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What was your relationship with the counterculture by 1967? Coming out of the WorldWar II generation, you were a bit older than the people driving the movement.
Let's see, '67, I was forty-four, so, yes, I was older than the counterculture, for sure. You have to understand that the counterculture in away was a very difficult birth, socially speaking, because all through the Fifties we felt we were very few in numbers. These were the Eisenhower years. Comparing him to the presidents that have come since, he wasn't that bad, but at the time,we thought he was awful, because he was so middle-of-the-road American. And we felt the country was ready to explode with all sorts of new ideas and a new mode of perception. It must have been a good eight years — 1965, at least — before the revolution, so called, began. By then, I felt like the dean of that movement. But it wasn't like people were beating a path to my door. I was more of an observer than an adviser.
Did you feel much of a generation gap?
I thought they weren't responsible. You'd hear kids saying, "Let's burn an American flag." Even worse, a rather scurrilous type I knew said, "Let's burn a dog, to show them what it is like burning people in Vietnam." I remember saying to him, "Are you out of your fucking mind? Burn a dog?" But it was typical of the extremity. My generation had come out of the war, feeling on one hand that we had really been involved in a watershed. And on the other hand, as you almost always feel after war, we felt we had been betrayed. We hadn't been in that war to have a cold war following it. So we had roots. We had a historical sense of things. I had the feeling that this new generation was just born out of nowhere. And I also felt that they didn't know what they were doing. On the other hand, it was exciting as hell, because at least finally we were breaking out. But the "we," as I say,was slightly smudged.
What else divided your generations? How about the drug culture?
Well, of course, in the Fifties,we who had been marijuana smokers were very proud of that. And we really felt that marijuana maybe was the secret back route to the revolution. That if everyone was smoking marijuana, we would naturally have a revolution, because when you are on marijuana you can see everything clearly and so forth. I stayed a marijuana smoker until I finally gave it up ten or twenty years later. I felt like you were mortgaging the future with marijuana. You take pot — when I take it, I really have a trip — and I was good for nothing for two days after that. I realized that if I am going to be a serious writer and do a lot of work, I would have to give it up, and did, reluctantly. The younger kids were going on to heavier drugs. I never went near that stuff.
You never tried psychedelic drugs at the time?
Before LSD came along, there was something called, what the hell was it? It began with an "m" — mescaline. I remember taking it once, in New Orleans, and getting very sick, just miserable and then crazy. And I never was tempted to go near the stuff again. And I never really went into LSD. I sort of disapproved of it.
Why?
I felt it was too easy. I have always had this very strong, call it a feeling, call it a prejudice, call it a conviction . . . that the mysteries are not easily available. You have to earn entrance into them. You didn't learn things for too little. You had to pay a price. And I felt that LSD was just blasting superhighways into the mysteries. And what I really didn't like about LSD is that people who were taking it were seeming to become less and less as they took it. They got emptier and more vapid. I always felt Leary really was a sort of bland asshole. What was it: "Turn on, tune in, drop out"? I thought he absolutely was wasting a generation. So I have nothing good to say about him, and I felt that with all the excitement being liberated, there also were some very bad things happening, including the finer sensibilities of a generation being exploited and finally consumed, consumed for too little.
Was rock & roll another dividing point?
Jazz had meant a great deal to me. All through the Fifties I used to go to the Five Spot and hear Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins. They were heroes to me. I felt jazz was an extraordinary opening into, again, the mysteries of modern existence. And I felt rock & roll was just monotonous compared to jazz and never liked it. I always felt like it was taking over and it was the equivalent of LSD in a way. That everything was getting cheapened. I think this is true to this day. We live in a cheaper environment now than we used to.
You wrote about the 1968 political conventions in your book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." Looking back, what do you think is the legacy of the protests that took place in Chicago that year?
