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.}

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