Fear
Raising Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson lives on. In the play, Gonzo: A Brutal Chrysalis, performer and writer “B. Duke” incarnates the Last Free American Writer as he was during the intense and difficult years 1968-1971.
The play’s publicity package tells it like this: “Fresh from his breakthrough success chronicling — and nearly being beaten to death by — the Hells Angels, Thompson embarks on a one- and two-man war on the Death of the American Dream. From Big Oil and the Big Three to the NRA and the Kentucky Derby, Richard Nixon and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the usual suspects are strafed and castrated by the Man Who Would Be Raoul.
“What he could not conquer from without, he co-opted from within by becoming the single greatest and most effective danger that anyone before or since has been to the bipolar establishment that is American politics.”
I would only add that on November 11, 1971 Rolling Stone published the first installment of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And in the following year, they ran his Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72. A generation was thus given an opportunity to learn the truth about America in the only way it could truly be told, through a cracked acidic lens that blurred fiction and fact and came to be called “Gonzo Journalism.”
Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness
Great transcript of a speach given by Terence McKenna in 1983 that also apparantly appears in his book “The Archaic Revival”.
Very interesting stuff , here is the opening paragraph :
There is a very circumscribed place in organic nature that has, I think, important implications for students of human nature. I refer to the tryptophan-derived hallucinogens dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and a hybrid drug that is in aboriginal use in the rain forests of South America, ayahuasca. This latter is a combination of dimethyltryptamine and a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that is taken orally. It seems appropriate to talk about these drugs when we discuss the nature of consciousness; it is also appropriate when we discuss quantum physics.
I especially enjoy his thoughts on DMT fear :
One of the interesting characteristics of DMT is that it sometimes inspires fear – this marks the experience as existentially authentic. One of the interesting approaches to evaluating such a compound is to see how eager people are to do it a second time. A touch of terror gives the stamp of validity to the experience because it means, “This is real.” We are in the balance. We read the literature, we know the maximum doses, the LD-50, and so on. But nevertheless, so great is one’s faith in the mind that when one is out in it one comes to feel that the rules of pharmacology do not really apply and that control of existence on that plane is really a matter of focus of will and good luck.
