Thompson - Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80s

Praise for Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson should be recognized for contributing some of the clearest, most bracing, and fearless analysis of the possibilities and failures of American democracy in the past century.

Chicago Tribune

Thompsons voice still jumps right off the page, as wild, vital, and gonzo as ever.

The Washington Post

[R]ollickingly funny throughout, Thompsons latest proves that the father of gonzo journalism is alive and well.

Publishers Weekly

Thompson gives another side to every story, another wall to cast your view of reality against. In doing so, he adds something often lacking or poorly executed in modern journalism. He makes it fun

South Bend Tribune

Thompsons wicked humor, mixed with characteristic hubris, offers leaps of insight that it seems only he could unleash. He writes what others would fear to think, let alone lay down in such an unbridled manner.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

Hunter Thompson is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists. His ideas are brilliant and honorable and valuablethe literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

His hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest.

Nelson Algren

He amuses; he frightens; he flirts with doom. His achievement is substantial.

Garry Wills

There are only two adjectives writers care about anymorebrilliant and outrageousand Hunter Thompson has a freehold on both of them.

Tom Wolfe

What we have here is vintage Hunter S. Thompson, a literary orgy of wicked irreverence.

The Boston Globe

Thompson is a spirited, witty, observant, and original writer.

The New York Times

Obscene, horrid, repellent... driving, urgent, candid, searing ... a fascinating, compelling book!

New York Post

No one can ever match Thompson in the vitriol department, and virtually nobody escapes his wrath.

The Flint Journal

While Tom Wolfe mastered the technique of being a fly on the wall, Thompson mastered the art of being a fly in the ointment. He made himself a part of every story, made no apologies for it, and thus produced far more honest reporting than any crusading member of the Fourth Estate.... Thompson isnt afraid to take the hard medicine, nor is he bashful about dishing it out.... He is still king of beasts, and his apocalyptic prophecies seldom miss their target.

Tulsa World

Also by Hunter S. Thompson

Hells Angels
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72
The Great Shark Hunt
The Curse of Lono
Songs of the Doomed
Better Than Sex
Screwjack
The Proud Highway
The Rum Diary
Fear and Loathing in America
Kingdom of Fear

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC.: Excerpt from the poem The Hollow Men in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Copyright 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. HOWARD NEMEROV: The Phoenix by Howard Nemerov from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, published by The University of Chicago Press, 1977. Reprinted by permission of the author.

RANDOM HOUSE, INC.: Excerpt from the poem In Memory of W. B. Yeats from W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. Rights outside the U. S. administered by Faber & Faber Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., and Faber & Faber Ltd.

WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC, INC.: Excerpt from the lyrics to Its All Right Ma (Im Only Bleeding) by Bob Dylan. Copyright 1965 by Warner Bros Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Copyright 1988 by Hunter S. Thompson All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

This Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2003 SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

5 7 9 10 8 6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Vintage Books edition as follows: Thompson, Hunter S.
Generation of swine: tales of shame and degradation in the 80s / Hunter S. Thompson.
p. cm.
1. United StatesPolitics and government1981- .2. United StatesPopular cultureHistory 20th century. 3. Thompson, Hunter S.JourneysUnited States. I. Title. E876.T48 1989 973.92dcl9 88-40449

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5044-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2689-9
ISBN-10: 0-7432-5044-3

To Maria Khan and David McCumber, the other two legs of the tripod

Earth receive an honored guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique.

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honors at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

W. H. Auden
from In Memory of W. B. Yeats

GENERATION
OF
SWINE

And I will give him the morning star.

T hat is from Revelationonce again. I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English languageand it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

And there is also the fact that I spend a lot of my time on the road, renting typewriters and hustling FAX machines in strange hotels and always too far from my own massive library at home to get my hands on the wisdom that I suddenly realizeon some sweaty night in Miami or a cold Thanksgiving Day in MinneapolisI need and want, but that with a deadline just four or five hours away is utterly beyond my reach.

You cannot call the desk at the Mark Hopkins or the Las Vegas Hilton or the Arizona Biltmore and have the bell captain bring up the collected works of Sam Coleridge or Stephen Crane at three oclock in the morning.... In some towns Maria has managed to conjure up a volume of H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain, and every once in a while David McCumber would pull a rabbit like Nathanael Wests Cool Million out of his hat or his own strange collection in his office at the Examiner....

But not often. Fast and total recall of things like page 101 from Snowblind or Marlowes final judgment on Lord Jim, or what Richard Nixon said to Henry Kissinger when they were both on their knees in front of Abe Lincolns portrait in the White House on some crazed Thursday night in July of 1974 are just about impossible to locate after midnight on the road, or even at noon.

It simply takes too much time, and if theyve been sending bottles of Chivas up to your room for the past three days, they get nervous when you start demanding things theyve never heard of.