For God’s Sake Hunter S. Thompson, Doctor Gonzo, Give Us A Sign-Do Not Put Pearls Before Swine-With “Generation Of Swine,” Part 2 In Mind

By Frank Jackman

No question politics is a hard-ball profession, tougher still when you have to write about these thieving bastards who would not know the truth if they fell over it in some forsaken gin mill some salty midnight. Are so crooked and here you can use your own variation, they need anything from their morning toilette valet to six Secret Service agents to screw them into their pants (the women too except maybe they need help with dresses). That is why whenever I have despaired, when I was ready to fold them and weep I would, still do actually as you will read below, I grab whatever Doctor Gonzo, that is the late lamented Hunter S. Thompson volume I can lay my greedy little hands on. To relieve that awful headache that reaches to my medulla every time I try to write anything about current political developments, in the United States mostly in the Age of Trump.

Now Thompson was not a taste for everybody and as he slid down the life trail he got caught in something of a trap having to accept, however reluctantly, the mantle every four years from poor Teddy White of the dreaded Making of The President series of books trap  covering the freaking presidential campaigns that in the end he knew were pure vanilla, pure bullshit even if he had some partisan favorite. In the end they all, the politicians and their hangers-on had feet of clay and corkscrew morals.

I find it very hard to draw any comparisons between today’s extreme low bar of political civility, today’s political gridlock and previous eras since these times seem to be sui generous but when I grabbed from the shelf Thompson’s Generation of Swine I knew why I grabbed the sucker (beyond that political twist a read which stopped my headaches-for a while). That book detailed mainly through weekly articles what Thompson did when he got a serious paying job for young Will Hearst whose grandfather Kane I think his last name was hired him after he had taken over his San Francisco Examiner flagship newspaper with the idea of treading new ground in the Age of Ronald Reagan, POSTUS in the 1980s. (I would be performing my own whitewash of the times, making it some kind of middle ground ‘golden age” if I did not include one Yankee cowboy, George Bush, the old man not the guy who dragged our asses into now never-ending wars in Afghanistan in those times. Pretty Boy George gave the Eastern imprimatur to every dirty trick, every ugly ploy, every bag job, every satchel filled with twenties for some ill-begotten adventure those silly bastards pulled dragging the rest of us along with them.)

The Age of Reagan, the age of the Generation of Swine, Part 1 is the perfect low-bar to compare with these days of the serious gutter that bourgeois politics has fallen into (beyond that possibility it is either hapless Warren Harding or the misbegotten Sam Grant but those boys were strictly amateur, would be eaten by a guy like now disgraced Ollie North or Steve Bannon for lunch and have time for a nap). No question at the time that likes of cowboy Ollie who ran the whole Iran-Contra out of the basement of the White House while Dutch (and Ivy League Bush slept the sleep of the dusted), Sleepy Bud MacFarlane, shifty Admiral Poindexter, bum of the month George Shultz, the Dragon Queen Nancy, some stone cold-killers running the hustle of the month club out in Evangelical land like Jimmy Bakker and Patsy Robertson (who laugh, laugh had some kind of demented presidential ambitions were in line for the first rank of hell.

I almost become bilious when I saw the names from out of the past since I thought we had buried those “undead” or at least put knives through their hearts. I know I was ready to kick the nearest television set in anger at the damn supply-side voodoo economics, the big- time red scare Cold War II and other assorted bullshit these bastards put us through. Thompson caught it just right when he said that was an age when it was unsafe to walk in the acidified rain or to touch any human blood, meaning any human being for any reason without worrying about winding up in some freaking hospice. Today is worse, far worse but you already know that.               

Yeah, those were tough times, the bar was pretty fucking low to hold the tattered social fabric together. But what would Thompson, who committed self-sought suicide over a decade ago, think about this current edition of the generation of swine. How would he go down in the mud with the bad ass boys and girls, the rabble, there is no other word for it, who run the show down in D.C. No one would blame him for barring the door to his cabin in Woody Creek and daring anybody to come within fifty yards of that locale. Still with true crazies like Trump, his family, his entourage of yes men and women, his putting the rest of us through hoops Thompson would cut to the bone, would go down in the mud and mix it up. I swear I will not ask for anything else, but Hunter give us a sign, tell us where the tarot heads, channel Johnny Depp if you have to but give us some pithy words to slay these bastard dragons. Hell, call collect if you have to I will gladly take your call anytime.