I was reading a bit of Fear and Loathing in American this morning, and stumbled upon Doc’s teardown of John Wayne and The American Dream. I can’t believe I’ve never read this before, but it ignited me fiercely, in the way only Hunter’s best stuff can.
It starts thusly…
This country is so basically rotten that a vicious, bigoted pig like John Wayne is a great national hero. Thomas Jefferson would have been horrified by a monster like Wayne——and Wayne, given a shot across the time-span, would be proud to pistol-whip a “radical punk” like Jefferson.
John Wayne is a final, rotten symbol of everything that went wrong with the American Dream——he is our Frankenstein monster, a hero to millions… He beats the mortal shit out of anything he can’t understand. The brainwaves of “The Duke” are like those of the Hammerhead Shark——a beast so stupid and irrationally vicious that scientists have abandoned all hope of dealing with it, except as an unexplainable “throwback.” The Hammerhead, they say, is no different today than he was in One Million B.C. He is a ruthless, stupid beast with only one instinct——to attack, to hurt & cripple & kill…
–Hunter S. Thompson, from a letter to Margaret Harrell, Fear and Loathing In America
Amazing stuff, and it gets better, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself. Just a bit of thought to chew on in this post-aquarian age. Mahalo.
-c
ChrissyOne 