Hunter S. Thompson, Nixon, and Ron Paul

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I'm really whoring out the threads right now, but this was too fitting for WF to not write

I just watched this movie Gonzo which is all about Hunter S Thompson. I recommend that you all watch it, even if you know nothing about the guy - i really didn't.

Anyway he had a crazy life and was a man who really followed his passion and had deep convictions about the issues in our country and the direction it was headed, it's even suggested that when George Bush being elected was the "Tipping" point for him before he decided to take his own life.

The most shocking thing about the whole documentary is that similarities between state of the country during the Nixon election, when it was Nixon vs McGovern, is eeeeeerily close to the exact same shit we are seeing today. What amazes me is how close it is, it's almost like a carbon copy. Nixon was a greaseball just like Mitt, we were in vietnam for no reason just like the middle east today its fucking crazy.

And throughout all of it Hunter S Thompson was able to really see the trend of the country and how fucked our system was. I don't know if any of you knew this already, but i certainty didn't and i had to share it.

Hunter blasted himself in 2005, i FUCKING wish he was around today, or at least lived to see the 2008 election. I swear to god that after watching that whole documentary, and understanding the type of person he is, i have no doubt that he would probably be the BIGGEST Ron Paul advocate and spokesperson of all time. It's a fucking shame

Here's just a quick clip that explains what i'm talkin about, you can skip after 1:20

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GgkzNiW2Xo]Nixonalia - Hunter S.Thompson discusses what Nixon represents to him - YouTube[/ame]
 


He had an unhealthy obsession with Nixon. Occasionally during hallucinations, he would see various objects in the room turn into Nixon heads.

When people would come over to his house, he'd take them in the backyard and they'd sit there getting drunk and throwing grenades at stuff. For his funeral, Johnny Depp shot his ashes out of a cannon.

If you liked him, and the Fear and Loathing stuff, check out The Rum Diary. his character is one of the more normal ones.
 
jryan21 said:
He had an unhealthy obsession with Nixon. Occasionally during hallucinations, he would see various objects in the room turn into Nixon heads.

When people would come over to his house, he'd take them in the backyard and they'd sit there getting drunk and throwing grenades at stuff. For his funeral, Johnny Depp shot his ashes out of a cannon.

If you liked him, and the Fear and Loathing stuff, check out The Rum Diary. his character is one of the more normal ones.
Click to expand...

Just watched the rum diary. It was good but it kinda fell flat/was confusing
 
I'm sorry, why should we listen to Hunter S. Thompson?

He's a guy who became popular by writing entertaining stories, but does that make him a political expert? If this guy wasn't a published author, he's be your average aging, drug abusing hippy, constantly drinking cocktails and rambling on about how he hates the government. You may just well get your political information from me at that rate. Or Lindsay Lohan.

As someone who studied Nixon extensively, at least his foreign policy aspect, especially since he "opened up China" to the rest of the world and had many other success in that sphere, I don't consider Nixon that bad of a president. Most people instantly have a knee jerk reaction to Nixon without really even knowing anything about the guy because of the whole Watergate scandal.

On the whole, Nixon was a tragically flawed, but a genius man. Everything about him can be summarized through one anecdote: In college, Nixon thought he made a mistake on one of his final exams, and found a janitor and paid him to break into the teacher's office and make sure his answer was correct. The janitor did just that, but the next day the break in was detected and all of the tests were invalidated. Nixon had a perfect score.
 
The article he wrote on 9/11 reminds us that he had extraordinary vision. The movie is a bit meandering however.
 
Moberg had been in San Juan only a few months, but Lotterman seemed to loathe him with a passion that it would take most men years to cultivate. Moberg was a degenerate. He was small, with thin blond hair and a face that was pale and flabby. I have never seen a man so bent on self-destruction -- not only self, but destruction of everything he could get his hands on. He was lewd and corrupt in every way. He hated the taste of rum, yet he would finish a bottle in ten minutes, then vomit and fall down. He ate nothing but sweet rolls and spaghetti, which he would heave the moment he got drunk. He spent all his money on whores and when that got dull he would take on an occasional queer, just for the strangeness of it. He would do anything for money, and this was the man we had on the police beat. Often he disappeared for days at a time. Then someone would have to track him down through the dirtiest bars in La Perla, a slum so foul that on maps of San Juan it appears as a blank space. La Perla was Moberg's headquarters; he felt at home there, he said, and in the rest of the city -- except for a few horrible bars -- he was a lost soul.

