ollie ollie in-free Oligopoly

In time and practice, I've figured out three tactics -- methods -- to make reading and learning more fluent -- fluid -- or something....

One is -- if you're listening to information being delivered verbally -- a lecture, or anything in school, or a seminar -- take notes -- even if you think you'll be disinclined to review or study them later.  Simply the act of writing it down, and the concentrating that is required for that, helps you learn.

Another one is, if I copy out information in print form -- either typing it, or writing it longhand -- I learn it better, somehow, than if I had only read it.

And the third one is, if I have to read something -- "have to" being the operative phrase -- something assigned at school or required by work, and maybe not necessarily something I expect to enjoy, and I want to finish reading it fast, if I try to go fast it's too hard.  But if I determine in my mind that I'm going to read as slowly as possible -- that  I'm going to relax, and r-e-a-d s-l-o-w-l-y...then my eyes and mind break free and go forward in the text faster.

One time when I was substitute teaching I -- attempted -- to share this Fast-Reading Technique with high school students in a classroom.  They just sat there looking at me.

And I remember I told one class about the note-taking strategy, as well -- suggesting that they take notes because it will help them learn even if they never study the notes later.

In the classroom, not one person took out a pen or a piece of paper.

Sat there looking at me.
Mmh. ...we do what we can.

===================
In the mode of typing out some information in the hope of learning / understanding it better, I'm going to type out an article called "The Oligopoly Problem" which appeared in The New Yorker online in April of this year.

It's about aspects of the current economy in the United States. 

And I don't even have a Fleetwood Mac song to go with it (unless it's "I'm So Afraid" from the nineteen-seventy-five album). ...

--------"The Oligopoly Problem"

In a recent T-Mobile commercial, one black-hatted outlaw breaks with the rest of his gang.  "Aw," he says, "I can't do this anymore."  The message is not subtle.  Yes, we've all been robbing you for years, declares T-Mobile, but at least we've decided we're done with it.  There's more than rhetoric here:  T-Mobile recently broke with longstanding industry norms and abandoned termination fees, sneaky overage charges, and other unfriendly practices.

Although T-Mobile's decision is welcome news for consumers, it doesn't change the fact that the old extortions remained in place for about fifteen years, and that they remain in place for the vast majority of Americans still trapped in contracts with Verizon, AT & T, and Sprint.  And it sheds light on a long-standing problem with how we think about and treat anticompetitive practices in the United States.  Our current approach, focussed near-exclusively on monopoly, fails to address the serious problems posed by highly concentrated industries.

If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it.  For our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established -- just ask Microsoft or the old AT & T.  But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is "competitive" and everything is fine. 

To state the obvious, when companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm. 

There is, in short, a major blind spot in our nation's oversight of private power, one that affects both consumers and competition.

This blind spot is of particular significance during an age when oligopolies, not monopolies, rule.  Consider Barry Lynn's 2011 book, "Cornered," which carefully detailed the rising concentration and consolidation of nearly every American industry since the nineteen-eighties.  He found that dominance by two or three firms "is not the exception in the United States, but increasingly the rule."  Consumers, easily misled by product labelling, often don't even notice that products like sunglasses, pet food, or numerous others come from just a few giants.  For example, while drugstores seem to offer unlimited choices in toothpaste, just two firms, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive, control more than eighty per cent of the market (including seemingly independent brands like Tom's of Maine).

[[Excuse me, is The New Yorker telling us that there is no dude named Tom up in the crisp, quiet woodlands of Maine, mixing up that healthy and natural toothpaste??]]

The press confuses oligopoly and monopoly with some regularity.  The Atlantic ran a recent infographic titled "The Return of the Monopoly," describing rising concentration in airlines, grocery sales, music, and other industries.  With the exception of Intel in computer chips, none of the industries described, however, was actually a monopoly -- all were oligopolies.  So while The Atlantic is right about what's happening, it sounds the wrong alarm.  We know how to fight monopolies, but few seem riled at "The Return of the Oligopoly."

Things were not always thus. 

Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels in the tobacco industry and Hollywood with the same vigor it had chased Standard Oil, the quintessential monopoly trust. 

In the late nineteen-seventies, another high point of enforcement, oligopolies were investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, and during that era Richard Posner, then a professor at Stanford Law School, went as far as to argue that when firms maintain the same prices, even without a smoke-filled-room agreement, they ought to be considered members of a price-fixing conspiracy.  (By this logic, the Delta and US Airways shuttles between New York and Washington, D.C., would probably be price-fixers, since their prices do vary by how far in advance you buy, but are always identical.)

