"Bill Clinton would have played the Jew's harp stark naked on 60 Minutes
if he thought it would help him get elected. He is the Willy Loman of
Generation X, a traveling salesman from Arkansas who has the loyalty of
a lizard with its tail broken off and the midnight taste of a man who'd
double-date with the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart." So writes famed political
analyst Hunter S. Thompson in Better Than Sex, his groundbreaking,
breathtaking, and escapading saga of what happens to campaign junkies
behind the scenes of a victorious presidential campaign - their orgies,
their despair, and finally their terror when they abandon all hope as
the forces of darkness close in and make them prisoners in their own
White House, where they cry out like doomed animals. As he did in such
classics as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Hell's Angels,
and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Thompson has again wandered into
the savage vortex of political power, and emerged, barely, with this
bizarre tale of life within the Belly of the Great American Beast.
Better Than Sex drags you into Mr. Bill's Neighborhood, a world full of
fear that stretches from Pennsylvania Avenue to Hollywood to the squalid
hills of the Ozarks, where power-crazed monsters like James Carville,
Oliver North, and George Stephanopoulos seize control of a nation and
wallow unashamed in a Palace of Power where the only governing ethic is
raw lust. It is an ugly and disillusioning spectacle, one that only the
merciful death of Richard M. Nixon - explored here in all its glorious
symbolism - could defuse. Read it and weep, Bubba. We live in an ugly
time and Thompson's cruel struggle with his political addiction is a
matter of publicrecord.
