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May 31, 2005

You could strike sparks anywhere

Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be launched from his gonzo fist tower on August 20. Johnny Depp is paying for it. That would be something to see.

PLAYBOY: Do you believe religious things about drugs?
THOMPSON: No, I never have. That's my main argument with the drug culture. I've never believed in that guru trip; you know, God, nirvana, that kind of oppressive, hipper-than-thou bullshit. I like to just gobble the stuff right out in the street and see what happens, take my chances, just stomp on my own accelerator. It's like getting on a racing bike and all of a sudden you're doing 120 miles per hour into a curve that has sand all over it and you think, "Holy Jesus, here we go," and you lay it over till the pegs hit the street and metal starts to spark. If you're good enough, you can pull it out, but sometimes you end up in the emergency room with some bastard in a white suit sewing your scalp back on.

PLAYBOY: Do you think that his resignation proves that the system works?
THOMPSON: Well, that depends on what you mean by "works." We can take some comfort, I guess, in knowing the system was so finely conceived originally -- almost 200 years ago -- that it can still work when it's absolutely forced to.

(snip)
...but in the end, the Nixon Watergate saga was written by mavericks who worked the loneliest outside edges of the system, not by the kind of people who played it safe and followed the letter of the law. If the system worked in this case, it was almost in spite of itself. Jesus, what else could the Congress have done -- faced with the spectacle of a President going on national TV to admit a felony? Nixon dug his own grave, then made a public confession. If his resignation somehow proves the system works, you have to wonder how well that same system might have worked if we'd had a really blue-chip, sophisticated criminal in the White House -- instead of a half-mad used-car salesman. In the space of ten months, the two top executives of this country resigned rather than risk impeachment and trial; and they wouldn't even have had to do that if their crimes hadn't been too gross to ignore and if public opinion hadn't turned so massively against them. Finally, even the chickenshit politicians in Congress will act if the people are outraged enough. But you can bet that if the public-opinion polls hadn't gone over 50 percent in favor of his impeachment, he'd still be in the White House.

PLAYBOY: Is politics going to get any better?
THOMPSON: Well, it can't get much worse. Nixon was so bad, so obviously guilty and corrupt, that we're already beginning to write him off as a political mutant, some kind of bad and unexplainable accident. The danger in that is that it's like saying, "Thank God! We've cut the cancer out...you see it?...It's lying there...just sew up the wound...cauterize it.... No, no, don't bother to look for anything else...just throw the tumor away, burn it," and then a few months later the poor bastard dies, his whole body rotten with cancer. I don't think purging Nixon is going to do much to the system except make people more careful. Even if we accept the idea that Nixon himself was a malignant mutant, his Presidency was no accident. Hell, Ford is our accident. He's never been elected to anything but Congress.... But Richard Nixon has been elected to every national office a shrewd mutant could aspire to: Congressman, Senator, Vice-President, President. He should have been impeached, convicted and jailed, if only as a voter-education project.

PLAYBOY: Do you think that over the course of the Watergate investigation, Congress spent as much energy covering up its own sins as it did in exposing Richard Nixon's?
THOMPSON: Well, that's a pretty harsh statement; but I'm sure there've been a lot of tapes and papers burned and a lot of midnight phone calls, saying things like, "Hello, John, remember that letter I wrote you on August fifth? I just ran into a copy in my files here and, well, I'm burning mine, why don't you burn yours, too, and we'll just forget all about that matter? Meanwhile, I'm sending you a case of Chivas Regal and I have a job for your son here in my office this summer -- just as soon as he brings me the ashes of that fucking letter."

For some hilarious, then sobering, then hilarious again moments with my favorite doctor of journalism, read the rest.

Posted by Jeff at May 31, 2005 12:18 PM