more on Nixon, "a brute in need of extermination"---Hunter S. Thompson

[Mark Kohut]

yes, I loathed him too---too easily, as alice is always saying (about some, maybe me righteously)---as did most I knew....from "Nixonland" book, I learned his "negatives" were higher than about any politician's, even Goldwater's and some hated Dems.....he was the examplar of the modern partisan divide.....for someone who scored national majority wins...

I should have written so many writers loathed him in their published work.....that seems different in general....

--- On Fri, 1/1/10, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: more on Nixon, "a brute in need of extermination"---Hunter S.  Thompson
> To: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Date: Friday, January 1, 2010, 10:44 PM
> It wasn't just the writers who
> loathed Nixon. My mother is and was a
> Republican (God save her heathen soul) and yet I remember
> that fateful
> November night in 1972 as an awful experience for all of
> us. Besides
> being a Republican, my mom is and was one of THOSE
> Christians. By that
> I mean the type that would likely have scared the shit out
> of ol'
> Jesus. But I remember how fervently she prayed over the
> radio--it was
> a drizzly November evening in the redwood forest and we had
> a
> steelhead in the smoker outside while we played Monopoly
> and listened
> as the results came straggling in--and she was praying that
> the Beast
> would be voted out of office and McGovern would be
> elected.
> 
> And the shock and fear we all felt that night all came
> flooding back
> in November '04. It was the same sense of betrayal, only
> multiplied by
> the explicit betrayal of the Watergate proceedings. That
> another crook
> could repeat the crime AND GET AWAY WITH IT was
> emotionally
> overwhelming when Bush was re-elected. I remember sitting
> at a 4-way
> boulevard stop for several minutes at one point the day
> after '04
> election and the four of us stopped at each sign just sat
> staring. We
> were all so stunned and amazed that none of us could take
> the
> initiative to move from our quasi-catatonic state for some
> time. It
> was hard to care whether going was any different than
> staying or not.
> 
> By contrast, I was staying with my dad in Minneapolis on
> August 8,
> 1974 and I remember the joy my dad (an Episcopal minister)
> and his new
> fiancee (a former Catholic nun) displayed when I walked in
> to the
> apartment on Pillsbury Ave and they announced that Nixon
> had resigned.
> They were ecstatic. This was about the time I read Catcher
> in the Rye
> and felt Holden Caulfield's alienation was tawdry at best.
> I had
> reached that sense of moral dismay and turpitude that
> defined my
> outlook for many years. I was pretty sure Ford would not be
> an
> improvement. And Ford's first act? Clemency for the
> criminal king. I
> was pretty sure we were all fucked and nothing mattered
> anymore, so I
> failed to be greatly moved. It was as if my dismay at the
> "system"
> finally showed me there was no sense in hoping to change
> it. There was
> only hopelessness for all the years to come. Not only was
> America in
> decline, civilization and all human existence seemed
> intolerable. It
> took a couple years for me to come into contact with Marx
> and the
> Marxists and get a fire going again for a while.
> 
> And 30 years later, Bush got re-elected.
> 
> Emotionally, I sense a great deal of...well, not
> similarity,
> but...connectedness between the two eras. It may be
> entirely
> subjective, may not. A lot of folks got pretty inspired
> when Carter
> was elected. He did a lot of really groovy things. Some of
> us remember
> how long that lasted, too, and how it ended. Carter remains
> my
> favorite president in my lifetime. Kennedy might have been,
> but we all
> know how long that lasted, and how it ended..... Will there
> be many
> parallels between Carter and Obama? Time will do it's thing
> as regards
> that.
> 
> Is there hope? Is that maybe a little of what P explores in
> IV? The
> movement in the early '70s was all about emancipation
> through personal
> transformation. Like everything else, it got all fucked up,
> but some
> folks got the idea. Isn't it the ultimate hope of the
> enlightened
> anarchist that everyone will catch on eventually and want
> to learn how
> to row their own little boat? But people can only catch on
> if the
> rogues among us show something better than contempt....
> Beware the
> Fang, and keep cool, but care....
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > One major, and more than two, of our good-reading
> plisters have pointed to
> > Thompson's Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas in re
> Inherent Vice, specifically the Las Vegas section.
> >
> > In some of Hunter S.'s letters, I am reminded of how
> much he loathed Nixon, as Pynchon did,  most public in
> "Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" which
> stemmed from an interview Hunter did early in the campaign,
> having written Nixon off as a tired loser set to lose again
> but instead with his V signs and football metaphors finding
> him more energetically bright than he expected and therefore
> much more dangerous than he had feared.....expressed in a
> letter in the phrase above...
> >
> > Pynchon, Coover, Roth, Thompson, others I'm sure I
> don't know of.....so many American writers so loathed that
> man.................
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> "liber enim librum aperit."
>