In 1971, “gonzo” author, Hunter S. Thompson, debuted his novel, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. His soon-to-be-classic became a seminal part of over-the-top fiction depicting the exploding phenomenon of a drug-fueled counter-culture and a wild disregard for the behavior of the day. Although we traditionally think of “counter-culture” as describing anti-establishment norms on the left, these days, it has turned out to be just the opposite.
The current white house resident holds nothing but fear and loathing toward our wide-spread 21st Century American culture of diversity, equity and inclusion. His obsession has set him crazily careening through a multitude of attempted erasures of segments of that history, which he explains in sentences that sound like the ramblings a person totally wasted on drugs. His race-loathing comments and actions toward all those who commit the sin of not being white are summed up, in his addled brain, as Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.
Using the extensive power of his office, he strong arms institutions and individuals in order to make sure that we lose all access to our diverse history, forget our pride in the basic diversity of the American ideal, and acquiesce to limiting government benefits to people who look like him. He orders 400 books, related to, or written by, people of color or lgbtq individuals, removed from the Naval Academy Library. He threatens to control the selection of books in all libraries. He orders purges at the Smithsonian, the obliteration of Black Lives Matter murals and erasure of web stories about Navajo Code Talkers’ contributions to WWII. He defunds universities, newspapers, and television networks, in order to prevent them from revealing the truth about him, and about our history and culture. Let ignorance reign!
He orders the toadies running the Department of Defense to erase the military history of baseball’s incredible Jackie Robinson, deletes hundreds of pages and pictures of non-white heroes from the website of the Arlington National Cemetery, and orders Q-Codes to be placed on national monuments and in national parks so that people can report anything they consider is part of a “divisive ideology” and, therefore, anti-American.
This includes, of course, any recognition that we may have violently expropriated the land on which we stand from the native population who had lived there for centuries. Or any recognition that, for years, Americans perpetuated, and benefitted from, the enslavement of one race by another. In other words, a more complete and grown-up history of this country. As though, if you face the truth, you cannot find America to be great and laudable. However, as any of us who have spent more than five minutes in therapy know, you need to face the past in order to adequately plan for, and live in, the future.
Why is he doing this? That’s easy. He is afraid of us. Afraid of the fact that diversity leads to mutual appreciation, which generates collaboration and public power. Afraid that his efforts to separate and demonize certain minorities will fail and his whole hate-filled plan will come crashing down.
In 1998, Hunter Thompson and Terry Gilliam made a crazy, speedy film out of Thompson’s book. They understood the “benefits” of the blotting out of truth, analysis and rational thought. Get as high as you can, turn into a raving paranoid, and try to create a world that fits your bizarre reality, with no regard for the wreckage you leave behind. It is also a plus that, when you dumb down a population through withholding information, banning books, removing historical data, attacking universities, ending scientific research, terminating accurate scientific reporting, and, essentially, controlling the culture, you can more easily mislead, use and control that population. It’s definitely working with those mindless hordes of zombies who seem to nod obediently at every presidential pronouncement like bobble-heads on a car dashboard.
There is evidence, however, that many are waking up (hence the fear in the white house of the word “woke”). The temporary resident of the oval office is not so popular anymore and his numbers are plummeting. He is ever more fearful, and losing more and more adherents with every pronouncement, every ICE raid, every cruelty, and every lie. Hopefully, he will turn out to be the best organizing tool we have.
A Little Love From Canada
Among the contents of my mail today was a large brown envelope from someone I didn’t know in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Inside was a long note and a lovely, hand-woven, dishcloth. The writer says she is a long-time fan of my early TV work, and recently caught some re-runs of The Beverly Hillbillies series. She simply wanted to send me her sympathies for what my poor country is going through. As a Christian, she says, she is offended by the use of that term by many in the Trump administration who claim to be protecting families while doing the exact opposite. She offers a dishcloth woven by her elderly mother as a gift and tells me she is praying that he is ousted and a decent leader elected to take his place. She encourages me and my friends and family to hang in.
Her kind words made me think about how so many people we don’t know and will never meet are rooting for us to make it through this hard time and get rid of the current administration. They want us to be the real America, the one they love to visit, but no longer will, for a while, the America they fought wars in alliance with, the America they admired for our brave experiment with inclusion and freedom.
I want to thank every single one of them, along with those folks who are showing up in Culver City every Saturday, and in every other town in America, along every highway, and in front of every federal office, to say “This is my country, stop trying to control it.” We will eventually prevail, but, while we fight, it’s good to know that our friends all around the world are with us. It’s a small world, after all.