Like many things from the nineteen-seventies, the treatment of oligopoly was subject to an enormous backlash in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. 

(Posner actually helped lead the backlash.) 

And with some justification: 

some of the cases were quite bad, like a long-forgotten federal war on the breakfast-cereal industry.  Firms shouldn't be penalized for practices that are parallel but not actually harmful, nor for mere "parallel pricing."  An interpretation of law that makes nearly every gas-station owner into a felon is questionable.

But just as the nineteen-seventies went too far, the reaction to the nineteen-seventies has also gone too far. 

As part of a general retreat from prosecution of all but the most extreme antitrust violations, the United States has nowadays nearly abandoned scrutiny of oligopoly behavior,

leaving consumers undefended. 

That's a problem, because oligopolies do an awful lot that's troubling.

Consider "parallel exclusion," or efforts by an entire industry to keep out would-be newcomers, a pervasive problem.  Over the eighties and nineties, despite "deregulation," the established airlines like American and United managed to keep their upstart competitors out of important business routes by collectively controlling the "slots" at New York, Chicago, and Washington airports.  Visa and MasterCard spent the nineties trying to stop American Express from getting into the credit-card industry, by creating parallel policies ("exclusionary rules") and blacklisting any bank that might dare deal with AmEx.  It was only thanks to the happenstance that both put their exclusions in writing that the Justice Department was able to do anything about the problem.

The rise of the American oligopoly makes this an important time to reexamine how antitrust enforcers and regulators think about concentrated industries.  Here's a simple proposal:  when members of a concentrated industry act in parallel, their conduct should be treated like that of a hypothetical monopoly.  Of course, that doesn't make anything necessarily illegal, but

abusive or anticompetitive conduct shouldn't get a free pass just because there are three companies involved instead of one. 

(I have co-authored a detailed academic paper, with former New York antitrust bureau chief Scott Hemphill, about how this should play out.)

Meanwhile, the idea that an industry is nominally "competitive" should not provide excessive protection from regulatory oversight.  Consider, again, the wireless carriers.  The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to insure that the carriers, who are leaseholders on public spectrum, use that resource to serve "the public interest, convenience, and necessity." 

Unfortunately, the agency, for more than a decade, has let the industry get away with all nature of monkey business,

from termination fees through "guess your minutes" pricing plans and subsidization schemes.  All this has been allowed under the theory that the industry is "competitive" and therefore not in need of oversight.  But, to quote T-Mobile, "this is an industry filled with ridiculously confusing contracts, limits on how much data you can use or when you can upgrade, and monthly bills that make little sense."  The F.C.C. could have done something about this years ago;

the fact that it took a member of the industry to call out more than a decade's abuse of consumers amounts to a serious failure on the part of the F.C.C.

Exploitation of concentrated private power is not a problem that will ever go away.  In the United States, it has been a concern since the framing:  the original Tea Party ws actually a protest against a state-sponsored tea monopoly. 

The challenge is that power constantly mutates and assumes new forms. 

That's why, whether overseeing private or public power,

it's important not to become fixated on form, but to attend to the realities

that face consumers and citizens.----------------["The Oligopoly Problem" from The New Yorker online, April, 2013.  Written by Tim Wu.]

-30-

it's only rock and roll but I like it

On You Tube there is an 8-minute live performance of "Gold Dust Woman" from 1981 -- at the end Stevie Nicks while saying "thank you" and "good night" to the audience, bursts out with enthusiasm:  "They never let me play Gold Dust Woman that long...!  Thank you!..."  She's all sort of exuberant.  Just very happy to do the song for the audience:  to give it to them.

Each member of Fleetwood Mac (and I'm referring to the standard-5 from 1975 on -- Mick F., Stevie, Lindsey, and 2 McVies) appears to be -- really -- all about the work.  The music.  Different from the "it's-me-and-my-body-parts" theme of some entertainers we encounter....

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
I got the book Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 in the 1990s -- maybe 96, or 8 or 9.  I know I had it by '99 because that summer I had it with me at a Bob Dylan concert (no time to read, though but thought there might be, since waited 9 hours to get space near stage in the evening).

Cannot remember how the topic of that book originally came up, in my existence -- somehow, during lobbying at state capital (in the Capitol in the capital) the subject arose.  The "fear-and-loathing" phrase, as the title of something, was not unfamiliar to me -- I'd heard of it somewhere, and I knew the name "Hunter Thompson" as well, but had read nothing by him.

