I’m in a motel room, the only cheap Best Western franchise joint in Boulder, replete with thin carpet duct tape mended and taped to the hallway floor; ineffectual air conditioning rumbling and unable to make a dent in the humid air of August; and Angie Dickinson’s “Police Story” providing the aural ambience of sirens and Angie running around in tight sweaters wielding handcuffs on a small black-and-white TV in the corner.
A young, sweating, anxious, excited boy/man has pulled up his shirt to give a famous author space to write with a dripping red magic marker on the kid’s chest.
Honey, says the author/journalist/legend, “How do you spell weird? I should know that word by now.” Kathy, the self-designated wife/girlfriend at the time and I walked gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson through the spell-check process one letter at a time: W-E-I-R-D.
Hunter basically made a career exploring, living and writing about the weird: politics, sports, Hell’s Angels, drugs, DEA agents, Las Vegas and the American Dream. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” he said, and, sure enough, dark money made the profession professional.
What Hunter brought in from the edge of experience then is now mainstream parlance for entire generations, not just mine but today’s end-of-alphabet generations X, Y and Z — who are all trying to describe what has come to be just as Hunter described what was then. Weird has returned to the forefront with the reincarnation of the then-famous “I am not a crook” president as an actual former 34-times-convicted president, maintaining that he, also, is not a crook.
Weird. And the Democrats are meeting in Chicago as they did in 1968 to nominate yet another replacement vice president stepping in to take the reins of an unpopular president who knew the game was up. Kamala Harris is picking up the Biden mantle as the self-styled “happy warrior” progressive from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, picked up Lyndon B. Johnson’s mantle, 56 years ago in the city by the lake. Again, it’s someone from Minnesota, with a joyful progressive, Gov. Tim Walz, stepping in as the vice presidential candidate. Need we say “weird” again?
That’s the venue where the men in pale blue made tear gas and billy club war — not love — on young anti-war protesters. (Vietnam then; will it be Gaza now?) They klunked Thompson on the head with a nightstick, setting off a writing frenzy that mixed humor, cynicism, despair and insight — forging the term “fear and loathing” into a powerful critique of an American dream lost in a sea of corruption, materialism and authoritarian undercurrents that “Dick the Trick” and his cohorts dreamed of creating back in 1968. Call it “Project 1975” if you will. “The American people need to know their president is not a crook,” was the trickster’s definitive statement, now being recycled by his party’s current nominee who’s hoping for the immunity, taking a page from his predecessor who declared, “If the President does it, it’s not illegal.” (Source: 1977, David Frost, CBS)
Yes, W-E-I- R-D is back, the word of the day, of the week, of the campaign for president — a resurrected vision for new generations. Effectively brandishing that word in describing the GOP ticket helped propel a Nebraska-born football coach into the No. 2 slot on the Democratic ticket. The young kid at the start of this story is now just about the same age as the VP nominee: coach and Gov. Tim Walz. Walz doesn’t have the word inscribed on his chest in Steadmanesque all caps in sweat-melted red magic marker, but the convicted one — the orange man — fears being branded weird as much as the kid of 30 years ago desired being marked in scarlet with the W-word. Nixon and Thompson were obsessive football fans, weirdly enough.
“She actually called me ‘weird’ … it was just a sound bite. And she called JD [Vance] and I ‘weird.’ He’s not weird.” Thus he concludes, “I think I am entitled to personal attacks.”
Entitled or not, the newly branded candidate has unloaded a catalog of brandings of Kamala Harris ranging from claims that she “only recently” became a Black person, to a misogynistic claim that she slept her way into office. He’s labeling her alternatively as a socialist and a communist, before…
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