Wild Hunter's Circus Story

SonnyWannaTryTheBigTop?
HSTFriday5thEditionVille


'The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Six Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos...but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trazeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego.....

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends......Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99 cents your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message......

I could see myself lying in bed at the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: "Woodstock Uber Alles!"

Hunter S. Thompson.
Rolling Stone #95, Nov. 1971
Reprinted in: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Warner Books, pp 46-47.

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

A top Bush aide speaking to Ron Susskind in the Summer of 2002
In the New York Times Magazine, Oct 17th, 2004.

'Bush is really the evil one here and it is more than just him....

We're the Nazis in this game, and I don't like it. I'm embarrassed and I'm pissed off. Yeah. I mean to say something and I think a lot of people in this country agree with me.'

Hunter S. Thompson, January 2003
Interview with Mary Suma, KDNK Radio, Roaring Fork Colorado
Reprinted, and Audio Archived by Democracy Now

Ever out in front of the herd, little did Dr. Thompson realize that the Circus-Circus would become a bastion of family entertainment some thirty years on. And perhaps even more prescient, it looks like the American people are starting to come around to his thinking on the Bush regime if John Zogby's latest poll is any indication, especially the part about 42% of the populace being in favour of impeachment proceedings if it can be shown that they were misled to war.

Let the good times roll.

____
Canada Day Coda: On the night they went to the Circus-Circus, Thompson's Attorney, who was definitely not Samoan, wanted to go to the Tropicana to see Guy Lombardo and his Young Canadians. Thompson said no, as he had no intention of paying out hard earned dollars to watch a bleeping corpse. So they went to the Desert Inn to watch Debbie Reynolds sing Sgt Pepper in a silver afro wig instead. Strange days indeed.

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