And a lobbyist who was my age told me his dad had known Hunter Thompson on George McGovern's campaign in 1972.

The dad was also a lobbyist whom I saw every year -- I was like, Wow, that's interesting!

And his dad was in the book.
The son told me this information, not in a boasting way, but just because he could see that I was interested.  And -- he thought his dad was cool, I think -- and that was nice.
I was sort of -- "I gotta get that book."

Went to the State Library to borrow it -- didn't have a Library Card, and so had to do paperwork to get that.  Finally got the hard-cover book from them.  (When I purchased a copy through Barnes & Noble, got the paperback.)

Began with the borrowed Library-copy, flipping pages at a furious pace, to find our lobbying colleague -- looking, looking, looking for his name.  Found it -- several spots.  It was pretty wild.  (Besides being on the McGovern campaign and knowing Hunter Thompson, he was also lieutenant governor at that time.)

And then backing off my quest for one name, started to take in the book's text and found it -- startling.  At that point in time, I did not often hear "the f-word" and it was in there...and
 -- and -- there were all these off-the-wall drug references and thoughts going here and there, and strong language...exaggerated language.  I was going, "W-w-hh-a-a-t??"

I told the son that I had the book and found it to be kind of like Bob Dylan's music.  (Why? I ask self, now -- because the telling and talking and typing and writing seem to roll forward at a pace that's exciting and with content that's beguiling in spite of parts you might not like -- like Dylan's style:  alternately rumbling, stomping, crooning....I was kind of scared of Hunter Thompson's book, but I also started to really like it.)

And I told the dad -- the guy in the book -- that I was reading it, & I said, "this guy (the author) goes on about drugs a lot -- I don't see how he could physically follow a campaign for a year and write about it if he was high that much."  Bill turned to me on the stairs and said with a smile, "Oh, he -- exaggerated a lot of that stuff." 

Well duh -- why was I taking it so literally?  Well I just didn't really know what to make of it.  And in that time in my life I think I was less skeptical, and took more things literally, or at face value.

Fear and Loathing's words, and phrases:

...this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.

...as it became obvious that dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone.

...when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs...

traffic boiling up

Live steady.  don't f--k around.

Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.  (OK, I thought -- that refers to the 1968 Democrat nominating Convention in Chicago when there was a riot -- I know that. 
Mr. Thompson gonna have to get up pret-ty ear-ly in the morning to put that over my head. ...)

When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston.

Ah-h-h.

-30-

a genuinely weird campaign

[excerpts / Hunter Thompson book on 1972 presidential campaign]------------------ BRUCKNER'S ARTICLE WAS FOCUSED on the mood of Young Blacks, but unless you were reading very closely, the distinction was easy to miss.  Because the mood among Young Whites is not much different -- despite a lot of well-financed publicity about the potentially massive "youth vote."

These are the 25 million or so new voters between 18 and 25 -- going, maybe, to the polls for the first time -- who supposedly hold the fate of the nation in the palms of their eager young hands.  According to the people who claim to speak for it, this "youth vote" has the power to zap Nixon out of office with a flick of its wrist.  Hubert Humphrey lost in '68 by 499,704 votes -- a miniscule percentage of what the so-called "youth vote" could turn out in 1972.

But there are not many people in Washington who take this notion of the "youth vote" very seriously.  Not even the candidates.  The thinking here is that the young people who vote for the first time in '72 will split more or less along the same old lines as their parents, and that the addition of 25 million new (potential) voters means just another sudden mass that will have to be absorbed into the same old patterns . . . just another big wave of new immigrants who don't know the score yet, but who will learn it soon enough, so why worry?

...Among the half-dozen high-powered organizations in Washington who claim to speak for the "youth vote," the only one with any real muscle at this point is the National Association of Student Governments, which recently -- after putting together an "Emergency Conference for New Voters" in Chicago last month -- brought its leadership back to D.C. and called a press conference in the Old Senate office building to announce the formation of a "National Youth Caucus."...

I came in about ten minutes late, and when question time came around I asked the same one I'd asked Allard Lowenstein at a similar press conference in Chicago:  Would the Youth Caucus support Hubert Humphrey if he won the Democratic nomination?

Lowenstein had refused to answer that question in Chicago, saying, "We'll cross that bridge if we come to it."  But in Washington Draper said "Yes," the Youth Vote could get behind Hubert if he said the right things -- "if he takes the right positions."...

