So now, in closing, I want to thank everybody who helped me put this happy work of fiction together. Names are not necessary here; they know who they are -- and in this foul era of Nixon, that knowledge and private laughter is probably the best we can hope for. The line between martyrdom and stupidity depends on a certain kind of tension in the body politic -- but that line disappeared, in America, at the trial of the “Chicago 7/8,” and there is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power.

In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile -- and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely. We owe that to ourselves and our crippled self-image as something better than a nation of panicked sheep. . . but we owe it especially to, our children, who will have to live with our loss and all its long-term consequences. I don't want my son asking me, in 1984, why his friends are calling me a “Good German.”

Which gets down to a final point about Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I have called it, only half sarcastically, “a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties,” and I think it is. This whole twisted saga is a sort of Atavistic Endeavor, a dream-trip into the past -- however recent -- that was only half successful. I think we both understood, all along, that we were running a hell of a risk by laying a sixties trip on Las Vegas in 1971. . . and that neither one of us would ever pass this way again.

So we pushed it as far as we could, and we survived -- which means something, I guess, but not much beyond a good story and now, having done it, written it, and humping a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and then went so brutally sour, I don't see much choice but to lash down the screws and get on with what has to be done. Either that or do nothing at all -- fall back on the Good German, Panicked Sheep syndrome, and I don't think I'm ready for that. At least not right now.

Because it was nice to be loose and crazy with a good credit card in a time when it was possible to run totally wild in Las Vegas and then get paid for writing a book about it. . . and it occurs to me that I probably just made it, just under the wire and the deadline. Nobody will dare admit this kind of behavior in print if Nixon wins again in '72.