I think that the Democratic party is finally beginning to get off its hands and knees. It has been down there ever since '68. That convention did incredible damage to the Democratic party, because it cleaved the party down the middle — it was almost biblical, in the sense that the waters parted. There were those who were totally opposed to the war in Vietnam and virtually ready to die for their beliefs, and the other half of the party felt, "You guys brought this on us! You wrecked our party!" It was dreadful, and the party has staggered ever since. Sixty-eight was a disaster for the Democrats.
Why do you think this president and this war haven't engendered a comparable level of protest?
Well, it hasn't engendered that level yet because there are a few thousand professional soldiers who are being killed. What do we have, 3,000 professional American soldiers who have been killed? The U.S. casualties in Vietnam were 50,000, and also it was a draft army. But there is a great deal of resentment to [this war]. And the resentment is wholly justified. It is probably the most dastardly war we have ever been in, the most meaningless war, especially when you look back on the stupidity of the brainy people who got us into it, the neo-cons,who really believed it would be easy.
You think this is a more misguided war than Vietnam?
Well,Vietnam was an immensely misguided war for a very simple reason, which is that communism was cannibalistic. There were separate principalities of communism fighting each other, and if we had left it alone, it all would have come apart. But instead, there was a paranoia in American life. The right, very incorrectly, believed that communism was going to take over the entire world. I would say because of Christian bad conscience.
What do you mean by that?
Well, we are not supposed to enrich ourselves, enrich ourselves, enrich ourselves. We are supposed to take care of the poor, if we are good Christians. But in fact there is no such thing as a good Christian. A good Christian is one man and one woman in a thousand. The average Christian is a mixture, like the rest of us, with their good and their bad. And church going Christians have been running America in my lifetime. And they saw communism as the spawn of the devil. They didn't see it as a messed-up system filled with people just like themselves, half-good, half-bad.
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Speaking of the Cold War, in "The White Negro," you wrote about how the threat of nuclear annihilation created an existential crisis among young people.
That your death will be without meaning.
Do you see a comparable thing going on today with the war on terror?
9/11 is a perfect example of that. The horror, the shock, is that you get up in the morning, you say goodbye to your children, you kiss your wife, you go off to work, and you are dead. That was an intolerable shock. That is why terrorists are so hated, because they destroy the idea that you are going to have a meaningful ending to your life, so therefore, what's the sense in working hard, if you're not doing it in the name of a higher purpose? That is why Bush can keep pushing the button: "Terrorists! Terrorists!" In a certain sense, Bush is a terrorist, because anyone who keeps evoking the word "terrorist" all the time is pressing a button to get a reaction, without any higher moral intent.
The intent is creating fear.
He is creating fear where fear may not necessarily need to reside. The advantage of being a novelist is you form the habit very early in life in trying to look at everything from every side. And particularly in hearing about somebody who i s god-awful, you have this curiosity of what are they like. And so in that sense, what is the story of the terrorists? The story of the terrorists is that they are working against immense odds, relatively speaking. They don't have large resources. What they have is the possibility to do some dirty things in some dirty places and kill off a few hundred or a few thousand people, and if they can do that, they can feel they are immensely successful, because given the multiplication of the result that cheap politicians like Bush go in for, it will work to a degree. But that is their limit. They can't destroy us. We can destroy them, but not through war. We can destroy them through endless careful police work for decades . But instead we go to war, because the war has served so many purposes for people whose motives are neither clean nor illumined. But profit-oriented.
So what is the story of Bush, then, if that is the story of the terrorists?
Bush is a terrorist.
Do you think he is the worst president of your lifetime?
He is a spiritual terrorist.
It is interesting that, in retrospect, he makes someone like Nixon look pretty good.
Nixon was a mean son of a bitch whose inner life probably smelled of old urine, but he was intelligent as hell, and he was serious, and he could recognize the limits that were incumbent upon him whenever he got into a venture. So looking back on him then, yes, we would be far better off with Nixon than we would be with Bush.
