The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (The Gonzo Papers Series Book 1)

by Hunter S. Thompson

the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live—(13 years longer, in fact)—and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

breakfast in a plastic hamburger palace

Joe Edwards’ platform was against the developers, not the old-timers and ranchers—and it was hard to see, from their arguments, how they could disagree in substance with anything we said … unless what they were really worried about was the very good chance that a win by Edwards would put an end to their options of selling out to the highest bidder. With Edwards, they said, would come horrors like Zoning and Ecology, which would cramp their fine Western style, the buy low, sell high ethic … free enterprise, as it were, and the few people who bothered to argue with them soon found that their nostalgic talk about “the good old days” and “the tradition of this peaceful valley” was only an awkward cover for their fears about “socialist-thinking newcomers.”

This is a good characterizing of conservative, Western thinking: freedom in the service of “buy low, sell high.” It doesn’t really empathize enough to speak to what the ends are, what these “pigs” do desire to do once they’ve won. Do they have an aesthetic that would drive that?