A vintage Hunter rant

Was flipping through “Fear and Loathing in America,” one of Hunter S. Thompson’s collection of letters ,when I came across, yes, a shocking screed.

Hunter was writing to Mike Moore on May 30, 1970 about the publication, Aspen Wallposters, he was putting together with artist Tom Benton.

“If we can sell enough copies to make the Wallposter pay for itself we can give enough away to create some kind of working unity on Aspen’s political front. This Valley is full of people who came here for reasons other than to turn the whole place back into a nazi-thinking condominium-complex & make it a safe & saleable resort for the Texas Cavaliers & the Atlanta Ski Club. There is a hell of a huge difference between skiing as a sport — or even as a lifestyle — and skiing as an industry, a boom-time fad like golf or bowling. Or beating up Peace Freaks on your lunch hour.

“But fuck skiing. All it is, in Aspen, is a swollen sugar-tit for a gang of aging nazis who are not the local establishment. The Wallposter is the voice of Aspen’s counter-culture – the people who last fall came within six (6) votes of electing a 29-year-old bike racing head/lawyer as Mayor (The ’69 Joe Edwards campaign). And before 1970 is out they may — or may not — seize control of the town & the whole valley, or at least enough control to short-circuit the greedheads & land-rapers who’ve descended on the place like a plague of water rats. The conflict has already degenerated into dynamitings, street-violence and a sense of almost constant political crisis that never lets up, not even in the off-seasons. On one side are the cops and the Mayor and the County Commissioners, along with local realtors and corporate land developers from Chicago & LA & Texas — and even NY & Boston. These people see Aspen as a resort and they want to sell it. And they are. Indeed — for the past 20 years they’ve been selling harder than New Orleans street-pimps.

“The other side is a weird mix of locals, liberals, freaks, dropouts, ranchers, heads, geeks & other less commercially oriented types who see Aspen as a place to live — not to sell — a refuge, of sorts, from the same kind of rotten urban madness that these scum-sucking developers are trying to sell here in Aspen. The town is already faced with horrors like smog, parking-problems & sewage in the drinking water. The Aspen Ski Corp. has threatened to put a limit on lift tickets — raising the specter of $100 a day ski-tourists standing in the lift-lines from dawn until noon, then being turned away ‘because of the quota.’

“The summer looks more and more like Coney Island. A Holiday Inn is already here — right next to the route of the new 4-lane highway in town — and there’s also a Minnie Pearl Chicken Palace going up, just across the street from Stein Erickson’s ski shop. Selah.”