We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are those goddamn animals?"
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered in wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said, "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
Well, we're all seeing bats now, at least those of us who count ourselves among the sane. Of course, there are the deniers, all hopped up on ceremonial patriotism and wearing 401K blinders so as to see only ahead towards a finish line promised many times but receding more and more into the distance as projections fail and U.S. strategies collapse, obvious houses of cards. But those of us without the privilege of coinage-lined blinkers and the advantage of gigantic MAGA cap brims, we see the bats. Swooping and screeching and bringing the inevitable end to The Great American Dream much sooner than anyone expected.
These last five months, the United States has missed Hunter S. Thompson in a deep, familial way. What would that champion of insight and justice have revealed to our minds had he still been alive? Would he have surrendered in disdain and taken his own life in horror, or would he have swallowed hard and mustered inimical responses to the sociological psychedelia and rancid-milk-with-rum of the Trump era?
I want to kick Hunter Thompson's ass right now for depriving us of what would have been some badly needed wisdom and perhaps a call to arms. He had done his job so brilliantly well, however, that I shouldn't criticize avoiding further pain. He taught us well; we just didn't learn very well. He had seen the bats coming from afar, back when they were loud and vicious, but still vulnerable to a well placed left hook and a machete in hand. He could see the Great American Dream dying many leagues away. And he did his best to warn us.
The bats have grown well beyond the size of Madagascar flying foxes. That would have been impossible enough. But now we are confronted with these Pteranodon-size monstrosities, bats so large that one of them can carry one of us away. That's the way democracy works, I'm told. Some people think they come from China, but folks in the know suspect a Russian origin. They are legion. Their noise, so loud, so raucous; no speech is possible. At least not in our convertibles.
Americans have always loved convertibles. Open and daring; dashingly independent. Vehicles in denotative name. Connotatively, vehicles to also display our lack of fear. Americans pride ourselves on a lack of fear. And now that lack of fear has proven our undoing. We drive with our tops down through the deserts of California and Arizona, across Texas, through the heat of a southern summer.
Unfortunately, the bats can smell our sweat. And they come, a deafening flapping of wings. First drowning us out with their non-rational cacophony, then picking us off one by one. When spatters of blood join aerosolized sweat in the air, a feeding frenzy ensues. Hunter Thompson saw all of this on the American horizon. He could hear the wingbeats at great distance. A threat to The Great American Dream. We didn't listen.
Once upon a time, we had a direction. And we could trust the signs on the side of the road. The people who put them there had some interest in our getting to where we wanted to be. The signs are all gone now, ripped from their moorings by massive talons and strewn all over the roadscapes. We no longer have a clear direction. And the sky is always full of bats. Always the bats.
I'm angered and saddened that HST is gone, and he has left the work to ineffectual hacks like me. But his words still echo, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." The going has gotten sadistic, cruel, and very definitely weird. Our response should be to go pro, as HST implored. Screw the convertibles. Not very practical when you're dealing with bats. Get old monster Cadillacs or huge prison vans, something with lots of metal. Grab fine Beretta shotguns, coolers full of Coronas and kielbasa, and let's go hunt some bats.
If Richard Nixon was, as HST said, "a political monster straight out of Grendel," then these bats are much, much worse. They're like army ants whose queens have died. What they do makes no sense in any grand scheme, but they must be stopped. Show them no mercy.
Bob Dietz
July 11, 2020
