seriously bent

 

------------------ [Hunter Thompson excerpt] ---------------------------

But on my way into Manchester, driving like a werewolf, it never occurred to me that maybe I was not quite as sane as I'd always thought I was.  

There is something seriously bent, when you think on it, in the notion that a man with good sense would race out of his peaceful mountain home in Colorado and fly off in a frenzy like some kind of electrified turkey buzzard to spend three or four days being carried around the foulest sections of New England like a piece of meat, to watch another man, who says he wants to be President, embarrassing a lot of people by making them shake his hand outside factory gates at sunrise.

        Earlier that night, in Cambridge--over dinner at a bogus Mexican restaurant run by Italian junkies--several people had asked me why I was wasting my time on "this kind of bullshit."  McGovern, Muskie, Lindsay, or even Gene McCarthy.  I had just come back from a long day at the Massachusetts "Rad / Lib Caucus" in Worcester, billed as a statewide rally to decide which Democratic candidate to support in the Massachusetts primary on April 25th.

        The idea, said the organizers, was to unify and avoid a disastrous vote-splitting orgy that would splinter the Left between McGovern, Lindsay & McCarthy--thus guaranteeing an easy Muskie win.   The Caucus organizers were said to be well-known McCarthy supporters, who'd conceived the gathering as a sort of launching pad for Gene in '72 . . . and McCarthy seemed to agree; he was the only candidate to attend the Caucus in person, and his appearance drew a booming ovation that gave every indication of a pending victory.

        The night before, at a crowded student rally in Hogan Student Center at Holy Cross, McCarthy had responded to a questioner who asked if he was "really a serious candidate" by saying:  "You'll see how serious I am after tomorrow's Caucus."

        The crowd at Holy Cross responded with a rolling cheer.  The median age, that night, was somewhere around nineteen and McCarthy was impressively sharp and confident as he drew roar after roar of applause with his quietly vicious attack on Nixon, Humphrey, and Muskie.  As I stood there in the doorway of the auditorium, looking across the shoulders of the overflow crowd, it looked like 1968 all over again.  There was a definite sense of drama in seeing McCarthy back on the stump, cranking up another crusade.

------------------------------------

{Fear And Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Copyright 1973, Straight Arrow Books.}

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