I just watched an old debate that you did with Marshall McLuhan -
My God.
It was a black-and-white television show from 1968, and you were both talking about the "electronic envelope" and information overload. And I was watching this on Google Video, so it was very surreal. Do you think the technological changes of the past five years have been a net positive?
Oh, I don't know if it is positive at all. There is a loose connection you can make between gathering information and gathering sexual knowledge. There is a certain point where if you gather too much sexual knowledge, you vitiate the impact of it. And I think the same is true with information. When you know too much information and you acquire it too easily, you tend to either to use it in disagreeable ways, out of vanity, or you tend to be indiscriminate about it . I mean, in the old days, it was tricky, you had to go to various encyclopedias, you had to go to the library, maybe spend a day there, whatever. But in the end, if you found something, it was really exciting. Now you hit a couple of buttons and you get some information. Which, by the way, is almost always presented in that same goddamn mediocre style that characterizes the Internet for me. It is slightly deadening. And I would say if there is one thing that is wrong with the technological changes, it is just those two words, "slightly deadening."
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Do you use the Internet yourself?
I don't even know how to turn on a computer.
So you-
I use it indirectly. My wife uses one, and my assistant, so I get the benefits without having to pay the price.
Do you feel like becoming a literary celebrity was a distraction for you?
Oh, yeah, a distraction, a bonus, a trap. It caricatured your life.
What bothered you the most, as far as the wrong notions people had about you?
Nothing has bothered me more than the idea that I hate women. I grew up in a world that was full of women, and they were lovely women, and I loved women. I was foolish enough, as I grew older, to make a few sneering remarks about women. I made a couple of totally ridiculous remarks over the years, and of course what you had was a bunch of - not all of the women in the women's revolution were ugly. Gloria Steinem, for example, was damn good-looking. But there were an awful lot of uglies in that revolution, and they hated men, and they were looking for despised objects, and I became a despised object.
Saying there were a lot of ugly people in the women's revolution isn't going to endear you to feminists.
In the early stages, in the early stages! No longer. They have now become part of the general population.
You were on assignment with Hunter S. Thompson in Zaire in 1974 to cover the Muhammad Ali - George Foreman fight. What was that like?
Zaire was fascinating. There were a great many of us writers there who loved prizefights and were absolutely, completely attached to the idea of the fight. Then Hunter came in, and it was so typical of Hunter: Here was the convocation of experts, and his experience throughout most of his life was that convocations of experts were concentrations of bullshit. He figured he was going to ace the whole goddamn thing. He had a basic knowledge that he wasn't going to learn more about prizefights in a week or two than the rest of us had already known for years, and so he had to make an end run around us. And what he decided to do was to see the fight with Mobutu, who was the dictator of Zaire. He made a real effort to get together with Mobutu - and failed.
I saw him on the plane home, and there he was, full of good spirit and knocking down a great many beers in a row. I remember that in terms of his immense adaptability - he'd take huge risks, and if they blew up on him, so what? There was always another risk to take, and he move on. But that was probably one of the least successful ventures he went on.
Did you follow his writing?
[Fear and Loathing in] Las Vegas is - I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but it's a hell of a book. Everything he did, in a way, is a hell of a book. He broke so many rules that I would get dizzy trying to evaluate him. I didn't always approve of the rules he was breaking, since I was much more of an established writer than he was, but his daring always appealed to me. And he's one of those people who you could read a page of his work and be turned on by it, and you can't say that about too many writers. It's a rare page of Hunter's that won't turn you on.
What did you make of the baby boomers' belated embrace of the "greatest generation"?
[Laughs] I don't think we ever saw ourselves that way at all. It's cute. It has nothing to do with reality. The reality is we groused, we pissed, we moaned, we were furious. We just pissed and moaned right through the war. The idea of the greatest generation, it was a low appeal to our vanity. I don't know what it was to younger people. But I think the smarter ones just said, "Oh, more bullshit."