Kingdom of Fear (36 page)

Jesus! That is so horrible that I hate to see myself actually writing it. What is wrong with me? Why would I even
think
of a scene like that?

. . .

Well, shucks, folks. I guess I’m just lucky. It’s just amazing, isn’t it?

Right. And Ted Williams was lucky, too.

Whoops. And so much for hubris, eh? I was never able to swing a baseball bat like Ted Williams, and I will never be able to write a song like “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But what the hell? Neither one of those Yo-yos could write
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
either. . . . At the top of the mountain, we are all Snow Leopards. Anybody who can do one thing better than anyone else in the world is a natural friend of mine.

Even Criminal Lawyers will qualify for that thin-air club on some days, and my wildly publicized trial in the winter of 1990 was one of those. What had begun as just another routine case of a booze-maddened autograph seeker run amok very quickly mushroomed into a profoundly serious Life or Death situation for me in the middle of another goddamn Urgent book deadline, and I suddenly realized that I was going to need major-league criminal trial attorneys if I wanted to avoid the dismal fate of a wild beast caught in a net and headed for the Bronx Zoo forever.

There is not much difference between the death penalty and going to jail for the rest of your life to a snow leopard or any other wild beast. Even a fish will fight to the death, rather than be hooked and tortured by strangers who may or may not eat him alive. It’s like they used to say in New Hampshire—LIVE FREE OR DIE.

That was before the state brazenly peddled its soul to the cruel and greasy BUSH family from Texas. Along with its bogus reputation for independence and freedom. Going to New Hampshire today is like going to a leafy greenish high-end boutique in Utah where they sell the skulls of famous bigamists who died in prison for fifteen dollars or a bottle of brown whiskey. . . .

Ah, but never mind Utah for now, eh? Only a freak would jabber like that about the two most god-fearing states in the union. And where did
that
come from, anyway? I must be going crazy. Why go out and pick fights in an election year? We are not what we seem to be.

In any case, that was when I hired Hal Haddon and began my long quixotic journey to becoming the Poet Laureate of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, who rode in droves to my defense in my time of great and imminent peril. They slithered in like champions when the great Whistle blew—along with Ralph Steadman, the heroic Mitchell Brothers gang from San Francisco, Bob Dylan, the wild Sabonic sisters from Russia, and Jack, etc. . . . and we kicked the shit out of those Nazis who were trying to kill us. . . . Hallelujah! Fuck those people. OK, time to quit, I see. But not for long. We will RUMBLE, young man, RUMBLE!

Yes. Thank you. Don’t mention it. . . . And now we will get back to normal. Why not?

I was talking about this with Bob Dylan last night, and there was not a hint of Violence as we got down to our discussions. “We may never be able to defeat these swine,” he told me, “but we don’t have to join them.”

Yes sir, I thought. The too much fun club is back in business. Let us rumble.

Summit Conference with Bob Dylan, Aspen, Labor Day, 2002
(Anita Bejmuk)

. . .

DRAT! I wish I had more time and space for this story right now—but the publisher’s armed narks from N.Y. are on my back like leeches, and I can barely hear myself think. Somewhere in the chaos I hear myself yelling,
“Please don’t slit yourself, JoJo. Just get back in the truck. I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Oh no, I thought quickly. That is definitely not me. I would never talk like that. It must be a music nightmare.

And it
was,
because I never heard those voices again, and those Screws in New York never bothered me again, once I got a chance to mix the big board for Mr. Bobby. Nobody fucked with me after that.

. . .

And that is why I secretly worship God, folks. He had the good judgment to leave me alone to write a few genuine black-on-white pages by myself, for a change. Only Anita is with me now, and that’s how I want it. . . . Mahalo.
Res Ipsa Loquitur. Amor Vincit Omnia.

Okay, and it’s about it for now, people. It is 10:00
A.M
. in Manhattan, and I can almost
feel
those bastards getting jittery in their cubicles.

Oh ye of little faith. We are, after all, professionals.

HST/wc/September 3, 2002

The Doctor speaks at a press conference on the steps of the Pitkin
County courthouse with Black Bill and lawyers Hal Haddon and
Gerry Goldstein, after all charges were dropped
(Nicholas Devore III)

June 15, 2002
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Owl Farm
Woody Creek, Colorado
Re:
It’s Been an Interesting Ride

Dear Doc:

As I headed out to deep East Texas, I was marveling at your huevos for standing up to our hometown police when they ran amok through your roost at Owl Farm. Your willingness, then and now, to take a stand against intolerance, wherever it rears its ugly head, is a testament to your tenacity. Your reputation may be that of the poet laureate of our generation, but you teach us by more than just word. Your example of political and social activism speaks volumes about good citizenship. As you reminded me recently:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing.”
¹

