Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (92 page)

Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. A V-8 Cadillac will go ten or fifteen miles faster if you give it a full dose of “Carmelita.” This has been proved many times. That is why you see so many Cadillacs parked in front of truck stops on Highway 66 around midnight. These are Speed Pimps, and they are loading up on more than gasoline. You watch one of these places for a while, and you see a pattern: a big fast car pulls up in front of the doors and a wild-looking girl gets out, stark-naked except for a fur coat or a ski parka, and she runs into the place with a handful of money, half crazy to buy some flat-out-guaranteed driving music.

It happens over and over, and sooner or later you get hooked on it, you get addicted. Every time I hear “White Rabbit,” I am back on the greasy midnight streets of San Francisco, looking for music, riding a fast red motorcycle downhill into the Presidio, leaning desperately into the curves through the eucalyptus trees, trying to get to the Matrix in time to hear Grace Slick play the flute.

There was no piped-in music on those nights, no headphones or Walkmans or even a plastic windscreen to keep off the rain. But I could hear the music anyway, even when it was five miles away. Once you heard the music done right, you could pack it into your brain and take it anywhere, forever.

Yes sir. That is my wisdom and this is my song. It is Sunday and I am making new rules for myself. I will open my heart to spirits and pay more attention to animals. I will take some harp music and drive down to the Texaco station, where I can get a pork taco and read a
New York Times
. After that, I will walk across the street to the post office and slip my letter into her mailbox.

Res ipsa loquitur.

__ __ __ __

While the 2004 election seems almost like a fait accompli in retrospect, it was still an all-hands-on-deck, down-to-the-wire dogfight when Hunter was writing what turned out to be his last post from the National Affairs desk—and his final
Rolling Stone
story. George W. Bush wasn’t declared the winner until the day after the election, when John Kerry elected not to contest the official result in Ohio, and Hunter used his bully pulpit to encourage readers to get out and vote in a direct, pragmatic way that was unlike almost anything he’d done since . . . well, since trying to muster votes for his own run for sheriff of Aspen himself some thirty-four years earlier—the foundation, of course, of his first piece for the magazine. The snake was eating its own tail.

If there’s nostalgia or sentimentality in this piece, it’s in Hunter’s remembrance of his first meetings with John Kerry in 1972 when they were both demonstrating against the Vietnam war in Washington, D.C., “angry and righteous,” and Hunter was “trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president’s lawn.” It was a brutal contrast between those “white-knuckle days of yesteryear” and the nation’s contemporary political climate, in which the big question was not “whether President Bush is acting more like the head of a fascist government” but “if the people want it that way.”

How bad was Dubya? Bad enough to make Hunter long for his old nemesis Tricky Dick: “If he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him.” Less than four months later—at the end of the football season, and one month after Bush’s inauguration for a second term—Hunter would be dead.

November 11, 2004

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004

Lyndon Johnson and the Pig Farmer . . . The Stink of a Loser . . . The Drug of War . . . President Nixon, Now More Than Ever . . . Revenge of the Fun-Hogs . . . A Sacrifice to the Rat Gods

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners. Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him “Mister President,” and then I felt ashamed.

Karl Rove, the president’s political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White
House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe—and that is Rove’s problem. His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of sixty million voters.

That is an unacceptable failure for hardballers like Rove and Dick Cheney. On the undercard in Cleveland against John Edwards, Cheney came across as the cruel and sinister überboss of Halliburton. In his only honest moment during the entire debate, he vowed, “We have to make America the best place in the world to do business.”

Bush signed his own death warrant in the opening round, when he finally had to speak without his TelePrompTer. It was a Cinderella story brought up to date in Florida that night—except this time the false prince turned back into a frog.

Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There
are
no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the
passing lane
. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush—Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain—all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.

That is why George W. Bush is president of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply
wanted
it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the U.S. Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc.) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November.

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early and he had no response to “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the military-industrial complex loot the Treasury and
plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

The genetically vicious nature of presidential campaigns in America is too obvious to argue with, but some people call it fun, and I am one of them. Election Day—especially a presidential election—is always a wild and terrifying time for politics junkies, and I am one of those, too. We look forward to major Election Days like sex addicts look forward to orgies. We are slaves to it.

Which is not a bad thing, all in all, for the winners. They are not the ones who bitch and whine about slavery when the votes are finally counted and the losers are forced to get down on their knees. No. The slaves who emerge victorious from these drastic public decisions go crazy with joy and plunge each other into deep tubs of chilled Cristal champagne with naked strangers who want to be close to a winner.

That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public.

Nobody wants to hire a loser. Right? They stink of doom and defeat.

That is the nature of high-risk politics.
Veni Vidi Vice,
especially among Republicans. It’s like the ancient Bedouin saying, As the camel falls to its knees, more knives are drawn.

Indeed, the numbers are weird today, and so is this dangerous election. The time has come to rumble, to inject a bit of fun into politics.

I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional gambler, especially when I’m betting real money on the outcome.
Contrary to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with 5 points as a recommended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about 46 percent, plus 5 points for owning the U.S. Supreme Court—which
seemed
to equal 51 percent. Nobody really believed that, but George W. Bush moved into the White House anyway.