Radio Silence

Manan tells us he took last week off from the campaign. I think I’m going to follow him this week, though my commitment to the campaign was small last week, too, because of my (more or less) completing “‘California Lost All’: Vanishing and Failure in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona.” But this week is for real. I might throw some cash at Christine Cegelis, since she’s trying to unseat that reptilian bastard Henry Hyde, but other than that, I’m out. I want to be less jaded when the debates start (if they even happen) in two weeks.

Instead, of course, I want to do more homework. Or maybe pay attention to more baseball. Or maybe daydream about stuff. Of course, this is also the sort of mood that often yields multiple viewings of Beautiful Girls. But I figure I might also go back and re-read some Hunter S. Thompson. Tonight I think I’ll try to blast through Better Than Sex. I’m looking for Thompson’s pig-fucker anecdote about LBJ, but I’m also interested in other stuff he’s writing about. I pulled my Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail today and found that, of the five passages I’d marked, one included Thompson’s quoting the closing line of The Great Gatsby. As all good HST students know, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, at its most basic, a wilful remix of Gatsby, and it’s interesting to see that book’s effect creep into Thompson’s other work, too. I sometimes feel like the only writer around who captures 70s-era Thompson at his saddest is Hendrik Hertzberg, when he’s going off on the Electoral College or George W. Bush. There’s a lot of outrage being penned in the HST vein these days, but very little of Thompson’s very palatable disappointment in the failure of America. It’s heart-wrenching, in fact, so I’ll leave you with the close of Chapter 8 (the LSD at the Fillmore chapter), which competes with the bit on “authority” and LSD in Chapter 11 for the best section in FLLV:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave….

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Good night, America.