Dear Dirty America

After watching the candidates circle one another during the second presidential debate, seeing the intensity in their gazes, and being uncomfortable with Mitt Romney’s pushiness toward the moderator, I couldn’t stop thinking of the following passage written forty years ago by Hunter Thompson:

…a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare–any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it….

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A career politician finally smelling the White House is not much different form a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way…(Fear & Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, 380).

If Hunter hadn’t killed himself in 2005, he might have been driven over the edge by this election season. Romney/Ryan would have done him in, along with the misadventures of the last four Obama years.

“Like” Dear Dirty America on Facebook