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We don't know about you, but after a betrayal like the Dem capitulation to Dr. Evil Cheney and Dimwit George, we felt like taking a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson.

Those were the days. In the face of the grim reality of the Nixon era, at least people could "trip out" for awhile and flee a world gone both mad and cowardly.

Yes, this is the classic of "Gonzo" drug-besotted journalism: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream."

We don't know if the Smithsonian has an exhibition honoring Thompson, but what a piece of Americana he was -- and none more so than in "Fear and Loathing."

"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken."

Uh, how we miss Thompson, but America had passed him by, so his death was perhaps symbolic of the fact that in the past seven years America has walked through the looking glass. We have been taking a death trip under the Bush Adminsitration that makes Thompson's Las Vegas journey look like an adolescent prank.

Thompson brought out the ultimate in youthful self-indulgence, abandoment, hedonism and rebellion against authority. And Las Vegas could be no more fitting a place for the culmination of his journey. That city born of gambling, glitter, sin, and outsized tackiness was the perfect setting for a trip that broke the speedometer on Thompson's brain and body.

In "Fear and Loathing," Thompson implicitly throws off the shackles or our Puritanical inheritance and gorges himself on an alternative reality.

But ain't it ironic that it's only in the world of the "divinely inspired" and religious fundamentalists that people die in wars and violence?

No one dies during Thompson's "trip."

Although, we're not recommending George W. Bush or Dick Cheney take acid and down a six-pack of beer. That would be the end of the world as we know it.

Bush would nuke a dozen countries just to see the shock and awe while playing Gameboy.

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