Kingdom of Fear Page 8

  Curtis is suddenly aware of what appears to be two or three more attackers, maybe one, maybe a friend in the aisles, some movement behind him—he feels threatened by more than this one foulmouthed bastard—and due to his self-defense instincts, he sees himself surrounded. So Curtis shoots the guy in front of him, in order to teach the attackers a lesson, and sure enough, they swing away. Then the guy makes a lunge at him, so Curtis pops him two more times. Not quite the best judgment. Since the beer is on the counter in front of him, and he was trying to pay for it with a credit card, let’s say Curtis leaves his card and takes the beer—that’s the kind of thing that could happen, even in our professional journalism ranks.

  You hear the shots, but you don’t really hear them; you’re listening to the radio. You aren’t watching in there, necessarily; let’s say a cop car had pulled into the far side of the parking lot where the light didn’t reach, and you’re aware of that. You think, Hmm, a cop, where’s Curtis, and you look up just in time to see him kind of scurrying back, not galloping or fleeing, but in a hurry back to the car with a six-pack in his hand. He hurriedly jumps in, and he tells you, “Get out of here, man.” And you say, “What happened, what’s wrong?” He says, “Never mind, just get out of here, get out of here.” You mention the cops at the other end of the 7-Eleven parking lot, and that really freaks him out. The next time you have a thought you’re three or four blocks away. And Curtis is trembling, and then you start to tremble too, because you have a right to, because the next thing he’s going to tell you is “I think I shot that guy; I shot that guy. Goddamn that bastard, they attacked me in there, I had to shoot.”

  And you’re starting to think, Whoops. Uh-oh. Say what? Oh my God. Because you are then almost certain to go to prison for Murder One. In the state of Colorado, the state of California, and most others, attenuation involves the felony murder law. You are an accessory, you’re held liable for the crime of your friend, you’re a conspirator—and conspirators, under that law, go to death, or to jail forever. Murder One. So does that describe, more or less, our situation?

  (to be continued)

  Jesus Hated Bald Pussy

  Let’s face it—the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do—says what he is told to say—poses the way he is told to pose. He is a Fool.

  This is never an easy thing for the voters of this country to accept.

  No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in time—when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House.

  Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters—it is where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and acts giddy about other people’s lives—if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder as a logical plan to make sure we are still Number One—he is a Jackass by definition—a loud and meaningless animal with no functional intelligence and no balls.

  To say that this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon.

  Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a Liberal?

  The capacity of these vicious assholes we elected to be in charge of our lives for four years to commit terminal damage to our lives and our souls and our loved ones is far beyond Nixon’s. Shit! Nixon was the creator of many of the once-proud historical landmarks that these dumb bastards are savagely destroying now: the Clean Air Act of 1970; Campaign Finance Reform; the endangered species act; opening a Real-Politik dialogue with China; and on and on.

  The prevailing quality of life in America—by any accepted methods of measuring—was inarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002.

  The Boss was a certified monster who deserved to be impeached and banished. He was a truthless creature of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—a foul human monument to corruption and depravity on a scale that dwarfs any other public official in American history. But Nixon was at least smart enough to understand why so many honorable patriotic U.S. citizens despised him. He was a Liar. The truth was not in him.

  Nixon believed—as he said many times—that if the president of the United States does it, it can’t be illegal. But Nixon never understood the much higher and meaner truth of Bob Dylan’s warning that “To live outside the law you must be honest.”

  The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the difference between a pedophile and a Pederast: The pedophile is a person who thinks about sexual behavior with children, and the Pederast does these things. He lays hands on innocent children—he penetrates them and changes their lives forever.

  Being the object of a pedophile’s warped affections is a Routine feature of growing up in America—and being a victim of a Pederast’s crazed “love” is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option. Once penetrated, the child becomes a Queer in his own mind, and that is not much different than murder.

  Richard Nixon crossed that line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of “family values”—and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown-skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people.

  When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill “gooks” in Vietnam he said, “I ain’t got nothin’ against them Viet Cong. No Cong ever called me Nigger.”

  I agreed with him, according to my own personal ethics and values. He was Right.

  If we all had a dash of Muhammad Ali’s eloquent courage, this country and the world would be a better place today because of it.

  Okay. That’s it for now. Read it and weep. . . . See you tomorrow, folks. You haven’t heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for the spirit of freedom and decency in you. Shit. Somebody has to do it.

