Being bummed all damn day

Hunter S. Thompson's death has bummed me out all damn day. Rereading this article he wrote a few days before the election brought it all home to me. PJ said in the comments of Roxanne's blog:

Damn it Hunter, why? You made it through Nixon, Reagan, Bush/North and you would have made it through Bush Lite. Yes, the swine are running amok. All the more need for you.

Holding off despair is a weighty task. And there's no evidence whatsoever that it can or even should be done. Every time I flip on the TV and see more images of the malevolent forces running this country and contemplate the complacency and ignorance that allows it to happen, I have to stave off despair somehow. Anger sometimes. Distraction. Wild optimism that this soon will pass; it has to. But the ugly truth is that it doesn't have to. This evil has its fangs in us and we may not shake it off before it kills us.

Night of the Living Dead is one of my favorite movies of all time. In it, a bunch of people hole themselves up in the house to protect themselves from the increasing hordes of flesh-eating zombies and we stay with them the whole time, watching them try to figure out how to survive, watching their petty in-fighting over survival strategies, and thinking that having gone through this ordeal, the hero is bound to come out on the other end of this alright. But no--he survives a night of zombie attacks only to be shot in the morning by some fellow living human beings who mistake him for the enemy.

Those of us who oppose the vampiric Republicans who run this country are true patriots, struggling to save America for ourselves and for others. And in the last election, our fellow Americans shot us down, mistaking us for the enemy. How can they not see that we are trying to save them?

BULLETIN: KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT; DR THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH "THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT".

"Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis," the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.

"Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush. He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November." Thompson, well known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as "a worthless Judas goat with no moral compass."

"I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago," he said, "and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States."

Despair is feeling completely helpless, like you have no control, no choices left. Without hope. Bush and all the vampires that wish to suck the good people of this country dry are just nothing without their human allies who have been suckered into helping them. I keep waiting for my fellow humans to get a clue, certain that they will figure it out any day now. I've been lying to myself in order not to despair.

I don't know what caused Thompson to do what he did, what made him decide that hope and him had permanently parted ways. But I think we all have our suspicions. And I am freaked the fuck out that if Thompson, who put up with so much shit in his life, had finally decided to give up hope, then the rest of us might be doomed. But then again, maybe it was just his age that had caught up with him.