s say, "approved." Nothing gets out of there without going through the military machine. All of our news really from Iraq and Afghanistan for probably the last two years has strictly been the product of Psy-Ops and the CIA. BC: Was it the same when you were reporting on Vietnam? HST: Not at all. They didn’t have that censorship in place. The first time they implemented it was in [1983] Grenada, and I was shocked. It was a practice run for the next war in Panama. Grenada was the first time really that all access was cut off. BC: But you were independent at the time. You didn’t have to take orders, right? HST: There was no control over the press, but that was their first attempt to do that. I remember the first time I’d ever seen razor wire, and they tried to kick me out of my hotel. They took it over, and I refused to leave. That was the first time I’d ever been ordered around by the Army. BC: How does the media coverage compare to when you were in Saigon? HST: I was in Saigon at the end, but I went out to various places in the field. For journalists, Vietnam was a very free war. That’s why the Pentagon blames the media for losing the war. We had a lot of violence down there with the reporters. BC: During Nixon, who controlled whom? Did the press control the White House, or did the White House control the press? HST: It was about 50/50 on any given day. That was the beauty of it. That was also true in Vietnam. You could go anywhere you could get. You know a lot of people were killed and shot over there. Our photographer was killed on the last goddamned day of the war. But at least we got the truth out about that war. We haven’t had the truth about any war since then. BC: What do you think will happen with this war? HST: This war is going to go on for 20 or 30 years. It’s been going on for 12 already. We’ll be there certainly the rest of my lifetime, and pretty much into infinity. Look at Korea. That’s a country we invaded and went to war with 50 years ago, and look what we got out of that. Fifty years is nothing. For what amounts to one person’s lifetime, we’ve been fighting a war with the same country. BC: You wrote in your book that Bush is now getting us into a war with the entire Arab-speaking world. HST: Oh yeah, this is World War III. BC: And what will be the end result? HST: A fascist police state for one. I mean that’s necessary in wartime, right? Let’s just call it Bush–(It’s not Bush, but it’s his administration). He’s clearly the worst president in the history of the U.S. The negativity of his accomplishments is going to take a long time to recover from. The same people that control the "goofy child president," as I call him, also controlled his father. Oh yeah! We were talking about Rolling Stone and Vietnam. On my way to Vietnam, actually I was on a 747 crossing the Pacific. At some point along the way I was fired by Wenner, which also cancelled my life and health insurance. Nobody should be forgiven for that. That was kind of a turning point in our relationship. Then it just got worse, and everybody with any talent who has ever worked there was fired. Wenner just stopped caring about what was going on in the country. He just got into being a celebrity publisher. BC: That happened to a lot of people of that generation. HST: Well, it didn’t happen to Bob Dylan. I was talking to him a few weeks ago out here, and he was asking me about what happened to Rolling Stone. I told him it was the greed, and fuck it, one of the most evident factors in the change in Rolling Stone was when he [Wenner] came out of the closet. And I don’t know if there’s any connection at all, but when he started hanging out with Ralph Lauren and the Velvet Mafia, the power and money, he just got into that life, and he cut himself off from his friends from the past and his wife, certainly, the editor of Sports Illustrated now, the editor of ESPN, hell all of our Black Alumni Club. I’m proud to be a member. We all are. Some of the best talent he ever had. Oh, Jesus, if you look at that group picture of the Rolling Stone taken in 1971, that was the very beginning. Annie Leibowitz took the photo. It’s in one of my letters books. It’s a famous photo. Goddamn, just the names. BC: Would you say that those were the golden years American media? HST: Yeah. During Watergate–but not for long after it–I really believed it was the beginning of a new era for American journalism. I thought we were heroes, and we had done heroic work getting Nixon out of there. I feel like part of a ring of what Nixon called "The Conspiracy." And there was a conspiracy between certain people. I thought we were going to develop a new generation of journalism, and I’m still baffled at what happened. It did not get better or smarter. The word or the message did not get passed on. BC: What exactly did happen to the American Dream? HST: That’s a big subject. It seems to me that history goes–in this country anyway–in eras of 20 years. Look at the period between 1960 and 1980–from the introduction of the birth control pill until the arrival of AIDS. That was distinctly 20 years. And then the generation 20 years after that, that’s really like comparing two worlds. Everything seems to lead back to 1980 to the real beginning of the downfall of America. Living in this country is gonna be a different experience from now on, and nobody’s gonna know or much less remember at all what it was like to live in the ’60s or ’70s. That was a very special 20-year period, and then 1980 to 2000 was a downhill slide. BC: Were the 1960s a failure? HST: Oh, hell, no. Not by my light. There were a lot of failures, but it was the birthplace of the journalism and the writing and thinking that brought Nixon down and should have continued, but didn’t after 1980. Carter was a good man. Compared to this Bush, Carter was one of the best presidents ever. But since then, they were all Republicans–I don’t have to stress that too much–Reagan and the Bushes. Clinton was all right. Whether he knew or not that all these people were stealing out of the stock market I can’t say for sure. I think everybody knew, except the poor bastards that invested their life savings in retirement plans. BC: Is democracy in America dead? HST: Well, I think it’s very ill and this administration wants to get rid of it. And it doesn’t seem to be working when more than half the voters don’t vote. Democracy just can’t function without the participation of the "governed." BC: Why don’t the people participate? HST: Fuck, I don’t really know. I don’t think in terms of journalists as smart people. Just the best–and I’m talking about my own tribe here. That quality didn’t disappear. It’s just that the corporations took it over. Shit, Viacom now owns everything that I write for. Except Vanity Fair. BC: Any predictions for the 2004 presidential election? HST: Well, I don’t see any other way possible to stop this frenzied Jesus freak, this Kingdom of Fear, except by beating Bush in 2004. The last election was stolen. Imagine how they’ll have to scramble to make sure they win this election. We’re the enemy now, and we’re going to have to pay attention in ’04. That’s one way of possibly stopping this runaway train and the fall of the empire. It’s crumbling. BC: So you think America will be finished soon? HST: Yeah. Or at least what they’re still trying to claim it represents. What? Freedom? Democracy? Excellence? I don’t think we’re making much progress in those areas. This is not a free country. BC: You write a lot about civil liberties and our continual loss of them. HST: "Giving them up" is what it is, goddammit! This "loss"… I’m tired of people… Never mind. I’m getting kinda wild. BC: Go ahead. HST: Ahhhhhhhh Gooood!!!! BC: So what’s at stake? HST: What’s at stake? The difference between journalists covering the Vietnam War and covering this war. The weird thing is that this [New York Times] story says–and it is true–that the journalists like it. "Reporters Respond Eagerly to Pentagon Welcome Mat." Now if that’s not Hitler, if that’s not the Third Reich… Well, this is the Fourth Riech, I’ll just come out and say it. It’s getting wild up here. I was talking to Charlie Rose on the air last week or the week before, and when I compared Hitler to George Bush, goddamn, they cut it. That was impossible for even me to say in New York. That was over the line. So I’m just telling you in case you want to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich again. Hitler is an apt and very good comparison to this regime, this fucking crusade. It’s all the same. Same plan. Same old format. Goddamn, I’ve really wandered far afield. I was concentrating on sports when you called. We really covered the, uh–heh, heh–territory there. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com |
It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on. The situation for human beings is hopeless… For the while that’s left, though, we can remember the Great and the gods.
