Flashbacks, sans Acid

CrocVille, California
32° 44' North; 117° 11' West


For a long time Hunter S. Thompson was scared to take LSD.

Ya, you read that right.

And it wasn't because Thompson was scared of shoving crap into his body, but rather because somebody along the way, somebody with Leary-like connections, told him that it would unleash all that repressed violence inside of him that he was always alluding to in his writing.

But all that changed around about the time that Mr. Thompson helped introduce Sonny Barger's boys to Ken Kesey's bunch at La Honda.

And by the time he hit it big with the Vegas thing there was No Beast available, chemical or otherwise, that could keep Thompson from Getting Rid of the Pain of Being a Man.

But HST could still smell hypocrisy from half a continent away. And so, when the criminal repressive Nixon finished washing the floor with the decent progressive McGovern, Thompson was crestfallen when he wrote this, just weeks after that doomed election:

"'On page 39 of California Living magazine I found a hand-lettered ad from the McDonald's Hamburger Corporation, one of Nixon's big contributors in the '72 presidential campaign: PRESS ON, it said. NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN TAKE THE PLACE OF PERSISTENCE. TALENT WILL NOT: NOTHING IS MORE COMMON THAN UNSUCESSFUL MEN WITH TALENT. GENIUS WILL NOT: UNREWARDED GENIUS IS ALMOST A PROVERB. EDUCATION ALONE WILL NOT: THE WORLD IS FULL OF EDUCATED DERELICTS. PERSISTENCE AND DETERMINATION ALONE ARE OMNIPOTENT. I read it several times before I grasped the full meaning......'

The 'full meaning', indeed.

Now I, for a whole lot of reasons that have nothing to with repressed violence I hope, have never, ever, taken acid.

But just yesterday I flashed back to a late adolescent obsession with the writings of Thompson while flipping through the pages of the NYT.

What did it was another, very different, but somehow eerily similar, fullpage Ad from McDonalds on pg C3 that contained a picture of a guy named Charley Bell, the company's former CEO, with teeth impossibly white and a golden arches pin impossibly holographic on his lapel. The Ad also had the following quote:

"At our heart is the will to do and the soul to dare."

Why all this sentiment for a man who helped streamline the freedom-fry seller by cutting labour costs, again, while simultaneously hoodwinking a significant proportion of the population/electorate into thinking that those MSG/fat-laden salads they are having with their Big Macs are actually making them healthier?

Well, you see, Mr. Bell passed away on Jan 16th at the age of 45 from colorectal cancer.

Thanks to the writing of Mr. Thompson and other contrarians of his ilk, I only had to read the Ad once to grasp the full meaning of that thing.