UKH

"We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic."

Seems pertinent and relevant but it's reassuring how he wrote this decades ago, maybe we're in a cycle of intellectual boom and bust and all is not lost?

Or it was just prophetic.

Maybe. He was a fascinating writer and lived and died by his own rules. His quotes regularly crop up on my Twitter feed (maybe that makes me the New Dumb!). I wish he was around today to hold the incumbent brainless swine to account!

Or just a gonzo W. B. Yeats per "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Mike Judge made a great documentary about this in 2006

Idiocracy! Put me back in the hibernation chamber.

Another corker!

“There are times, however, and this is one of them when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.”

I detect an undercurrent of poking fun beneath the shocking bleakness of the prose.

Surely, Thompson's finest sentence...

"It's always good to act crazy first, because later you can appear normal."

Not a Thompson quote, but from a review of 'The Great Shark Hunt.'

"He reported back that the paranoids were right, and they were."

" When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro"

Yeah, that one and "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold" are the standouts for me.