Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone by Hunter S. Thompson Read Free Book Online

Aspen recently, they were amazed to find that I actually expect to
win
my race. A preliminary canvass shows me running well ahead of the Democratic incumbent, and only slightly behind the Republican challenger.
    The root point is that Aspen’s political situation is so volatile—as a result of the Joe Edwards campaign—that
any
Freak Power candidate is now a possible winner.
    In my case, for instance, I will have to work very hard—and spew out some really heinous ideas during my campaign—to get
less
than 30 percent of the vote in a three-way race. And an underground candidate who really wanted to win could assume, from the start, a working nut of about 40 percent of the electorate—with his chances of victory riding almost entirely on his Backlash Potential; or how much active fear and loathing his candidacy might provoke among the burghers who have controlled local candidates for so long.
    The possibility of victory can be a heavy millstone around the neck of any political candidate who might prefer, in his heart, to spend his main energies on a series of terrifying, whiplash assaults on everything the voters hold dear. There are harsh echoes of the Magic Christian in this technique: the candidate first creates an impossible psychic maze, then he drags the voters into it and flails them constantly with gibberish and rude shocks. This was Mailer’s technique, and it got him fifty-five thousand votes in a city of ten million people—but in truth it is more a form of vengeance than electoral politics. Which is not to say that itcan’t be effective, in Aspen or anywhere else, but as a political strategy it is tainted by a series of disastrous defeats.
    In any event, the Magic Christian conceit is one side of the “new politics” coin. It doesn’t work, but it’s fun ... unlike that coin’s other face that emerged in the presidential campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in 1968. In both cases, we saw establishment candidates
claiming conversion
to some newer and younger state of mind (or political reality) that would make them more in tune with a newer, younger, and weirder electorate that had previously called them both useless.
    And it worked. Both conversions were hugely successful, for a while ... and if the tactic itself seemed cynical, it is still hard to know, in either case, whether the tactic was father to the conversion, or vice-versa. Which hardly matters, for now. We are talking about political-action formats: if the Magic Christian concept is one, then the Kennedy-McCarthy format has to qualify as another ... particularly as the national Democratic Party is already working desperately to make it work again in 1972, when the Demos’ only hope of unseating Nixon will again be some shrewd establishment candidate on the brink of menopause who will suddenly start dropping acid in late ’71 and then hit the rock-festival trail in the summer of ’72. He will doff his shirt at every opportunity and his wife will burn her bra ... and millions of the young will vote for him, against Nixon.
    Or will they? There is still another format, and this is the one we stumbled on in Aspen. Why not challenge the establishment with a candidate they’ve never heard of? Who has never been primed or prepped or greased for public office? And whose lifestyle is already so weird that the idea of “conversion” would never occur to him?
    In other words, why not run an honest freak and turn him loose, on
their
turf, to show up all the “normal” candidates for the worthless losers they are and always have been? Why defer to the bastards? Why assume they’re intelligent? Why believe they won’t crack and fold in a crunch? (When the Japs went into Olympic volleyball they ran a blitz on everybody using strange but maddeningly legal techniques like the “Jap roll,” the “dink spike,” and the “lightning belly pass” that reduced their taller opponents to screaming jelly.)
    This is the essence of what some