Instead, he refused to go gracefully, and rather than helping Edwards he tried to destroy him. At one point Barnard actually tried to get back into the race himself, and when that didn't work he shoved in a last-minute dummy. This was poor Gates, who went down -- along with Buggsy -- to an ignominious defeat. We beat them stupid, and Barnard couldn't believe it. Shortly after the polls closed, he went down to City Hall and stared balefully at the blackboard when the clerk started posting the returns. The first figures stunned him visibly, they said, and by ten o'clock he was raving incoherently about “fraud” and “recounts” and “those dirty bastards who turned on me.”

One of his friends who was there recalls it as a very heavy scene. . . although Dylan Thomas might have dug it, for the Mayor is said to have raged horribly against the dying of the light.

And so much for what might have been a very sad story. . . except that Buggsy went home that night and began laying feverish plans to become Mayor of Aspen again. His new power base is a thing called the “Taxpayers' League,” a sort of reverse-elite corps of the booziest Elks and Eagles, whose only real point of agreement is that every animal in this world that has walked on two legs for less than 50 years is evil, queer and dangerous. The Taxpayers' League is really a classic example of what anthropologists call an “atavistic endeavor.” On the scale of political development, they are still flirting with Senator Bilbo's dangerously progressive proposal to send all the niggers back to Africa on a fleet of iron barges.

This is Buggsy's new constituency. They are not all vicious drunks, and not all mental defectives either. Some are genuinely confused and frightened at what seems to be the End of the World as they know it. And this is sad, too. . . but the saddest thing of all is that, in the context of this article, the Taxpayers' League is not irrelevant. In the past six months this group has emerged as the most consistently effective voting bloc in the valley. They have beaten the liberals handily in every recent encounter (none crucial) that came down, in the end, to a matter of who had the muscle.

Who indeed? The liberals simply can't get it up. . . and since the end of the Edwards campaign we have deliberately avoided any effort to mobilize the Freak Power bloc. The political attention span of the average dropout is too short, we felt, to blow it on anything minor. Nearly everyone who worked on the Edwards gig last year was convinced that he would have won easily if the election had been held on November 14th instead of November 4th. . . or if we'd started whipping our act together even a week earlier.