[a space in the text]
The only people who seem genuinely interested in the '72 elections are the actual participants -- the various candidates, their paid staff people, the thousands of journalists, cameramen & other media-connected hustlers who will spend most of this year humping the campaign along . . . and of course all the sponsors, called "fat cats" in the language of Now-Politics, who stand to gain hugely for at least the next four years if they can muscle their man down the homestretch just a hair ahead of the others.

The fat-cat action is still one of the most dramatic aspects of a presidential campaign, but even in this colorful area the tension is leaking away -- primarily because most of the really serious fat cats figured out, a few years back, that they could beat the whole rap -- along with the onus of going down the tube with some desperate loser -- by "helping" two candidates, instead of just one.

A good example of this, in 1972, will probably be Mrs. Rella Factor -- ex-wife of "Jake the Barber" and the largest single contributor to Hubert Humphrey's campaign in '68.  She didn't get a hell of a lot of return for her investment last time around.  But this year, using the new method, she can buy the total friendship of two, three, or perhaps even four presidential candidates, for the same price . . . by splitting up the nut, as discreetly as possible, between Hubert, Nixon, and maybe -- just for the natural randy hell of it -- a chunk to Gene McCarthy, who appears to be cranking up a genuinely weird campaign this time.------------------ [end excerpt]

====================
Rock on, gold dust woman --
Take your silver spoon
And dig your grave

Heartless challenge
Pick your path,
and I'll pray

Wake up in the morning
See your sunrise -- loves -- to go down.
Lousy lovers
pick their prey but they
never
cry out loud

Well did she make you cry?
Make you break down?
Shatter your illusions of love?

And is it over now?
Do you know how...
to pick up the pieces and go home?

Rock on, ancient queen
Follow those who
Pale

in your shadow...

Rulers make bad lovers
You better put your kingdom up for sale...

Did she make you cry?
Make you break down?
Shatter your illusions of love?
And is it over now?
Do you know how
-- pick up the pieces and go home

Well did she make you cry?
Make you break down?
Shatter your illusions of love-now tell me is it over now?
Do you know how
to pick up the pieces and go home?

go home,

and go ho-o-o-me...
Pale -- shadow -- of a woman...
Ooh --

black

Widow...

Pale

shadow

of a dragon...

gold --

dust --

woman.

Mm, pale shadow of a woman
Mm, black widow
Mm, pale --

shadow,

she's a dragon.

Gold.  Dust.  Woman

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpts from Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA.  Straight Arrow Books}
{song:  "Gold Dust Woman" - written by Stevie Nicks - Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album, 1977.}

-30-

everything you do is just all right

According to the Gallup Polls, however, -------[Hunter Thompson excerpt]------- the Underculture vote is building up a fearful head of steam behind Ted Kennedy; and this drift has begun to cause genuine alarm among Bigwigs and "pros" in both parties.  The mere mention of Kennedy's name is said to give Nixon bad cramps all over his body, such as it is.  His thugs are already starting to lash Kennedy with vicious denunciations -- calling him a "liar" and a "coward" and a "cheater."

And this is only December of 1971; the election is still ten months away.

The only person more nervous than Nixon about Kennedy's recent surge in the polls seems to be Kennedy himself.  He won't even admit that it's happening -- at least not for the record -- and his top-level staffers, like Jim Flug, find themselves walking a public tightrope.  They can see the thing coming -- too soon, perhaps, but there's nothing they can do about that either.  With the boss hunkered down, insisting he's not a candidate, his lieutenants try to keep their minds off the storm by working feverishly on Projects.

When I called Flug the other night at the office he was working late on a doomed effort to prevent Earl Butz from being confirmed by the Senate as Nixon's new Secretary of Agriculture.

"Too hell with Butz," I said, "what about Rehnquist?  Are they actually going to put a swine like that on the Supreme court?"

"They have the votes," he replied.

"Jesus," I muttered, "is he as bad as all the rotten stuff I've read about him?"

"Worse," Flug said.  "But I think he's in.  We tried, but we can't get the votes."

--------------
...Live steady.  Don't fuck around.  Give anything weird a wide berth -- including people.  It's not worth it.  I learned this the hard way, through brutal overindulgence.

And it's also a nasty fact that I have to catch a plane for Chicago in three hours -- to attend some kind of national Emergency Conferene for New Voters, which looks like the opening shot in this year's version of the McCarthy / Kennedy uprising in '68 -- and since the conference starts at six o'clock tonight, I must make that plane . . .

