Obama, Hunter Redux Plus Thoughts on Chomsky and Sports

A few months ago, when it became clear in the last week of the campaign that Obama was going to go over the top and win the bastard, I blogged about Hunter Thompson's suicide. It was pretty clear that the re-election of George W. Bush had depressed him to the point where he decided it was time to check out. Last night I watched a biopic on HST and this morning I watched the inaugural address and it got me thinking about faith and hope and symbolism and... sports.

Noam Chomsky is a sharp mofo and I like much of his analysis of power relationships and the way the media manufactures consent. But the man has no sense of fun when it comes to pro sports. He is quoted as saying (roughly) that pro sports just give the proles something to be distracted by while the real work of screwing them over occurs out of sight. And that may well be true, as far as it goes. But pro sports (rather than, say, pro algae farming) succeeds as entertainment because it connects with us emotionally. When we see our team go the distance and win the championship, it makes us feel like good things are possible.

I am an occasional hockey fan. A few years ago my local team was in the last place playoff spot (which was not unusual). Yet they beat their number-one-ranked opponents three games in a row in a playoff series, and looked set to win the best-of-seven contest. Around the same time, my band was in the middle of recording an album with a pro producer. We had endured about ten years of toiling in obscurity and poverty, and we were hard-pressed to believe that we could ever pull ourselves out of that place. Listening to the hockey games on the radio filled me with hope that good things could happen if people worked hard. And I worked HARD on that album. With a sense of hope in my heart that I can still hear in my vocals and my guitar performances.

In the end, my hockey team lost the next four games of that series and got bumped out of the playoffs. The album was finally birthed after a lot of disheartening delays and after I had left that band. But the point is not the ultimate result of a hockey series or a recording session. The point is the emotional feeling of possibility. When you lose the sense that good things can happen, you reach for your pistol like Hunter S. Thompson did after the 2004 election. I myself remember wondering how a just deity could allow a decent man like Kerry to lose to such a catastrophe as Bush. "Things happen for a reason." Cassie told me, "Have faith. Something better than you can even imagine now is around the corner." I thought she was a gullible hippie and considered kicking over her shrine. Now, with Obama sworn in, I realize that it would not have been possible if Kerry had won in 2004. And the truth is, I could never have foreseen this amazing moment. Cass was right. I suppose hope is optimism when things are going your way, and faith is optimism when your house gets stepped on by Godzilla. After he eats your child. And your testicles.

But right now, Obama is like that long-odds sports team that wins the championship. Except that he is also upending many generations of racial impossibility and making the youth vote feel like they can actually affect their political landscape. I wonder what Chomsky makes of this victory. Probably not a lot. He probably sees that Obama owes favours to the same special interests as his predecessors, and that the machinery of government makes real change very difficult. He may even suggest that the president is largely a symbolic sop for the masses while the real dealings occur behind closed, exclusive doors.

But that's precisely it. The US presidency is a weird office. It is a a symbolic post like a king. And it is a real seat of executive power. It is a brand - especially during the campaign. Obama will probably disappoint many with the tough executive decisions and compromises he will have to make once he takes office. But the very fact that the Obama brand inspired people so deeply, the fact that people put their hopes into this brand, and the fact that the USA in a free election chose this brand is wildly significant. He won the toughest championship in the history of the world. So think about what we can achieve in our lives. Some of us have been getting by on faith for a long time. And some of us have not made it through. As of this inaugaration, we can now have hope.

An Open Letter to Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on the Eve of an Obama Landslide

You gutless, dead, doom-drunk old addict! It's really too bad you took yourself out just after that second Bush win. I think you would have liked Obama. A Kentucky boy like you would have felt the significance of an African American president deep in your hillbilly heart. And you surely would have relished the savage stomping the GOP Greedheads are about to get. McCain is gonna be trounced as surely and as painfully as McGovern in '72. And the young black candidate who all the students are out marching for is gonna win by a mile. But that's what happens when you get so despairing that you can't even IMAGINE the world getting better. You don't get to stick around and see the fucking miracle that's just around the corner.

Sure, in early 2005 it looked like Rove's strategy for permanent Republican domination was working. How else could you explain such a lightweight human catastrophe with two failed wars and a demonstrable lack of comepetence getting RE-ELECTED? We were all pretty down. But not as far as you. When you drink that much it makes the downs WAY down. It fucks you up. Takes you out of the game. Makes you a clownish shadow of your glory days.

When Nixon died you wrote a scathing and tender obit. "Nixon gave no mercy and expected none. He was pure that way." So in that spirit let me give it to you straight, Hunter: Nixon lived out his natural alottment of days. He lived with the shame of what he'd done. He lived knowing the revulsion his name caused. Yet he found a way to carry on. But you - acid hero of a generation? You blew your fucking brains out and let your son find you. I hate to say it but in your one-man war against Richard Millhouse Nixon, Nixon wins.

Most if us who have hit the bottle too hard have come up with some baroque justifications: We need it to settle us. We need it for our image. For our sense of self. We need it for our work. We need it because we are sensitive and idealist and the world is a harsh and imperfect place. And when a talented drunk like you goes down it's easy for us to get all poetic and say that your heart was broken by the country going so far astray, or that you had imprisoned yourself in your bacchic reputation, but the truth is a bit simpler. You were a terminal alcoholic and a drug addict. It made you irreparably, clinically depressed. And you didn't get help for either condition. And you shot yourself. So you don't get to see this sweet, gorgeous, beautiful, glorious, perfect moment when all those sixties promises finally come true and the youth vote carries a decent, honourable man into the highest office in the USA. The kids - they're better organized now, Hunter. You thought McGovern had some hot shit students working for him? Man, you have no idea. You have no ideas at all now.

Hunter, Vegas showed us how to be secret agents in squaresville, and Campaign Trail '72 showed us how to approach politics and power without getting raped. I learned a lot from you about how to live outside - how to think outside, how a word can be used as a shiv. You were the sharpest of them all. But the biggest lesson I learned from you is that there's about as much fear and loathing in this world as you care to focus on. And that it can distract you from beauty and truth.