Fear and Loathing for Sanity

[popecrunch]

Driving to our nation's capital from Southern Virginia, you pass by a whole lot of military and governmental installations: Belvoir, Quantico, Alexandria, and others. I was driving near Richmond, looking at the fog collecting over the swamps by the side of the interstate, and listening to Simon and Garfunkel singing about finding America. I had

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[popecrunch]

The concept I was going for in the article was how I expected to write idealized article A before I got there, got there and it seemed about as far from that ideal as possible without gunfire being involved, and then near the end, turns out the ideal wasn't THAT far off.

Mostly I figured that everybody and their jerk brother would be writing political analysis of it, and either handwaving or ignoring entirely the actual experience of cramming 215,000 people into a small space with a very nebulous objective (or ignoring it entirely). It was on the drive back, when I was really struggling with how I was going to write this, when I realized that going for the gonzo angle - which is really less about drugs-and-craziness and more about expressing the event you are documenting from a personal perspective - was what I really wanted to do. Writing the article not about the event itself, but of my perceptions of the event, made the article flow MUCH easier and better communicated the idea I was really shooting for (countering the EVERYONE WAS ON THEIR BEST BEHAVIOR AND EVERYTHING WAS SANE. bits i've seen).

Or I dunno, that's the theory anyway.