Quote of the Day | May 18, 2008: The One with a Taste for High Rolling

From Hunter S. Thompson's Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room, originally published in Rolling Stone, 1978:

"No Vietcong ever called me 'Nigger.'"

Muhammad Ali said that, back in 1967, and he almost went to prison for it -- which says all that needs to be said right now about justice & gibberish in the White House.

Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them and some fools try to do both -- but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to a fork in the road a long time ago and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.

A brown Jay Gatsby -- not black and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby -- an endless fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for Wolfsheim, a delicate and dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby shuffle for Tom Buchanon and no answers at all for Nick Carraway, the word junkie.

There are two kinds of counter punchers in this world: one learns early to live by his reactions and quick reflexes, and the other -- the one with a taste for high rolling -- has the instinct to make an aggressor's art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor's style of the Counter Puncher.

Muhammad Ali decided one day a long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday that he was not only going to be King of the World on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else's. . . .

Which is very, very High Thinking -- even if you can't pull it off. Most people can't handle the action on whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can usually have better sense than to push their luck any further.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer -- he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Tags: Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, Muhammad Ali