. . . Back to Chicago; it's never dull out there.  You never know exactly what kind of terrible shit is going to come down on you in that town, but you can always count on something.  Every time I go to Chicago I come away with scars.

[end excerpt]
==================

...Oh daddy,
If I can make you see,
If there's been a fool around,
It's got to be me.

Why are you right when I'm so wrong,
I'm so weak but you're so strong,
Everything you do is just alright,
And I can't walk away from you, baby
If I tried.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song excerpt -- "Oh Daddy" - written by Christine McVie.  Rumours.  Fleetwood Mac.  1977.}

-30-

between you and love

"OK," I said.  -------[excerpt, Fear and Loathing...'72-Hunter Thompson]------- "I'll see you when I make it over to Baltimore."  I stuck out my hand and Jerry took it in a quick conventional handshake -- but Lester had his thumb up, so I had to adjust for the Revolutionary Drug Brothers grip, or whatever that goddamn thing is supposed to mean.  When you move across the country these days you have to learn about nineteen different handshakes between Berkeley and Boston.

[space]

WELCOME TO WASHINGTON, D.C.  That's what the sign says.  It's about twenty feet wide & ten feet tall -- a huge stone plaque lit up by spotlights at the head of Sixteenth Street, just in from the Maryland line.  The street is five lanes wide, with fat green trees on both sides and about 1,300 out-of-phase stoplights between here and the White House.

It is not considered fashionable to live in "The District" itself unless you can find a place in Georgetown, an aged brick townhouse with barred windows, for $700 or so a month.  Georgetown is Washington's lame answer to Greenwich Village.  But not really.  It's more like the Old Town section of Chicago, where the leading citizens are half-bright Playboy editors, smoking tailor-made joints.  The same people, in Georgetown, are trendy young lawyers, journalists and bureaucrats who frequent a handful of pine-paneled bars and "singles only" discotheques where drinks cost $1.75 and there's No Cover Charge for girls wearing hotpants.

I live on the "black side" of Rock Creek park, in what my journalistic friends call "a marginal neighborhood."  Almost everybody else I know or have any professional contact with lives either in the green Virginia suburbs or over on the "white side" of the park, toward Chevy Chase and Bethesda, in Maryland.

The Underculture is scattered into various far-flung bastions, and the only thing even approximating a crossroads is the area around Dupont Circle, downtown.  The only people I know who live down there are Nicholas Von Hoffman and Jim Flug, Teddy Kennedy's hyper-active Legislative Assistant.  But Von Hoffman seems to have had a belly-full of Washington and now talks about moving out to the Coast, to San Francisco . . . and Flug, like everybody else even vaguely connected with Kennedy, is gearing down for a very heavy year; like maybe twenty hours a day on the telephone, and the other four on planes....

Jim Flug says he'd rather not talk about Kennedy running for President -- at least not until he has to, and that time seems to be coming up fast.  Teddy is apparently sincere about not planning to run, but it is hard for him or anyone else not to notice that almost everybody who "matters" in Washington is fascinated by the recent series of Gallup Polls showing Kennedy creeping ever closer to Nixon -- almost even with him now, and this rising tide has cast a very long shadow on the other Democratic candidates.

There is a sense of muted desperation in Democratic ranks at the prospect of getting stuck -- and beaten once again -- with 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.  "He'd be a fine President," they say, "but of course he can't possibly win."

Why not?

Well . . . the wizards haven't bothered to explain that, but their reasoning appears to be rooted in the hazy idea that the people who could make McGovern President -- that huge & confused coalition of students, freaks, blacks, anti-war activists & dazed dropouts -- won't even bother to register, much less drag themselves to the polls on election day.

Maybe so . . . but it is hard to recall many candidates, in recent history, who failed to move what is now called "The McGovern Vote" to the polls if they actually represented it.---------------[end excerpt]

==================
I don't want to know the reasons why
Love keeps right on walking down the line
I don't want to stand between you and love
Honey, I just want you to feel fine

Finally baby
The truth has come down now
Take a listen to your spirit
It's crying out loud.
Try to believe
You say you love me, but you don't know
You got me rocking and a-reeling
Oh

I don't want to know the reasons why
Love keeps right on walking down the line
I don't want to stand between you and love
Honey, I just want you to feel fine

Finally baby
The truth has been told
Now you tell me that I'm crazy
That's nothing that I didn't know
Trying to survive
You say you love me, but you don't know
You got me rocking and a-reeling

I don't want to know the reasons why
Love keeps right on walking down the line
I don't want to stand between you and love
Honey, take a little time.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song -- "I Don't Want To Know" by Stevie Nicks.  Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album, 1977.}

-30-

I hit the brakes and pulled over

They'd been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by [Hunter Thompson - Campaign Trail '72 excerpt] . . . and in truth I only stopped because I couldn't quite believe what I thought I'd just seen.  Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade -- running easily, for a change -- when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.

