FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE KINGDOM OF COWARDS

[dweller]

https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/fear-and-loathing-in-the-kingdom?r=kxzps&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

There is a smell in the air of this country—an acrid, chemical stench that seeps into the lungs and lingers in the bloodstream like a curse. It is the smell of decay, of institutions rotting from the inside, of power without restraint and cruelty without consequence. This is the United States of America in the Year of Our Lord 2025: a pathetic carnival of cowards, strongmen, bootlickers, Christian nationalists, billionaire ghouls, and sniveling authoritarian wannabes who mistake violence for strength and obedience for patriotism. And against this backdrop, tens of millions of citizens can feel the same thing Hunter S. Thompson felt on November 22 1963—fear and loathing, in doses large enough to poison a nation.

Before Thompson ever scratched pen to paper, the phrase “fear and loathing”—or at least close variants of it—had already crept through the corridors of English literature and beyond. It whispers in translations of medieval Icelandic sagas: the warrior-poet grimly declares, “Fighting fills me/with fear and loathing”, over the clash of blades in the frozen north. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the language echoes the same mortal terror and disgust as boys on an island regress into savagery. The phrase held ancient associations with dread and moral revulsion long before it became Thompson’s personal rally-cry. What he did was not invent the terms, but fuse them into a nuclear core of American political diagnosis.

And so when Thompson wrote—“…much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder”—on the night JFK died, he was not merely weaving clever phraseology. He was tapping into a deep, resonant language of human horror and moral collapse, and redirecting it at the rotting heart of American power. That letter, written on November 22 1963, from Woody Creek, marked the first known time Thompson used those exact words together. From there the phrase would explode into books, journalism, myth. But in that instant it was private, raw, wounded—a diagnosis scribbled in grief.

Back then, it was the shock of a president murdered in broad daylight that shattered the myth of American decency. Today, it is something slower, uglier, and more humiliating: the American experiment bleeding out not from a single bullet, but from a thousand cowardly cuts. We now live under a spray-tanned fascist buffoon who stumbled his way into authoritarianism not through genius, but through the sheer incompetence, apathy, and moral bankruptcy of the people who should have stopped him. This was not an overthrow. It was a surrender.

more at link



✌🏻