I generally revisit this book every four years – every US campaign cycle. For half my life, the US election period has been a favourite spectator sport. I didn’t re-read it, last time around. Even Thompson gives a reason why:
How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions?
This time, I picked up a new edition on Kindle, with the above cover.
The first thing that strikes me is the thing that always strikes me on opening it, the thing I forget every time. You know how old tv shows now come with a content warning for outdated language and attitudes? I always, always forget how much Thompson threw the N-word around, how so many ostensibly liberal writers of the era did. I think it’s supposed to play like allyship, and perhaps it’s only the distance of decades that makes it hit absolutely not like that, and maybe also the complication that allies need to be chosen.
I still have issues using the word “queer,” despite the fact that my daughter identifies as queer, because I come from a period where it was a slur and it’s always going to have that connotation to me. My position is that I don’t get to use that word. I feel like Thompson maybe never had that conversation with himself, and never landed on the position that Ron Dellums got to use that word in public but Hunter Thompson didn’t.
All that said: there are reasons why I re-read the book, and they include that Thompson did have insight:
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity.
I mean, that’s a real thing. That’s recognition of privilege, and it lets you know he’s still in there. This is before Thompson went full human-cartoon: there was still an open mind and beating heart in there, no matter how imperfect, and a burning curiosity about other people’s lives and the systems they lived inside.
And that it remains eerily timeless.
The prevailing wisdom today is that any candidate in a standard-brand, two-party election will get about 40 percent of the vote.
The book is always a lesson in how very little ever seems to change in that system. (The UK system is its own exercise in hauntings.) 2020 was a bit of an outlier – biggest voter turn-out in 120 years, Biden 51% to Trump 46%.
This book also contains Thompson’s famous statement on objective journalism:
The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it until one of those known, heavy, out-front shoplifters came into the place … but when that happened, everybody got so excited that the thief had to do something quick, like buy a green popsicle or a can of Coors and get out of the place immediately.
Pretty sure I stole that a hundred times.
I have a feeling I may be using this space to make notes on my re-read.
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