He told me that he'd spent the first twenty years of his life in Sweden, and often I tried to picture him against a crisp Scandinavian landscape. I tried to see him on skis, or living peacefully with his family in some cold mountain village. From the little he said of Sweden I gathered he'd lived in a small town and his parents had been comfortable people with enough money to send him to college in America.

He spent two years at NYU, living in the Village at one of those residence hotels that cater to foreigners. This apparently unhinged him. Once he was arrested on Sixth Avenue, he said, for pissing on a fireplug like a dog. It cost him ten days in the Tombs, and when he got out he left immediately for New Orleans. He floundered there for a while, then got a job on a freighter headed for the Orient. He worked on boats for several years before drifting into journalism. Now, thirty-three years old and looking fifty, his spirit broken and his body swollen with drink, he bounced from one country to another, hiring himself out as a reporter and hanging on until he was fired.

Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard. "Lotterman thinks I'm a Demogorgon," he would say. "You know what that is? Look it up -- no wonder he doesn't like me." One night at Al's he told me he was writing a book, called The Inevitability of a Strange World. He took it very seriously. "It's the kind of book a Demogorgon would write," he said. "Full of shit and terror -- I've selected the most horrible things I could imagine -- the hero is a flesh eater disguised as a priest -- cannibalism fascinates me -- once down at the jail they beat a drunk until he almost died -- I asked one of the cops if I could eat a chunk of his leg before they killed him. . ." He laughed. "The swine threw me out -- hit me with a club." He laughed again. "I would have eaten it -- why shouldn't I? There's nothing sacred about human flesh -- it's meat like everything else -- would you deny that?"

"No," I said. "Why should I deny it?"

It was one of the few times I talked to him that I could understand what he said. Most of the time he was incoherent. Lotterman was forever threatening to fire him, but we were so understaffed that he couldn't afford to let anyone go. When Moberg spent a few days in the hospital after his beating at the hands of the strikers, Lotterman had hopes that he might straighten out. But when he came back to work he was more erratic than before.
 
jryan21 said:
If you liked him, and the Fear and Loathing stuff, check out The Rum Diary. his character is one of the more normal ones.
Click to expand...


Fuck that. If you like Hunter S. Thompson, why don't you read the fucking book, since, you know, he actually had something to do with the making of that. Like writing the fucking thing. Hollywood fucked that book all to hell when they made the movie.
 
statelizard said:
Fuck that. If you like Hunter S. Thompson, why don't you read the fucking book, since, you know, he actually had something to do with the making of that. Like writing the fucking thing. Hollywood fucked that book all to hell when they made the movie.
Click to expand...
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTN3s2iVKKI"]This.[/ame]
 
I took it back to my desk and read it twice. After the first reading, I knew why Segarra had called it useless. Most of it was dialogue, conversations with Puerto Ricans at the airport. They were telling why they were going to NEw York, what they were looking for and what they thought of the lives they were leaving behind.

At first glance, it was pretty dull stuff. Most of them seemed naive and ignorant-they hadn't read the travel brochures and the rum advertisments, they knew nothing of the Boom- all they wanted was to get to NEw York. It was a dreary document, but when I finished it there was no doubt in my mind why these people were leaving. Not that their reasons made sense, but they were reasons, nonetheless- simple statements, born in minds I could never understand because I had gone to football games and gin-jug parties and dancing school and I had done lots of things, but had never been a Puerto Rican.

It occurred to me that the real reason these people were leaving this island was basically the same reason I had left St. Louis and quit college and said to hell with all the things I was supposed to want-indeed, all the things I had responsibility to want- to uphold, as it were- and I wondered how 'I might have sounded if someone had interviewed me at Lambert Airport on the day I left for New York with two suitcases and three hundred dollars and an envelope full of my clippings from an Army newspaper.

