perfidy

I'm a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson. In my halcyon college days, I read all his classic books in one short stretch of the summer of 1995. I would sit in the shade after six hours of washing dishes for rich summer-band-camp brats, drink gallon jugs of Gin & Tonic, smoke big Mexican cigars until my teeth were brown, and read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, F&L on the Campaign Trail, and his collected shorter pieces until I could no longer put together a coherent sentence, much less stand on my own. It's not the gin. It's the cigars that will get you every time.

For a long time, HST was one of the best topical writers in America. Even as late as 1995 he would occasionally emerge from his vague rehashing of old, er, hash, to issue a diamond-clear, cutting demolition of the latest Clinton foolishness.

So naturally I was very happy when HST started writing a periodic column for espn.com. Some of them were great-- HST is a huge football fan, and he usually has enough money riding on college basketball for him to write something weird impassioned.

But what the hell is this?!

In his latest piece, Welcome to the Big Darkness, Thompson rambles on about spine and hip replacement surgery, Kobe Bryant, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness in America, and then makes it clear that someone's been slipping him massive doses of Ibogaine:

When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

Guh? Wuzzah? Is this screeching hate-fit a clever satire of the far left's alternate reality, or has the Doc finally severed mind from reality and plunged into the Void?

That's the damned thing about modern aesthetics. Sometimes you can't tell the difference between art and bullshit.