I hit the brakes and pulled over.  What the fuck was that?  I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days . . . and you don't really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.

A white bear?  Agnew's other son?

At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not?  Check it out.

But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer . . . so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn't back up.

But I was still curious.  So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a .357 magnum in the other.  No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought -- by wild beasts or anything else.  My instincts were purely humanitarian -- but what about that Thing I was going back to look for?  You read about these people in the Reader's Digest:  blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.

Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather.  You never know . . . and that warning works both ways.  Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle . . . and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a .357 magnum in his hand.

A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help.  For all they knew I was half-mad on PCP and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials . . . nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.

[a very small drawing, between paragraphs]

But this time things worked out -- as they usually do when you go with your instincts -- and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half-frozen heads with a blowout . . . and the "white bear" rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop.  At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said:  "I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane -- even a Cop Car; this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me . . . shit, they're supposed to help people, right . . . ?

Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the car until we started cranking it up.  The Volvo jack wouldn't work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.--------------- [end H. Thompson excerpt]

=====================
Sweet wonderful you,
You make me happy with the things you do,
Oh, can it be so,
This feeling follows me wherever I go.
I never did believe --
in miracles --
But I've a feeling it's time to try.

I never did be - lieve
in the ways of magic,
but I'm beginning to wonder why.

Don't -- -- don't break the spell,
It would be different and you know it will,
You -- you make loving fun,
And I don't have to tell you you're the only one.
You -- make loving fun.
You
make loving fun.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)}
{song:  "You Make Loving Fun" -- written / Christine McVie.  Fleetwood Mac - Rumours - 1977 - Warner Bros.}

-30-

if things were as good as they said

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists.  [Hunter Thompson excerpt]  It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs . . . humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel piss-ant; dragging a massive orange U-haul trailer full of books and "important papers" . . . feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.

It's a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving . . . but not even this new, six-cylinder super-Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado to Washington, D.C.  The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown . . . still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezewood in Pennsylvania; I'd stopped there to ponder the drug question with two freaks I met on the Turnpike.

They had blown a tire east of Everett, but nobody would stop to lend them a jack.  They had a spare tire -- and a jack, too, for that matter -- but no jack-handle; no way to crank the car up and put the spare on.  They had gone out to Cleveland, from Baltimore -- to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit . . . and they'd picked up this '66 Ford Fairlane for $150.

I was impressed.

"Shit," they said.  "You can pick up a goddamn new Thunderbird out there for seven-fifty.  All you need is cash, man; people are desperate!  There's no work out there, man; they're selling everything!  It's down to a dime on the dollar.  Shit, I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Baltimore."

I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business, if things were as good as they said.  They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland area and places like Baltimore, Philly and Washington.  "All you need," they said, "is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars."

"Right," I said.  "And some jack-handles."

"What?"--------------- [end excerpt]

=====================
Listen to the wind blow
Watch the sun rise
Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain
And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

Listen to the wind blow
Down comes the night
Running in the shadows
Damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence
Damn the dark, damn the light

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain
And if you don't love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
We would never break the chain

Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together (Running in the shadows)
Chain, keep us together...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{book excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)}
{song -- "The Chain" -- written by Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, Stevie Nicks.  Rumours - Fleetwood Mac - 1977 (Warner Bros.)}

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in the warm Pacific dusk

[Hunter Thompson book, Campaign trail '72 - excerpt]---------

December 1971

Is This Trip Necessary? . . . Strategic Retreat into National Politics . . . Two Minutes & One Gram Before Midnight on the Pennsylvania Turnpike . . . Setting Up the National Affairs Desk . . . Can Georgetown Survive the Black Menace? . . . Fear and Loathing in Washington . . .

OUTSIDE MY NEW FRONT DOOR the street is full of leaves.  My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it.  Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop.  In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage.  And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood:  pine, elm, and cherry.  I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days . . . even more than the Alsop brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life -- all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up.  I have ordered  more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp -- and also a fifty watt "boombox" for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball . . . a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation's Capital.

