National affairs trapped in Mr Bills neighborhood
by Hunter S. Thompson
(Reprinted from 'Better Than Sex')


"Trace a line of goose pimples up the tin young arm. Slide
the needle in, and push the bulb, watching the junk hit him
all over. Move right in with the shit, and suck junk through
all the hungry young cells."
                -William Burroughs, The Soft Machine

  Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty
addiction, but it is. Political junkies are addicts, and they are guilty,
and they lie cheat, and steal- like all the other junkies. And when the
get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their
cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive
thinking. That is politics- especially presidential campaigns. That is
when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else.
They are salmon, and they must spwan. They are addicts, and so am I. The
fish hear their music, and I hear mine.
  Politics is like the Guinea Worm. It sneaks into your body and grows
like a cyst from within- until finally it gets so big and strong that it
bursts straight through the skin, a horrible red worm with a head like a
cobra, snapping around in the air as it struggles to breathe.
  This is true. There are pictures in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The
Guinea Worm is real, and so is politics.The only difference is, you can
get rid of the worm by gripping its head and wrapping its body around a
stick, then pulling it very slowly out of your flesh, like a bird pulls
an earthworm out of the ground.
  Getting rid of a political addiction is not so easy. The power worm is
smaller and tends to migrate upward to the skull, where it feeds and
thrives on tissue. It is undetectable in the early stage, usually
diagnosed as a common "brain fluke"- which is also incurable- and by the
time it gets powerful enough to bore its way through a soft spot in the
skull, not even witch doctors will touch it.
  The Guinea Worm problem is confined mainly to equatorial Africa, thank
God. We are not ready for it in this country. A declining standard of
living is one thing, but getting used to the notion that any lesion on
your leg might be the first sign of a worm about to erupt is still
unacceptable to the normal American. Even a single (confirmed) case of
Guinea Worm in Washington would be taken as an omen and doom Bill
Clinton's presidency. An epidemic would finish the Democratic party and
put Pat Buchanan in the White House for 20 years.
  The humor of the campaign trail is relentlessly cruel and brutal. If
you think you like jokes, try hanging around the cooler after midnight
with hired killers like James Carville or the late Lee Atwater, whose
death by cancer in 1991 was a fatal loss to the Bush re-election effort.
Atwatercould say, without rancor, that he wanted to castorate Michael
Dukakis and dump him on Boston Commons with his nuts stuffed down his
throat.  Atwater said a lot of things that made people cringe, but he
usually smiled when he said them, and people tried to laugh.
  Not everbody will get a whoop out of these things, but if you want to
get elected, it is better to be Mean than to be Funny. Cruel jokes are a
big part of life in any enviroment where speed freaks, work addicts and
obsesive-compulsive political junkies are ripped to the tits day and
night for 13 straight months on their own adrenalin and swollen more and
more each day with the kind of with the kind of hubris that comes when
you try and cross Innocence and Ambition all at once and you start seeing
yourself on the front page of the New York Times in s photo with the next
president getting off a jet plane in Texas or Boston or Washington,
surrounded by a gang of hard-eyed Secret Service escorting you through a
cheering crowd...
  It's a rush that a lot of people will tell you is higher than any drug
they've ever tried or even heard about and maybe BETTER THAN SEX- wich is
a wierd theory, and often raises  unsettling personal questions, but is a
theory nonetheless, and on some days I've even believed it myself.
  But not really, and days like that are so rare that I usually can't
remember them...But when I do, it is like a nail in my eye. The pain goes
away, but the wound stays forever.

