There simply isn’t enough mescaline or acid to make sense of it all
“And the more I know/The less I understand.” Don Henley, “The Heart of the Matter.”
As I watch Donald Trump and his minions flail and fail at the simplest tasks, and MAGA Senators like Eric Schmitt of Missouri humiliate themselves (and the people they purport to represent), I can’t decide if the appropriate response is to laugh uproariously or wail into my pillow. Donald Trump, as I have observed for ten years, attracts misfits, fools, grifters, pinheads, assholes, dickheads, cranks, nitwits, racists and flat-out crooks like my compost bin attracts flies.
Instead of laughing or wailing, I decided to seek intellectual and spiritual sustenance in Fear and Loathing in America, The Gonzo Letters, Volume II, by the late Hunter S. Thompson. Specifically, my interest is the 1969-1970 period, when Thompson made a drug-fueled but quite astute bid to win election to the office of Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on a Freak Power ticket. At the time, as HST wrote, Aspen was being sold out from under people who simply wanted to “live in quiet, noncommercial peace, like decent human beings — and to escape the urban horrors that plagued them in L.A., the Bay Area, Chicago and New York. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see.”
While scanning letters for the Freak Power platform, HST’s statement of principles, I kept getting sidetracked by stuff like HST writing the General Ordnance Equipment Company to inquire about Chemical Mace MK-V: “I want to learn as much about the technical aspects of the new urban-style police work as I can.” This was Hunter preparing for his new role in law enforcement.
On July 31, 1970 HST wrote Senator Walter F. Mondale asking for permission to use this Mondale quote in a book: “The capacity of this nation to inflict pain & suffering on those without power is virtually unlimited.” Sweet Jesus, my dear readers, fifty-six years on and those words not only remain generally accurate but describe what Trump 2.0 is doing to the country. Trump is the front man for a Billionaire Class going for the kill shot, a final death blow to the wage-earning class; their contempt for citizens is matched only by their preference to turn their inferiors into digital serfs.
Anyway, I didn’t find the Freak Power aims and objectives, but I did find a letter HST wrote to the Aspen Times on October 22, 1970, which includes a statement that feels appropriate for the Trump Era of spectacle and stunt:
“In the ominous, ugly-splintered context of what is happening in 1970 Amerika a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all — not in the literal sense — but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition — but nothing changes.”
At this point, a U.S. Congress full of tequila & mescaline addled men and women is preferable to Christian Mike Johnson and the GOP’s slavish devotion to the doomed Cult of Donald. Provided they maintain a shred of basic human decency and at least a thimble-full of courage, I’d take my chances with the stoners. How much worse can it be? The real Freaks are ransacking the White House and the U.S. Treasury, supporting genocide in Gaza, a stupid war against Iran, and forcing unregulated AI down our throats; they’ve pissed all over higher education, destroyed the CDC, ruined the Justice Department, cowed the media, and even poisoned the military with Hegseth’s Christian Nationalist, high-testosterone gibberish. In a way, I’m glad HST didn’t live to see this shit, the breakdown of our institutions, an American president cavorting with dictators and building absurd monuments to himself. There simply isn’t enough mescaline or acid to make sense of it all, including the fact that we chose this path in November 2024.
Talk about epic own goals, about Death Wishes and bad juju.
Unlike HST, I don’t own any firearms and have never tried mescaline. For what it’s worth, I’m saving a bottle of mezcal brewed by a master named Antonio Carlos Martinez which my wife and I picked up in Oaxaca. One fine day, hopefully soon, I will uncork the bottle and toast the end of this malign and terrible era. And then I will orient myself toward Woody Creek, Colorado, and drink one for the good Doctor and Freak Power.
