On Tuesday afternoon my car disappeared. -------------------- [excerpt, Hunter Thompson] ----------------------- I left it on the street in front of the hotel while I went in to pick up my swimming trunks, and when I came back out, it was gone.
To hell with it, I thought, it was time to get out of Miami.
I went up to my room and thought for a while, sitting with my back to the typewriter and staring out the window at the big ocean-going yachts and luxury houseboats tied up across the street, at the piers along Indian Creek. Last week they'd been crawling with people, and cocktail parties.
Every time the Fontainebleau lobby started buzzing with rumors about another crowd of demonstrators bearing down on the hotel from the direction of Flamingo Park, the boats across Collins Avenue would fill up with laughing Republican delegates wearing striped blazers and cocktail dresses.
There was no better place, they said, for watching the street action.
As the demonstrators approached the front entrance to the hotel, they found themselves walking a gauntlet of riot-equipped police on one side, and martini-sipping GOP delegates on the other.
...With the lone exception of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the demonstrators in Miami were a useless mob of ignorant, chicken-shit ego-junkies whose only accomplishment was to embarrass the whole tradition of public protest.
They were hopelessly disorganized, they had no real purpose in being there, and about half of them were so wasted...that they couldn't say for sure whether they were raising hell in Miami or San Diego.
Five weeks earlier, these same people had been sitting in the lobby of the Doral, calling George McGovern a "lying pig" and a "warmonger."
Their target-hotel this time was the Fontainebleau, headquarters for the national press and many TV cameras. If the Rolling Stones came to Miami for a free concert, these a--holes would build their own fence around the bandstand -- just so they could have something to tear down and then "crash the gates."
...Nothing in the realm of human possibility could have prevented Richard Nixon from accepting that nomination. If God himself had showed up in Miami and denounced Nixon from the podium, hired gunsels from the Committee for the Re-Election of the President would have quickly had him arrested for disturbing the peace. --------------------
{Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. Hunter Thompson. 1973. Simon & Schuster}
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Protesters and a wall around Mexico
Protesters and a fence around the Rolling Stones
Hmmm. Do we make progress? Or are we, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says at the end of The Great Gatsby, "borne back ceaselessly into the past"?
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