"Tell me Mr. Kemp, just why are you leaving St Louis, where your family has lived for generations and where you could, for the asking, have a niche carved out for yourself and your children so that you might live in peace and security for the rest of your well fed days?"

"well, you seee, I .... Ah..... Well, I get the strange feeling I.... ash.... I sit around here and I look at this place and I just want to get out, you know? I want to flee."

Mr. Kemp, you seem like a reasonable man- just what is it about St. Louis that makes you want to flee? Im not prying, you understand, I'm just a reporter and I'm from Tallahassee myself but they sent me out here to-"

"certainly. I wish I could.... ah... you know, I'd like to be able to tell you that... ah.... maybe I should say that I feel a rubber sack coming down on me.... purely symbolic, you know.... the venal ignorance of the fathers being visited on the sons..... can you make something of that?"

"well, ha-ha, I sort of know what you mean, Mr. Kemp. Back in Tallahassee it was a cotton sack, but I guess it was about the same."

"Yeah, It's the goddamn sack- so I'm taking off and I guess i'll ... ah...."

"Mr. Kemp, I wish I could say how much I sympathize, but you understand that if I go back with a story about a rubber sack they're going to tell me that its useless and probably fire me. Now I don't want to press you, but I wonder if you could give me something more concrete; you know- is there not enough opportunity here for aggressive young men? Is ST Louis meeting her responsibilities to youth? Is our society not flexible enough for young people with ideas? You can talk to me Mr. Kemp- What is it?"

"Well, fella, I sish I could help you. God knowsI don't want you to go back without a story and get fired. I know how it is- I'm a journalist myself, you know- but.... well..... I get The Fear.... can you use that? St. Louis Give Young Men The Fear- Not a bad headline, Eh?"

"come on, Kemp, you know I can't use that: Rubber sacks... The fear"

"Goddamnit, man, I tell you it's the fear of the sack! Tell them that this man Kemp is fleeing ST. Louis because he suspects the sack is full of something ugly and he doesn't want to be put in with it. He senses this from afar. This man Kemp is not a model youth. He grew up with two toilets and a football, but somewhere along the line he got warped. Now all he wants is Out, Flee. He doesn't give a good shit for St. Louis or his friends or his family or anything else.... he just wants to find some place where he can breathe..... Is that good enough for you?"

"well, ah, Kemp, you sound a bit hysterical. I don't know if I can get the story on you or not"

"Well fuck you then. Get out of my way. They're calling my flight- hear that voice? Hear it?"

"you're deranged, Kemp! You'll come to no good end! I knew people like you in Tallahassee and they all ended up-?

They all ended up like Puerto Ricans. They fled and they couldn't say why, but they damn well wanted out and they didn't care if the newspapers understood or not. Somehow they got the idea that by getting the hell away from where they were they could find something better. They heard the word, the rotten devilish word that makes people incoherent with desire to move on- not everybody in the world lives in tin shacks with no toilets and no money at all and no food but rice and beans; and not everybody cuts sugarcane for a dollar a day, or hauls a load of coconuts into town to sell for two cents each- the cheap, hot hungry world of their fathers and their grandfathers and all their brothers and sisters was not the whole story, because if a man could muster the guts or even the desperation to move a few thousand miles there was a pretty good chance that he'd have money in his pocket and meat in his belly and one hell of a romping good time.

Yeamon had caught their mood perfectly. In 26 pages he had gone way beyond the story of why Puerto Ricans shove off for New York; in the end it was a story of why a man leaves home in the face of ugly odds, and when I finished it I felt small and silly for all the tripe I had written since I'd been in San Juan. Some of the conversations were amusing and others were pathetic- but through them all ran the main thread, the prime mover, the fact that these people thought they might have a chance in New York, and in Puerto Rico they had not chance at all
 
participants in political discussions always seem to forget that presidents are merely enablers, not the planners. they just press the buttons others tell them to press. there is no "genius" in being a president.
 
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