A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the intervening decade since we stood on the steps of the Pitkin County Courthouse, basking in the celebrative sunshine of that victorious moment, and most of it has seen the erosion of Constitutional guarantees set in place by our Founding Fathers as a bulwark to protect the governed from their government. For example, the United States Supreme Court has since ruled that the police can:

• Search your home based upon the consent of someone who has absolutely no authority to give same,
²

• Stop your car based upon an “anonymous tip” completely lacking any indicia of reliability,
³

• Subject a motorist to mandatory sobriety tests without any indication they have been drinking or that their driving is impaired,
⁴
and

• Hold innocent citizens for up to two days without giving reason or recourse.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, changed more than Manhattan’s skyline; it profoundly altered our political and legal landscape as well. Anyone who witnessed the desecration of those buildings and the heart-wrenching loss of life, who didn’t want to run out and rip someone a new asshole, doesn’t deserve the freedoms we still enjoy. However, anybody who thinks for one moment that giving up our freedoms is any way to preserve or protect those freedoms, is even more foolhardy.

Yet barely one month later, on October 26, 2001, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act. It rolled through the Senate on a vote of 99 to 1, and the lone holdout, Wisconsin Senator Russ Finegold, said he didn’t really know whether he was opposed to the bill or not, he just wanted to read it before voting. There were only two copies of the 346-page document extant at the time, and the Senate had been run out of their building by the anthrax scare.

That single Congressional enactment authorizes the detention of non-citizens suspected of terrorist acts without filing of charges or resort to judicial authority, permits roving wiretaps, and extends to American citizens the secret proceedings, surveillance, and wiretaps of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which sits in a vault atop the Department of Justice Building, and allows only Deputy Attorneys General of the United States to appear. Imagine an adversary process that allows only one side’s advocate to appear. No wonder that in its 24-year history not a single request for surveillance was turned down. Not until last month, when the secret judge refused to apply these secret proceedings to citizens, cataloging 75 instances
where the FBI had lied to them. The Just Us Department has appealed that secret decision to a secret appeals court, presumably at some other secret location.

At the same time, the Bureau of Prisons, by executive fiat, has authorized monitoring of attorney-client communications by direction of the Attorney General, without any judicial authorization. Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, the Supreme Court reminded those in power:

The Constitution of the United States is the law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the whit of man than that any of [the Constitution’s] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government.
⁵

But this is not the first time civil liberties have been eroded in the face of national crises. Abraham Lincoln suspended the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, Woodrow Wilson had his Palmer raids, and Franklin Roosevelt interred Asian-American citizens for no reason, other than their national origin. All of this is enough to make even the most ardent civil libertarian throw up their hands. But not you, Doc, no, you have refused to remain silent or to go quietly into the night. Your tireless defense of others, faced with official oppression, stands in the best tradition of true patriots.

You championed the cause of a displaced young Innuit woman,
⁶
who found herself in the grip of a draconian legal entanglement, calculated to imprison her for the crime of seeking the return of her purse from a thieving pack of rowdies. At your insistence, we gathered a team of legal eagles and launched a midday raid on the Leadville courthouse, nestled near the
Continental Divide, in a King Air Beechraft, stuffed so full of partisan supporters that Brother Semmes Luckett was heard to exclaim: “King Farouk didn’t require an entourage this large.”

More recently, you sent out a clarion call to defend an incarcerated Colorado woman,
⁷
condemned to suffer a lifetime for the misdeeds of another she had barely met. The idea that a citizen could spend the rest of her life in prison for a crime she did not intend, want, nor desire should be foreign to any sense of justice and fairness. In response you brought the weight and legal prowess of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Amicus Committee to her defense, and rallied a Colorado Governor’s wife, a Denver city councilperson, the Pitkin County Sheriff,
⁸
a Presidential Historian, and yours truly to the steps of our State Capital, all to the strains of Warren Zevon bellowing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

In 1990 you founded the Fourth Amendment Foundation, a collection of legal titans willing to take a stand against our government’s increasingly pervasive intrusions into its citizen’s privacy. While our forefathers were concerned that King George’s Red Coats were breaking down their doors and rummaging through their underwear drawers, today we are faced with more sophisticated means of invading our privacy. The new technology is not physical. You cannot see it. You cannot feel it. But in a way, it is more sinister and dangerous because of that. Stealthlike, it steals your thoughts. It steals your conversations. It invades the crossroads between the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and the First Amendment rights to free speech and association. It cuts to the quick the citizenries’ right to protest and complain about their government. The Fourth Amendment protection of a citizen’s privacy against his or her government’s intrusion is the linchpin upon which all other civil liberties rest. Freedom of speech and association, so essential to a free society, would mean little if the citizens’ activities and communications were not protected from
government interference and interception. George Orwell created his sterile environment and maintained control over the citizenry, not by imprisoning their bodies, but by exposing their thoughts and communications to government scrutiny.