  We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. . . . No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.

  Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn’t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today—and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.

  Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

  They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us—they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

  And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.

  HST, 2002

  PART TWO

  The artist at work, with Deborah, in the kitchen, 1994 (Paul Chesley)

  Politics Is the Art of Controlling Your Environment

  I know my own nation best. That’s why I despise it the most. And I know and love my own people too, the swine. I’m a patriot. A dangerous man.

  —Edward Abbey

  Running for Sheriff: Aspen 1970

  On Wednesday night, seven days before the 1970 sheriff’s election, we hunkered down at Owl Farm and sealed the place off. From the road the house looked stone dark. The driveway was blocked at one end of the circle by Noonan’s Jeep, and at the other end by a blue Chevy van with Wisconsin plates. The only possible approach was on foot: You could park on the road, climb a short hill, and cross the long front yard in the glar
e of a huge floodlight . . . or come creeping down from behind, off either one of the two mesas that separate the house from the five-million-acre White River National Forest.

  But only a fool or a lunatic would have tried to approach the place quietly from any direction at all . . . because the house was a virtual fortress, surrounded by armed crazies. Somewhere off to the left, in a dry irrigation ditch about two hundred yards beyond the volleyball court, was Big Ed Bastian, a onetime basketball star at the University of Iowa . . . limping around in the frozen darkness with a 12-gauge pump shotgun, a portable spotlight, and a .38 Special tucked into his belt. Big Ed, our long-suffering campaign coordinator, was growing progressively weaker from the ravages of his new macrobiotic diet. On top of that, he had recently snapped one of the bones in his left foot while forcing his legs into the lotus position, and now he was wearing a cast. The temperature at midnight was 12 above zero and sinking fast. There was no moon.

  On the other side of the house Mike Solheim, my campaign manager, was patrolling the western perimeter with a double-barreled 12-gauge Beretta and a .357 Colt Python Magnum. We suspected that Solheim was probably turning on very heavily out there—caving in to the Vietnam-sentry madness—and we were vaguely concerned that he might get wiggy and blow Bastian’s head off if they happened to cross paths in the darkness.

  But they weren’t moving around much despite the bitter cold. From the spots they’d selected they were both perfectly positioned to deal not only with the threat from the rear or either side of the house, but also to catch anyone approaching from the front in a deadly cross fire of 00-buckshot . . . thus tripling the terror for any poor bastard coming up from the road and straight into the muzzle of Teddy Yewer’s 30-30.

  Teddy, a wild young biker with hair hanging down to his waist, had driven out from Madison to have some fun with the Freak Power sheriff’s campaign . . . and he’d arrived just in time to get himself drafted into the totally humorless role of 24-hour bodyguard. Now, with the original concept of the campaign long gone and forgotten in this frenzy of violence, he found himself doing dead-serious guard duty behind a big window in the darkened living room, perched in the Catbird seat with a rifle in his hands and a fine commanding view of anything that could possibly happen within one hundred yards of the front porch. He couldn’t see Solheim or Bastian, but he knew they were out there, and he knew that all three of them would have to start shooting if the things we’d been warned about suddenly began happening.

  The word had come that afternoon from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the word was extremely grim. Tonight—sometime between dusk on Wednesday and dawn on Thursday—Mr. Thompson, the Freak Power candidate for sheriff, was going to be killed. This intelligence had come from what the CBI investigator described as “an extremely reliable informant,” a person they had every good reason to believe because he (or maybe she; we weren’t told) had “always been right in the past.” The informant had not been able to learn the identity of the assassins, the CBI man told us. Nor had he/she been able to learn what means or methods they planned to use on this job. Shooting was of course the most logical thing to expect, he said. Maybe an ambush at some lonely spot on the road between Aspen and Woody Creek. And if that failed . . . well, it was widely known that the candidate lived in a dangerously isolated house far out in the boondocks. So perhaps they would strike out there, by fire . . . or dynamite.

  Indeed. Dynamite. RDX-type, 90 percent nitroglycerine. Two hundred and ten sticks of it had been stolen just a few days earlier from an Aspen Ski Corp. cache on Ajax Mountain—according to a report from the Ski Corp.—and the thieves left a note saying, “This [stolen dynamite] will only be used if Hunter Thompson is elected sheriff of Aspen.” The note was signed “SDS.”