One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the "Westward Movement" in U.S. history.  After a few years on the Coast or even in Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place.  You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can't even park; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown . . . which is nasty:  but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to park on the city streets.  If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don't dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven't left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it's at these days.

Where indeed? ----------------------- [end excerpt]

=========================

For you, there'll be no more crying,
For you, the sun will be shining,
And I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right, I know it's right

To you, I'll give the world
to you, I'll never be cold
'Cause I feel that when I'm with you,
It's all right -- I know it's right.

And the songbirds are singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before.

And I wish you all the love in the world,
But most of all, I wish it from myself.

And the songbirds keep singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before...Like never before. ...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt -- Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72 - Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973 - San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books)
{song -- "Songbird," by Christine McVie.  Rumours album.  Fleetwood Mac.  Warner Bros.  1977.}

-30-

baby I'd give you my world

[excerpt-Hunter Thompson]-------------
...and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening:  from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.

So this is more a jangled campaign diary than a record or reasoned analysis of the '72 presidential campaign.  Whatever I wrote in the midnight hours on rented typewriters in all those cluttered hotel rooms along the campaign trail -- from the Wayfarer Inn outside Manchester to the Neil House in Columbus to the Wilshire Hyatt House in L.A. and the Fontainebleau in Miami -- is no different now than it was back in March and May and July when I was cranking it out of the typewriter one page at a time and feeding it into the plastic maw of that goddamn Mojo Wire to some hash-addled freak of an editor at the Rolling Stone news-desk in San Francisco.

What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history.  There will be no shortage of books covering that end.  The last count I got was just before Christmas in '72, when ex-McGovern speech writer Sandy Berger said at least nineteen people who'd been involved in the campaign were writing books about it -- so we'll eventually get the whole story, for good or ill.

Meanwhile, my room at the Seal Rock Inn is filling up with people who seem on the verge of hysteria at the sight of me still sitting here wasting time on a rambling introduction, with the final chapter still unwritten and the presses scheduled to start rolling in twenty-four hours . . . . but unless somebody shows up pretty soon with extremely powerful speed, there might not be any Final Chapter.  About four fingers of king-hell Crank would do the trick, but I am not optimistic.  There is a definite scarcity of genuine, high-voltage Crank on the market these days -- and according to recent statements by official spokesmen for the Justice Department in Washington, that's solid evidence of progress in Our War Against Dangerous Drugs.

Well . . . thank Jesus for that.  I was beginning to think we were never going to put the arm on that crowd.  But the people in Washington say we're finally making progress.  And if anybody should know, it's them.  So maybe this country's about to get back on the Right Track.

---HST
Sunday, January 28, 1973
San Francisco, Seal Rock Inn-------------------[end first excerpt]

===============================
Loving you
Isn't the right thing to do
How can I ever change things
that I feel

If I could
Maybe I'd give you my world
How can I
When you won't take it from me

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

Tell me why
Everything turned around
Packing up
Shacking up is all you wanna do

If I could
Baby I'd give you my world
Open up
Everything's waiting for you

You can go your own way
Go your own way
You can call it
Another lonely day
You can go your own way
Go your own way

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "Author's Note/Introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song -- "Go Your Own Way," written by Lindsey Buckingham -- Rumours, Fleetwood Mac, (Warner Bros.) 1977}

-30-

rejecting the luxury of hindsight

[Hunter Thompson excerpt]-------------- ... thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.

Things were never the same after that.  A cloud of hellish intensity had come down on the McGovern campaign by the time it rolled into California.  Mandates came down from the top, warning staffers to beware of the press.  The only exceptions were reporters who were known to have a decent respect for things said "in confidence," and I didn't fit that description.

And so much for all that.  The point I meant to make here -- before we wandered off on that tangent about jackrabbits -- is that everything in this book except the footnotes was written under savage deadline pressure in the traveling vortex of a campaign so confusing and unpredictable that not even the participants claimed to know what was happening.

I had never covered a presidential campaign before I got into this one, but I quickly got so hooked on it that I began betting on the outcome of each primary -- and, by combining aggressive ignorance with a natural instinct to mock the conventional wisdom, I managed to win all but two of the fifty or sixty bets I made between February and November.  My first loss came in New Hampshire, where I felt guilty for taking advantage of one of McGovern's staffers who wanted to bet that George would get more than 35 percent of the vote; and I lost when he wound up with 37.5 percent.  But from that point on, I won steadily -- until November 7, when I made the invariably fatal mistake of betting my emotions instead of my instinct.

The final result was embarrassing, but what the hell? 

