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}

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