The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXV

I discovered Hunter S. Thompson this week. But only five years after he has been dead. I found a book of his, Generation of Swine, in the sad little library where I search among the shelves for something to read. It was the only book of his.

When alive I knew who Thompson was, but his reputation or perhaps his self-nurtured image was such that I avoided him. His reputation was one of a hard drug and alcohol abuser. His photo always showed a man with a cigarette in a holder balanced in his lips. What kind of man smokes a cigarette in a holder? He was called Gonzo.

I see now I was wrong, at least about not having taken the time to read Thompson. Reading Generation of Swine, which was written during the 1980's and devoted to the political persons of that era, was like seeing it through a looking glass and discovering all the warts and blemishes for what they really were. I do not doubt there was any writer, including myself, who was alive at that time and worth his salt who did not understand there was something terribly wrong, like a cancer tumor taking root, in the soul of the country during those years. But some mistakenly took it not for a cancer tumor but merely some growth like a skin tag that could be removed by a laser. They thought there was still time for cosmetic surgery.

Few could imagine that it would lead us to George W. Bush, Iraq, the de-regulation of the banking system, and bankruptcy.

Hunter S. Thompson had no illusion about his own profession. "I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it - a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits and drunkards and failures....That is a thing you want to remember if you work in either journalism or politics - or both - and there is no way to duck it. You will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways - but it doesn't hurt as much

Hunter S. Thompson a.k.a. Gonzo
when you're right. There are times, however - when even being right feels wrong."

(Since writing a blog, The Age of Incompetence, how well I've come to know this feeling when even being right feels wrong.)

I think Thompson had a different plan for his life before he became mired in journalism. After a stint in the Air Force he moved to New York City and found a job with Time and found work as a copy boy for $51 a week and while working used one of their typewriters to copy Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms to try and learn their writing styles. He also enrolled in a short story class at Columbia. I think he imagined himself a novelist. Time fired him for insubordination and his future was set.

He never became a novelist, although he wrote a best seller, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.

Thompson had a kind of quirky brilliance to turn a phrase and skewer a low life in a humorous but nearly obscene way. He borrowed from H.L. Mencken and yet he was a cut apart from Mencken. At the height of Mencken's era his targets, Bryant, Coolidge, Taft, Cleveland, and Wilson were mostly run of the mill bounders. Mencken found them easy targets because of their mental laziness and classified them all as poltroons of one sort or another.

Beginning with Richard Nixon Thompson saw that our age had another class of bounders, but these men weren't merely

trying to feather their nests with graft or bribes, they were quite literally trying to hijack and steal a country with secret plots. H.L. Mencken could never have imagined a G. Gordon Liddy. These men thought the Constitution was nothing more than toilet paper.

So Thompson concluded all were fair game to be broadsided by any language that he felt exposed them for what they were. And at times it is impossible not to laugh; Thompson had a kind of perverse genius at skewering. And his material seemed endless: who could invent Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Lester Maddox or Gordon Liddy or Ollie North or Jimmy Swaggart or Ed Meese? Mencken could never in his best day ever imagined such soft targets to harpoon.

He railed that Nixon and Reagan, "both were as crooked as screwworms." He wrote of a top Reagan political consultant, Mitch Daniels, "He is a flimsy little yuppie who looks like something that got rejected at birth." He wrote of George Bush (Sr.), "He has the instincts of a dung beetle. No living politician can match his talent for soiling himself in public."

Finally he wrote an epitaph for the entire decade of the 1980's: "It is difficult for the ordinary voter to come to grips with the notion that a truly evil man, a truthless monster with the brains of a king rat and the soul of a cockroach, is about to be sworn in as president of the United States for the next four years...And he will bring his gang in with him, a mean network of lawyers and salesmen and pimps who will loot the national treasury, warp the laws, mock the rules and stay awake 22 hours a day looking for at least one reason to declare war...."

That was written at the end of the 1980's. And when I look backward now and read Thompson and recall all the names from Ivan Boeskey to Ed Meece who were indicted and did some time in federal prisons, or escaped merely because of pardons from someone at the top who knew without that pardon they too would soon be sitting behind bars, I see it merely set the

stage for a larger theater of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Invading Granada or Panama was minor drama to bring on Iraq. Selling weapons illegally to the head Muslim nut case in Iran was peanuts. The 1980's inspired the criminal imagination to think big. Whatever Ivan Boesky represented those at Enron later would do bigger and better, with the help of those in the government in high places. Whatever Lt. Col. North could do in the basement of the White House Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby would do bigger and better in the basement of the White House. Whatever the Savings and Loan scandal represented in the 80's the banks could do bigger and better in the Bush Jr. years, with the help of de-regulation and Alan Greenspan.

America is the place where everything must be lived and acted out in giant strokes. Greed is one of those strokes that seems to evolve into gigantisms in America. Untold amounts of energy are poured into schemes of how to steal. The men who ran America's banks all went to the best colleges and universities. Their schemes were so intricate those at the top of their banks couldn't understand them and neither could the regulators who were the cops on the beat.

So it was probably natural that at some point a Hunter S. Thompson would emerge on the scene just as it was natural earlier in the century for a H.L. Mencken to emerge. But Thompson was a mutant. His confession was genuine, "I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism."

I think he knew that if he spent his life writing about men with the instincts of dung beetles, he would ultimately become contaminated by the same dung. He understood it perfectly when he wrote, "There are times when even being right feels wrong." That's what the dung heap does to a man. Perhaps that's why he needed the hard drugs and gallons of booze.

It seems Gonzo scripted the end to his own life long before he pulled the trigger.