I blew that one,

along with a lot of other people who should have known better, and since I haven't changed anything else in this mass of first-draft screeds that I wrote during the campaign, I can't find any excuse for changing my final prediction.  Any re-writing now would cheat the basic concept of the book, which -- in addition to the publisher's desperate idea that it might sell enough copies to cover the fantastic expense bills I ran up in the course of those twelve frantic months -- was to lash the whole thing together and essentially record the reality of an incredibly volatile presidential campaign while it was happening:  from an eye in the eye of the hurricane, as it were, and there is no way to do that without rejecting the luxury of hindsight.-----------------[end excerpt]

====================
[song excerpt]----Don't stop,
thinking about tomorrow,
Don't stop, it'll soon be here,
It'll be -- better than before,
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.

Why not think about times to come,
And not about the things that you've done,
If your life was bad to you,
Just think what tomorrow will do.

Don't stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Don't stop, it'll soon be here,
It'll be-e -- better than before,
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone....

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "Author's Note / Introduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{second excerpt, "Don't Stop" by Christine McVie -- Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album, Warner Bros., released Feb. 1977}

-30-

dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts

...you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them -- and to keep them as sources of private information -- you wind up knowing a lot of things you can't print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.

This was one of the traditional barriers I tried to ignore when I moved to Washington and began covering the '72
----------[Hunter Thompson excerpt]---------- presidential campaign.  As far as I was concerned, there was no such thing as "off the record."  The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby / cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists -- in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. 

When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in . . . especially not for "minor infractions" of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there is panic on both ends.

A classic example of this syndrome was the disastrous "Eagleton Affair."  Half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps knew Eagleton was a serious boozer with a history of mental breakdowns -- but none of them had ever written about it, and the few who were known to have mentioned it privately clammed up 1000 percent when McGovern's harried staffers began making inquiries on that fateful Thursday afternoon in Miami. 

Any Washington political reporter who blows a Senator's chance for the vice-presidency might as well start looking for another beat to cover -- because his name will be instant Mud on Capitol Hill.

When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap.  Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me -- because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill.  I went there for two reasons:  (1) to learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign, and (2) to write about it the same way I'd write about anything else -- as close to the bone as I could get, and to hell with the consequences.

It was a fine idea, and on balance I think it worked out pretty well -- but in retrospect I see two serious problems in that kind of merciless, ball-busting approach.  The most obvious and least serious of these was the fact that even the few people I considered my friends in Washington treated me like a walking bomb; some were reluctant to even drink with me, for fear that their tongues might get loose and utter words that would almost certainly turn up on the newsstands two weeks later. 

The other, more complex, problem had to do with my natural out-front bias in favor of the McGovern candidacy -- which was not a problem at first, when George was such a hopeless underdog that his staffers saw no harm in talking frankly with any journalist who seemed friendly and interested -- but when he miraculously emerged as the front-runner I found myself in a very uncomfortable position. 

Some of the friends I'd made earlier, during the months when the idea of McGovern winning the Democratic nomination seemed almost as weird as the appearance of a full-time Rolling Stone correspondent on the campaign trail, were no longer just a handful of hopeless idealists I'd been hanging around with for entirely personal reasons, but key people in a fast-rising movement that suddenly seemed capable not only of winning the party nomination but driving Nixon out of the White House.

McGovern's success in the primaries had a lasting effect on my relationship with the people who were running his campaign -- especially those who had come to know me well enough to sense that my contempt for the time-honored double standard in political journalism might not be entirely compatible with the increasingly pragmatic style of politics that George was getting into. 

And their apprehension increased measurably as it became obvious that dope fiends, anarchists, and Big-Beat dropouts were not the only people who read the political coverage in Rolling Stone.  Not long after McGovern's breakthrough victory in the Wisconsin primary, arch-establishment mouthpiece Stewart Alsop went out of his way to quote some of my more venomous comments on Muskie and Humphrey in his Newsweek column, thus raising me to the level of at least neo-respectability at about the same time McGovern began to look like a winner.

Things were never the same after that.---------------------- [end excerpt]

========================
She broke down and let me in
Made me see where I've been

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

You don't know what it means to win
Come down and see me again

Been down one time
Been down two times
I'm never going back again

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
{first excerpt, "author's note/inroduction," Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright, 1973.  San Francisco, CA:  Straight Arrow Books}
{song:  "Never Going Back Again" - written, Lindsey Buckingham - Rumours album - Fleetwood Mac - Warner Bros. - released Feb. 1977}

-30-