General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRe-reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail
I'm struck by how many of his complaints/comments about the system still resonate 40 years later.
The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.
The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzythen go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.
Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.
How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuckand beaten once againwith some tried and half-true hack like Humphrey, Jackson, or Muskie
and George McGovern, the only candidate in either party worth voting for, is hung in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of the Washington Press Corps. Hed be a fine President, they say, but of course he cant possibly win. Why not? Well
I encourage everyone to read this book during every presidential primary season. It'll add a lot of perspective.
Algernon Moncrieff
(5,790 posts)Many excerpts are also in "The Great Shark Hunt."
Unrelated: Stephen Ambrose's "The Wild Blue" gives an excellent account of McGovern's WW 2 experience.
FLPanhandle
(7,107 posts)I suspect 40 years from now, it'll still be the same show.