  Right. Some ignorant dingbat actually signed the note “SDS.” The CBI man hadn’t smiled when we laughed at the tale: He quickly unfolded another sheet of notes and told us that his “reliable informant” had also told him that half the town was about to be destroyed by dynamite—the County Courthouse (meaning the Sheriff’s Office), City Hall (the Police Station), the Hotel Jerome (our campaign headquarters), and the Wheeler Opera House (where Joe Edwards and Dwight Shellman, our attorneys, had their offices).

  Only a cop’s brain could have churned up that mix of silly bullshit . . . and although we never doubted that, we also understood that the same warped mentality might also be capable of running that kind of twisted act all the way out to its brutally illogical extreme. It made perfect sense, we felt, to assume that anybody stupid enough to spread these crudely conceived rumors was also stupid enough to try to justify them by actually dynamiting something.

  At that point in the campaign it was still a three-way race between me, the incumbent (Democratic) sheriff, and the veteran undersheriff who’d resigned just in time to win the GOP primary (over the former city police chief) and emerge as a strong challenger to his former boss—first-term sheriff Carrol Whitmire, a devious, half-bright small-town cop whose four years in office had earned him a reservoir of contempt and neo-public loathing on the part of the local Bar Association, the District Attorney, his own Undersheriff and former deputies, the entire City of Aspen police force and everybody else unlucky enough to have had any dealings with him.

  When the campaign began, Whitmire had virtually no support from the people who knew him best: the county commissioners, the former mayor, the city manager, the ex-D.A., and especially his former employees. He spent the first two weeks of the conflict beseeching both the CBI and the FBI to turn up at least one recorded felony conviction on me . . . and when that effort failed, because I have no criminal record, the evil bastard brought in undercover federal agents to try to provoke both me and my campaign workers into felony violence that would have given him an excuse to bust us before the election.

  At one point he hired a phony outlaw biker from Denver—Jim Bromley, a veteran of two years of undercover work for the feds—who boomed into town one day on a junk chopper and first threatened to dynamite my house if I didn’t drop out of the race at once . . . then apologized for the threat—when it failed—and tried to hire on as my bodyguard . . . then spread rumors that people on my staff were in touch with Kathy Powers and a gang of Weathermen who planned to blow all the bridges into town . . . then tried to sell us automatic weapons . . . then offered to stomp the shit out of anybody we aimed him at . . . then got himself busted, by accident, when the city cops found a completely illegal sawed-off 20-gauge pump action shotgun in his car—which they happened to tow away from a no-parking zone.

  The sheriff panicked at that point and blew Bromley’s cover by instructing the city cops to give his illegal weapon back to him because he was a “federal agent.” This was done. But instead of leaving town, Bromley came back to our headquarters—unaware that a friendly city cop had already tipped us off—and hung around offering to run the mimeograph machine or anything else we needed done. Meanwhile, we were trying to compel the assistant D.A. to have the bastard arrested on charges ranging from felony conspiracy to threatening the life of a political candidate to carrying an illegal weapon—and offering to wreak violence on innocent people—but the assistant D.A. refused to act, denying all knowledge of the man or his motives, until the sheriff unexpectedly admitted that Bromley was actually working for him.

  Meanwhile, Bromley had once again lost his sawed-off shotgun—this time to a city cop who went out to his motel room at the Applejack Inn to seize the weapon for the second time in 36 hours, after a desk clerk we’d assigned to get a photo of Bromley called us to say that one of the maids had found a “vicious-looking gun” in his room. . . . But even then the D.A.’s office refused to move, not even to pick up the shotgun again. So we had to send a cop out on our own—Rick Crabtree, a dropout English major from Columbia—and even after Crabtree seized the weapon, the D.A.’s office snarled petulantly at our demands that Bromley be picked up and booked. He’d returned to the Applejack with a girl, they said, and
they didn’t want to disturb him until morning.

  This was too much for the frustrated crew of Left-bikers, Black Belts, White Panthers, and assorted local heavies who’d been calling for open season on Bromley ever since he showed up. They wanted to soak him down with Mace, then beat him to jelly with baseball bats . . . and they didn’t give a flying fuck if he was a federal agent or not. I was still on the phone with the assistant D.A. when I noticed the room emptying around me. “We’re on our way to the Applejack,” somebody yelled from the doorway. “You can tell that chickenshit pig of a district attorney that we decided to make a citizen’s arrest . . . and we’ll dump his fink at the jail in about thirty minutes, in a plastic bag.”