For no good reason ...

Dr. Gonzo, a moniker actually assigned to Oscar Zeta Acosta in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a book penned by Hunter S. Thompson,  the "outlaw" writer who turned journalism upside down by mixing drugs, perception and outrage, viewed America as one monumental self induced hellscape.

Yours truly brings up this crazed period in American history after viewing Gonzo, the documentary on the esteemed H. S. Thomson and his faithful side kick, Ralph Steadman, an artist for the ages transforming the grotesque into something quixotically beautiful, sorta like seeing a Jackson Pollock drip painting under the influence of LSD. 

Mr. Steadman has frequently aimed to shock with his drawings — nightmarishly funny compositions in which spidery lines intersect with clouds of spilled and sprayed ink.

Credit...Ralph Steadman/Sony Pictures Classics

He had done a few good sketches but so far we hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for the lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. One of the key genetic rules in breeding dogs, horses or any other kind of thoroughbred is that close inbreeding tends to magnify the weak points in a bloodline as well as the strong points. In horse breeding, for instance, there is a definite risk in breeding two fast horses who are both a little crazy. The offspring will likely be very fast and also very crazy. So the trick in breeding thoroughbreds is to retain the good traits and filter out the bad. But the breeding of humans is not so wisely supervised, particularly in a narrow Southern society where the closest kind of inbreeding is not only stylish and acceptable, but far more convenient — to the parents — than setting their offspring free to find their own mates, for their own reasons and their own ways. (“Goddam, did you hear about Smitty’s daughter? She went crazy in Boston last week and married a nigger!”)

Another problem was his habit of sketching people he met in the various social situations I dragged him into, then giving them the sketches. The results were always unfortunate. I warned him several times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it. Consequently, he was regarded with fear and loathing by nearly everyone who’d seen or even heard about his work. He couldn’t understand it. “It’s sort of a joke,” he kept saying. “Why, in England it’s quite normal. People don’t take offense. They understand that I’m just putting them on a bit.”

For no good reason, a 2014 flick about Steadman, works as the title for this blurb as there is no good reason to discuss the insane late 60's to early 70's unless one lived it as yours truly did. Anything did go as sex, drugs and rock & roll was the mantra in an era producing the best music and art seen in America along with the lie of Viet Nam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and, of course, Tricky Dick, one of the 5 worst presidents in US history. 

Nixon/Agnew ... forever

Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal comes to mind here does it not?