Gonzo politics through several decades
NOTE: The following is a piece I wrote last September. I then lost track of it until today.
Last week, I attended a state political convention. On my trip, I visited a used book store and found and purchased "Smiling Through the Apocalypse - Esquire's History of the Sixties". Serendipity: The very first entry just happened to be about another political convention, and it makes for an interesting contrast and comparison to such events in our times.
Just as Friedrich Nietzsche was the (largely unrecognized) intellectual progenitor of Sigmund Freud, the shadow predecessor of Hunter S. Thompson was the original gonzo political-junkie journalist, Norman Mailer. His article covering the 1960 Democratic convention was published by Esquire just before that year's general election. The following is his description of the convention floor cattle call:
"Delegates are not the noblest sons and daughters of the Republic; a man of taste, arrived from Mars, would take one look at a convention floor and leave forever, convinced he had seen one of the drearier squats of Hell. If one still smells the faint living echo of a carnival wine, the pepper of a bullfight, the rag, drag, and panoply of a jousting tourney, it is all swallowed and regurgitated by the senses into the fouler cud of a death gas one must rid oneself of -- a cigar-smoking, stale-aired, slack-jawed, butt-littered, foul, bleak, hard-working bureaucratic death gas of language and faces. . ."
Things are different today. Smoking is not allowed in the halls.
His comments on the nomination of a boyish-movie-star-quality politician as a Presidential candidate for the first time in TV America was surprisingly prescient of the nomination of the second such candidate, 32 years later, and should be remembered the next time such a candidate emerges, as he undoubtedly will:
". . . Finally it was simple: the Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.
"Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical, and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation. . ."
I cannot leave without quoting from the following classic entry from the Great Gonzo himself, from "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" about the 1972 Democratic convention and the animal instinct that propels the candidates as they near their goal. His comments are as apt now as it was then; state races are much less intense, of course, but the same instinct is always present:
"The ego is the crucial factor here -- but ego is a hard thing to get on paper [to describe] Lust, Ambition, or Madness.
". . . A man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare -- any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. . . The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. . . They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. . .
"A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything that he can't handle personally he will hire out - or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician."
Of course, in those more innocent times, the image of a president as a rutting animal was just a metaphor.
3:38:42 PM 
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