A Nation of 220 Million Used Car Salesmen

"Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race -- small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule."

Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877

"If the current polls are reliable. . . Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it -- that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes. . . understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose. . . Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

That is the one grim truth of this election most likely to come back and haunt us: The options were clearly defined, and all the major candidates except Nixon were publicly grilled. . . By mid-September. . . almost everyone likely to vote in November understood that Richard Nixon and George McGovern were two very different men: not only in the context of politics, but also in their personalities, temperaments, guiding principles, and even their basic lifestyles. . .

There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men, a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality -- the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts -- that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. . .This was not Richard Nixon had in mind when he said, last August, that the 1972 election would offer voters "the clearest choice of this century," but on a level he will never understand he was probably right. . .and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incuriably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his boxful of Barbie doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster that turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes to close. . ."

Selections from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, 

Hunter S. Thompson