From Hunter S. Thompson's 2003 Kingdom of Fear:
And it was not until several days or even weeks later that I understood that those cops had actually planned to have me beaten. Not me, personally, but Me as a member of "The Enemy," that crowd of "outside agitators" made up of people who had come Chicago on some mission that the cops couldn't grasp except in fear and hatred.
This is what caused me to tremble when I finally sat down behind the locked & chained door of my hotel room. It was not a fear of being beaten or jailed, but the slow-rising shock of suddenly understanding that it was no longer a matter of Explaining my Position. These bastards knew my position, and they wanted to beat me anyway. They didn't give a fuck if the Democratic National Committee had issued me special press credentials; it made no difference to them that I'd come to Chicago as a paying guest -- at viciously inflated rates -- with no intention of causing the slightest kind of trouble for anybody.
That was the point. My very innocence made me guilty -- or at least a potential troublemaker in the eyes of the rotten sold-out scumbags who were running that Convention: Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, Lyndon Baines Johnson, then President of the United States. These pigs didn't care what was Right. All they knew was what they wanted, and they were powerful enough to break anybody who even thought about getting in their way.
Right here, before I forget, I want to make what I think is a critical point about the whole protest action of the 1960s. It seems to me that the underlying assumption of any public protest -- any public disagreement with the government, "the system," or "the establishment," by any name -- is that the men in charge of whatever you're protesting against are actually listening, whether they later admit it or not, and that if you run your protest Right, it will likely make a difference. Norman Mailer made this point a long time ago when he said that the election of JFK gave him a sense, for the first time in his life, that he could actually communicate with the White House. Even with people like Johnson and Mac Bundy -- or even Pat Brown or Bull Connor -- the unspoken rationale behind all those heavy public protests was that our noise was getting through and that somebody in power was listening and hearing and at least weighing our protest against their own political realities . . . even if these people refused to talk to us. So in the end the very act of public protest, even violent protest, was essentially optimistic and actually a demonstration of faith (mainly subconscious, I think) in the father figures who had the power to cange things -- once they could be made to see the light of reason, or even political reality.
This is what the bastards never understood -- that the "Movement" was essentially an expression of deep faith in the American Dream: that the people they were "fighting" were not the cruel and cynical beasts they seemed to be, and that in fact they were just a bunch of men like everybody's crusty middle-class fathers who only needed to be shaken a bit, jolted out of their bad habits and away from their lazy, short-term, profit-oriented life stances . . . and that once they understood, they would surely do the right thing.
A Willingness to Argue, however violently, implies a faith of some basic kind in the antagonist, an assumption that he is still open to argument and reason and, if all else fails, then finely orcestrated persuasion in the form of political embarrassment. The 1960s were full of examples of good, powerful men changing their minds on heavy issues: John Kennedy on Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, Martin Luther King Jr. on Vietnam, Gene McCarthy on "working behind the scenes and within the Senate Club," Robert F. Kennedy on grass and long hair and what eventually came to be Freak Power, Ted Kennedy on Francis X. Morrissey, and Senator Sam Ervin on wiretaps and preventative detention.
Anyway, the general political drift of the 1960s was one of the Good Guys winning, slowly but surely (and even clumsily sometimes), over the Bad Guys . . . and the highest example of this was Johnson's incredible abdication on April Fool's Day of 1968. So nobody was ready for what began to happen that summer: first in Chicago, when Johnson ran his Convention like a replay of the Reichstag fire . . . and then with Agnew and Nixon and Mitchell coming into power so full of congenital hostility and so completely deaf to everything we'd been talking about for ten years that it took a while to realize that there was simply no point in yelling at the fuckers. They were born deaf and stupid.
This was the lesson of Chicago -- or at least that's what I learned from Chicago.
Tags: Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear, Sixties, 60s
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