Monday, October 16, 2006

dog-eating, crotch-busting fools

I read Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson this summer. So did some of my friends. The general conclusion seems to be that overall we don't really care about the Hell's Angels anymore. The roving menace that they were or were made out to be in the 60s and 70s no longer frightens us. That being said, the book is still worth reading. It's a testament to Thompson's journalistic and literary ability that my friends and I would continue to read and finish reading an entire book on a subject that has become completely irrelevant. His language has a way of shocking you into continuation. Things will be blah, blah, blah, motorcycles, blah, blah, blah, rape and then he throws out a phrase like "tender young blondes with lobotomy eyes," and you keep reading just hoping to find another something like that. lobotomy eyes. wow. He also has an almost prescient understanding of what would in our generation become the media circus. It is so subtle that one can't be sure if he is even aware of it, but it's there and it's interesting. He is much more vocally and satisfyingly political and bitingly if humorously takes on racism, the military, and backward thinking.



...it is a time for sharing the wine jug, pummeling old friends, random fornication and general full-dress madness.

The girls stood quietly in a group, wearing tight slacks, kerchiefs and sleeveless blouses or sweaters, with boots and dark glasses, uplift bras, bright lipstick and the wary expressions of half-bright souls turned mean and nervous from too much bitter wisdom in too few years.

All three major television networks would be seeking them out with cameras and they would be denounced in the US Senate by George Murphy, the former tap dancer.

They would owe most of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the shoulder of American journalism like some jeering mastubating raven.

Here, sweet Jesus, was an image flat guaranteed to boil the public blood and foam the brain of every man with female flesh for kin.

...they were lodged in the Monterey County Jail in Salinas...out there in Steinbeck country, the hot lettuce valley, owned in the main by smart second-generation hillbillies who got out of Appalachia while the getting was good, and who now pay other, less smart hillbillies to supervise the work of Mexican braceros, whose natural fitness for stoop labor has been explained by the ubiquitous Senator Murphy: "They're built low to the ground," he said, "so it's easier for them to stoop."

They rode with a fine, unwashed arrogance, secure in their reputation as the rottenest motorcycle gang in the whole history of Christendom.

they are better constructed for the mindless rape of any prostrate woman they might come across as they scurry about, from one place to another, with their dorks carried low like water wands.

The reasoning was sound; the beasts were put off in a place where they could whip themselves into any kind of orgiastic frenzy without becoming dangerous to the citizenry--and if things got out of hand, the recruits across the road could be bugled out of bed and issued bayonets.

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