Hunter S. Thompson and the culture of violence

I just finished reading the new Rolling Stone magazine with the feature article on Hunter S. Thompson. Specifically I want to talk about the prediction he made while traveling with and writing about the Hells Angels. When Dr. Bob Geiner asked Hunter why he was writing about “that bunch of losers,” Hunter replied because that is where the future is going. And isn’t that so very true? Kesey, Jerry Garcia, and many others in the 60s “peace movement” believed that the only way for “peace” to be achieved was for the Hells Angels and other such groups to cooperate with one another. But what happens when those trying to bring about a change as monumental as peace meet a long established tradition such as violence? The peace movement is silently subverted, while its momentum shifts to the more entrenched movement—violence in this case—and propels it to even greater legitimacy.

Look around, where are the Vietnam-style protests over the Iraq war? They are virtually non-existent. What does the vast majority of full-length feature films contain? Copious amounts of violence, with little emphasis on truly human desires of compassion, good will, etc. Movies like Across the Universe which seek to expose war for what it is and humans desirous of peace are not exposed to a large audience, but rather to a select few theaters across the country. Nietzsche said that the ascetic ideal is the artist and that the artist must avoid being corrupted by materialism. Maybe the modern ascetic ideal is the peacenik and it is absolutely imperative that the peaceniks avoid corruption by the entrenched violence that our culture loves so much. It is a rather strange phenomenon is it not, the extent to which violence pervades American culture? America has 10X more fatal shootings than does the next closest “industrialized” country. Domestic violence is on the rise, not on the fall. America deals more small arms throughout the world than any other country in the entire world. Our total spending by the Department of Defense (why did we change the name from Department of War?) is, since the illegal invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, over 600 billion dollars annually—ANNUALLY! That is more than the next 18 closest military budgets, including India and China, the two biggest countries in the world. I believe I read a statistic somewhere that said that the average American home possesses at least 2 guns. So was Hunter right in his rather presumptuous prediction? Most definitely.

And then people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the rest of Satan’s crew (disguised in the teachings of Jesus) want to talk about traditional family values and other such nonsense! There is this belief that Europe is entering a state of depravity and decadence because the accept nudity and human sexuality. But aren’t those things inherently human? While violence (at least to the extent that we have carried it) is certainly not. Traditional family values to these people entail the subservience of the woman to the man, the proliferation of intolerance and racism, and the inability to think for oneself—and then we wonder why violence (and especially hate crimes) is on the rise. To hell with traditional family values as these people preach them. There are much, much, much more important problems to be dealt with.