“We were two miles outside of Barstow, on the
edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” Thus begins the first
line of the book which serves as the handshake, for most, with Hunter S
Thompson, the masterpiece Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). It is 40 years after that book was written
and 6 years after he decided to call it a day with a bullet to the head. The
suicide in 2005 was inevitable. Thompson
had made no secret of his decision to commit suicide for years before he
actually did. The reasons were many and
varied, but the main reasons were due to his failing health, his idealisation
of youth and his resolute refusal to grow old gracefully. The funeral had been
planned years before and Thompson’s old friend Johnny Depp was responsible for
the funding of the ceremony – the good doctor’s remains were fired out of a
cannon at his compound in Colorado.
The stereotypical image of Hunter S. Thompson is
not actually one of Thompson himself; most think of his alter ego, the drug
crazed, babbling lunatic Raoul Duke. This is the persona in which Thompson was
able to write such insane tales of unbelievable excess such as the
aforementioned Fear and Loathing. But
Thompson himself was less of a caricature, and more of a thoughtful, darkly
angry crusader against all that he saw was wrong with America. His targets
included the decadence of the 70’s, pro football, and his arch nemesis Richard
Milhous Nixon. Nixon personified
everything that Thompson thought had gone awry with the United States, for he was
the gutless war-monger who bombed Indochina into the stone-age for nothing more
than political capital and when the students at Kent State came out in protest
Thompson connived to have them slain by the National Guard. Years before
Woodward and Bernstein blow open the Watergate scandal, Thompson was already
decrying Nixon as a crook, a blowhard and the bastard who would plunge America
into a decadent, depraved parody of every truth and principle on which it was
founded, as indeed he did.
But it is for Gonzo that Thompson is so fondly
remembered. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gonzo journalism, here’s a
quick primer to save you the trouble of checking Wikipedia. Gonzo journalism is
the antithesis of “fly on the wall” journalism, being more “fly in the
ointment” in its style. It approaches any given subject material from a
subjective viewpoint, exacerbating details to a ridiculous proportion in an
attempt to give a more sympathetic view of the material in question. It was
invented and pioneered by Thompson in his article The Kentucky Derby Is
Decadent And Depraved, in which he described his own experience of the
Derby rather than in the traditional sports-writer style – he covered the crowd
and not the derby. He did this purely because of a looming deadline and he had
no time to write up his notes. The resulting article is by turns grotesque,
informative and utterly hilarious, and gives a far more accurate portrayal of
Kentucky horseracing than would have otherwise been shown by a traditional writer.
Gonzo grew from there, and is now aped by innumerable writers across the world
(one of these writers being a particularly persistent perpetrator of this
style).
The aforementioned Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is undoubtedly his most famous
work, a monolith of excess and depravity
seared across America's most grotesque altar to consumption and vice. It is the
starting point for most into the world of Hunter S. Thompson, and is also his
funeral eulogy for the spirit of the 60's. The nihilistic search for a thrill
that Thompson (masquerading as Raoul Duke) and his unnamed Samoan attorney (a
comic exaggeration of Thompson's real life friend and confidant Oscar Acosta)
undertake in Nevada is born out of a sadness that the hippy spirit of the
decade before did not bring about universal peace and love, but instead opened
up America to the "grim meathook realities" of what absolute freedom
really meant. The famously Herculean consumption of narcotics undertaken in the
book is also inspired by the death of the
60's, a sly comment on how the spiritualistic nature of drugs as
preached by Timothy Leary descended into the hedonistic need for a chemical
buzz that fuelled the 70's, and as it remains to this day. The book came as a
howled requiem for the Beat Movement, the generosity and revolutionary zeal of
writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg replaced with a scowling, dark
commentary on how the world failed to live up to the promise of the Hippy
Dream, and wistfully looking back on how pathetic and futile the whole movement
had been.
We must remember him as a man with one face
looking back at John F Kennedy, the closest a politician could get to an
everyman, and looking towards George McGovern with his other face as he asks
for three margaritas and six beers for lunch. There are few ways to summarise
the man's viewpoint without giving way to his own words, as he was more
eloquent than we can ever be: "There are times, however, and this is one
of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance,
about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?
If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer
afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in
front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless
masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit
and die."
Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, December 6th 2011, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.
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