This election day my thoughts have turned to Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is both smart and hilarious, and never matched up to the mumbling, addled Thompson I remembered. So of course I turned to YouTube.
I think the BBC captured the true Hunter S. Thompson in this interview (I’m guessing 1976, since they mention Carter in comparison to Nixon). It begins with him saying Richard Nixon stands for the dark side of the American dream (poetic, but he’d written it before), shows him smoking pot and, behind the slate between takes, doing a line of coke off his hand, all the while being two steps ahead of the interviewer. When he knocks his whiskey over into the lawn, he cracks a joke about rolling his ice in chlorophyll, and the poor reporter can’t see he’s kidding. Stay with it until the end, to hear the cogent, sharp journalist Thompson admit “When I speak at universities, I’m not sure if they’re inviting Duke or Thompson; I’m not sure who to be.” Seems like it wasn’t long before Duke took over completely.
Ah well, as drug-damaged as he got, HST was against the war in Iraq. Which reminds me, it’s time to go vote.
I Declare a new holiday: Cooping Day. I think Hunter would approve. Not the ballot stuffing angle, just the rowdy tone of the thing.
As if literary folks needed another excuse to get drunk and wear each other’s clothes, I propose that Election Day, November 7, be declared “Cooping Day” in memory of Edgar Allan Poe’s demise.
According to The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore,
“This is the theory given in the vast majority of Poe biographies, although it cannot be proven true. Coincidence or not, the day Poe was found on the street was election day in Baltimore and the place near where he was found, Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls, was both a bar and a place for voting. In those days, Baltimore elections were notorious for corruption and violence. Political gangs were willing to go to great extremes to ensure the success of their candidates. Election ballots were stolen, judges were bribed and potential voters for the opposition intimidated. Some gangs were known to kidnap innocent bystanders, holding them in a room, called the “coop.” These poor souls were then forced to go in and out of poll after poll, voting over and over again. Their clothing might even be changed to allow for another round. To ensure compliance, their victims were plied with liquor and beaten. Poe’s weak heart would never have withstood such abuse. This theory appears to have been first offered publicly by John R. Thompson in the early 1870s to explain Poe’s condition and the fact that he was wearing someone else’s clothing. A possible flaw in the theory is that Poe was reasonably well-known in Baltimore and likely to be recognized.”
I believe we can pull this off without the beatings. Drinking is not uncommon at political rallies, and I, for one, have been known to wear ill-fitting clothes that don’t belong to me. In my younger days, I was once voted the best Nell at a Rocky Horror event.
Of course, we have to vote first! This is important (understatement); but once our ballots are cast and we are waiting, longing, for a change in the wind, we might as well do something to take the edge off.