You Have a Strange Attitude.

What were you doing -- I wanna know.

May I please have that?

I knew I was fucked -- The Pig had me on all counts.

See, you have two cases of beer, a basket of grapefruit, stack of T-shirts and towels, light bulbs --

You realise What You Did when you drive like that?

Yeah, I know. I'm Guilty. I understand that.

I knew it was a crime, and I did it anyway.

Shit, why argue? I'm a fucking criminal.

Look at me --

You have a Strange Attitude.

Maybe.

You know, I have a feeling you need to take a nap.

There's a rest area just up ahead.

I'd like you to go up there, pull over and get a few hours sleep.

That's not gonna help me.

I've been awake for too long, three for four nights, maybe.

Can't even remember.

I go to sleep now, I'm Dead for 20 hours.

What are you carrying two cases of soap for, son?

I wanna stay clean.

No...

Here's How it Is : -- What I put in My Book, as of noon, is that I apprehended you for driving too fast.

I ADVISED you to proceed to the next rest area -- STOP!

I advised you to proceed to the next rest area, your stated destination, right?

And take a long nap.

Do I make myself clear?

Well, how far is Baker?

I was sorta hoping to, I don't know, stop there for lunch.

It's not my jurisdiction. 

City Limits end 2.2 miles beyond the rest area.

Think you can make it that far?

I'll Try.

I've been wanting to go to Baker for a long time. 

Yeah. Heard a lot about it.

Excellent Seafood....

You know, I'm thinking, a guy with your kind of mind ought to try the land crab.

Excellent Seafood.

Land-crab.

All Right. Why Not?

The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail

One of the greatest Truths in psychology is that The Mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. To be Human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel — sometimes in horror — at your inability to control your own actions. 

The Roman poet Ovid lived at a time when people thought diseases were caused by imbalances of bile, but he knew enough psychology to have one of his characters lament: “I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and Reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”

Ancient thinkers gave us many metaphors to understand this conflict, but few are more colorful than the one in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The narrator, Timaeus, explains how the gods created the universe, including us. Timaeus says that a creator god who was perfect and created only perfect things was filling his new universe with souls — and what could be more perfect in a soul than perfect rationality? So after making a large number of perfect, rational souls, the creator god decided to take a break, delegating the last bits of creation to some lesser deities, who did their best to design vessels for these souls.

The deities began by encasing the souls in that most perfect of shapes, the sphere, which explains why our heads are more or less round. But they quickly realized that these spherical heads would face difficulties and indignities as they rolled around the uneven surface of the Earth. So the gods created bodies to carry the heads, and they animated each body with a second soul — vastly inferior because it was neither rational nor immortal. This second soul contained

those dreadful but necessary disturbances: pleasure, first of all, evil’s most powerful lure; then pains, that make us run away from what is good; besides these, boldness also and fear, foolish counselors both; then also the spirit of anger hard to assuage, and expectation easily led astray. These they fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust, and so, as was necessary, they constructed the mortal type of soul.

Pleasures, emotions, senses … all were necessary evils. To give the divine head a bit of distance from the seething body and its “foolish counsel,” the gods invented the neck.

Most creation myths situate a tribe or ancestor at the center of creation, so it seems odd to give the honor to a mental faculty—at least until you realize that this philosopher’s myth makes philosophers look pretty darn good. It justifies their perpetual employment as the high priests of reason, or as dispassionate philosopher-kings. It’s the ultimate rationalist fantasy—the passions are and ought only to be the servants of reason, to reverse Hume’s formulation. And just in case there was any doubt about Plato’s contempt for the passions, Timaeus adds that a man who masters his emotions will live a life of reason and justice, and will be reborn into a celestial heaven of eternal happiness. 

 

A man who is mastered by his passions, however, will be reincarnated as a woman.

Western philosophy has been worshipping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years.4 There’s a direct line running from Plato through Immanuel Kant to Lawrence Kohlberg. I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. That was Hume’s project, with his philosophically sacrilegious claim that reason was nothing but the servant of the passions.

Thomas Jefferson offered a more balanced model of the relationship between reason and emotion. In 1786, while serving as the American minister to France, Jefferson fell in love. Maria Cosway was a beautiful twenty-seven-year-old English artist who was introduced to Jefferson by a mutual friend. Jefferson and Cosway then spent the next few hours doing exactly what people should do to fall madly in love. They strolled around Paris on a perfect sunny day, two foreigners sharing each other’s aesthetic appreciations of a grand city. Jefferson sent messengers bearing lies to cancel his evening meetings so that he could extend the day into night. Cosway was married, although the marriage seems to have been an open marriage of convenience, and historians do not know how far the romance progressed in the weeks that followed.6 But Cosway’s husband soon insisted on taking his wife back to England, leaving Jefferson in pain.

To ease that pain, Jefferson wrote Cosway a love letter using a literary trick to cloak the impropriety of writing about love to a married woman. Jefferson wrote the letter as a dialogue between his head and his heart debating the wisdom of having pursued a “friendship” even while he knew it would have to end. Jefferson’s head is the Platonic ideal of reason, scolding the heart for having dragged them both into yet another fine mess. The heart asks the head for pity, but the head responds with a stern lecture:

Everything in this world is a matter of calculation. Advance then with caution, the balance in your hand. Put into one scale the pleasures which any object may offer; but put fairly into the other the pains which are to follow, & see which preponderates.

After taking round after round of abuse rather passively, the heart finally rises to defend itself, and to put the head in its proper place —which is to handle problems that don’t involve people:

When nature assigned us the same habitation, she gave us over it a divided empire. To you she allotted the field of science; to me that of morals. When the circle is to be squared, or the orbit of a comet to be traced; when the arch of greatest strength, or the solid of least resistance is to be investigated, take up the problem; it is yours; nature has given me no cognizance of it. In like manner, in denying to you the feelings of sympathy, of benevolence, of gratitude, of justice, of love, of friendship, she has excluded you from their control. To these she has adapted the mechanism of the heart. Morals were too essential to the happiness of man to be risked on the incertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation therefore in sentiment, not in science.

So now we have three models of the mind. Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery. Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the Emperors of Rome, who divided the empire into Eastern and Western halves. 

 

Who is right?

And They Were Afraid.

And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country. Now there was there nigh unto The Mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying,  

“Send us into The Swine, that we may enter into them.”

And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into The Swine: and The Herd ran violently down a steep place into The Sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in The Sea.

And they that fed The Swine fled, and told it in The City, and in The Country. And they went out to see what it was that was done.

And They come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with The Devil, and had The Legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind :

And They were AFRAID.

"Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type. 

Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero. 

Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a surprise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.

Back in "The Real World," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed. 

Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drinking heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic). 

It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous.”

HST

HST - Who Killed Hunter Thompson..? from Spike EP on Vimeo.

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.

They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.


Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's books include Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, The Proud Highway, Better Than Sex and The Rum Diary. His new book, Fear and Loathing in America, has just been released. A regular contributor to various national and international publications, Thompson now lives in a fortified compound near Aspen, Colo. His column, "Hey, Rube," appears each Monday on Page 2.

Conspiracy Of Silence - The Franklin Cover-up 

from Spike EP on Vimeo.

Children of the 1980s

“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. 

What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that Rain is Poison and Sex is Death? 

If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a Strange World. 

Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.” 

― Hunter S. Thompson, 

Generation of Swine: 

Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's

Thanks, Doc.

Now, since we're being so honest - why don't you tell us about the Franklin Savings & Loan, you, Larry King and the kids.....