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

by Hunter S. Thompson

but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories;

and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end.

The “death of democracy” has not left much of a vacuum in Peru. It was more like the death of somebody’s old uncle, whose name had been familiar in the household for many years, but who died, where he had always lived, in some far-off town the family never quite got around to visiting—although they had always meant to, or at least that’s what they said. If there is one profound reality in Peruvian politics it is the fact that this country has absolutely no democratic tradition, and any attempt to introduce one is going to meet violent opposition. The people who need democracy don’t even know what the word means; the people who know what it means don’t need it and they don’t mind saying so. If the Alliance for Progress requires that democracy in Peru become a fact instead of just a pleasant word, then the Alliance is in for rough sledding too.

If you want to get anywhere down here, you have to make people respect you.”

If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt; it is also a potential betrayal of people whose only “crime” is the smoking of a weed that grows wild all over the world but the possession of which, in California, carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison for a second offense and a minimum of five years for a third. So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads—just as many journalists were hard drinkers during Prohibition—it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.

Nonstudents lump one another—and many students—into two very broad groups: “political radicals” and “social radicals.”

report last spring by the faculty’s Select Committee on Education tried to put it all in a nutshell: “A significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as conventional motivation. Rather than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society, they want to be moral men in a moral society. They want to lead lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and responsibility.”

To them, anyone who takes part in “the system” is a hypocrite.

Many a man has whipped up a hell of a broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.

There is something primitive and tragic in California’s effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will legislate in ignorance against its unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of mass education.

Yes, the point: my feeling for Southern politicians is not especially warm, even now. Ever since the first cannonballs fell on Fort Sumter in 1861, Southern politics has been dominated by thieves, bigots, warmongers and buffoons.