FROM THE EMAIL

Munz has sent me a link to the online edition of a magazine called While You Were Sleeping (www.wyws.com) which contains an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. The doctor is in fine form, and also a handy reminder that all this debate about how the left needs to adopt the newspeak of the right to evict GWB from the White House is essentially bullshit, (see Doc40 Archive, December 5th, 2003) and that, in our everyday dealings we are quite capable of speaking plainly, and it?s only when a TV or a TV camera is turned on that the language becomes stifled and absurd.

Setting aside the fear and loathing and the fact that both Johnny Depp and Bill Murray have played him in the movie, the unique fact about Hunter is that he will talk to the media same as he talks the assholes in the bar. For example...

So, these Jesus freaks, these primitive hillbillies - really, worse than hillbillies: hellboys - they don't know anything, really. They're ignorant. And they don't know that what they're trying has been tried many times before. Yeah, it's called fascism. It's called state socialism or - fuck, I hate to say this ? but, theocracy. The separation of church and state has been the centerpiece of the American nation for 200 years. So we just try to brush aside 200 years of not just American but, shit, the whole world history. And you simply can't, anymore, get away with it....you know, it's not like a monarch, you can't just tax the peasants until they believe. They can't force them to work for nothing, confiscate their crops. You know, "all lands are royal lands," that worked back in Robin Hood's day in the Sherwood Forest. But it's not going to work when a bunch of cowboys with greasy oil hands reach out to seize nations that go back to, shit, 5,000 years before this alleged Jesus Christ.

The problem here would seem to be in that Hunter is promoted by the media as unique, and it?s somehow suggested that one has to be a drunken, multiple-abusing, veteran freak in order to call a fascist a fascist, and in this way he is clown-marginalized when he is, in fact, a national elder statesman of vision and clarity. (As in this second example.)

If every dead-head in this country voted next, or had voted in 2000, we would have a different government today. And not that that would guarantee anything, but we would all be a lot better off than we are now. The dead-heads carry a huge potential impact vote. At any age! I don't give a fuck what age. I've been a Grateful Dead addict ever since I met them. And that's an organizing basis. What the fuck? If they all voted, we could throw the president out. It's fun to throw the president out of the White House. I've done it. I know.