Fear and Loathing at Fifty

1971. That foul Year of Our Lord. Ghastly images from the Red Shark’s rearview mirror: A King and two Kennedys, stassenized. Naked L.A. sex cults sucking pineal glands off freshly cut-up corpses. National guard units thrill kill antiwar protesters on college campuses. The state-sanctioned blood orgy in Vietnam continues. Meanwhile, deep in the bowels of his Reichstag White House bunker, “Dick” Nixon huffs raw ether then howls at the full moon like a Nazi werewolf with ringworm before pucker chucking grapeshots of flaming diarrhea all over the Resolute Desk.

It was high-time time for a no-bullshit reappraisal of the American Dream.

Fifty years ago, Hunter S. Thompson and activist attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta fled L.A.’s racial Pandora’s box for a desert funhouse ride—think Sherman’s scorched-earth march on acid—and, armed with a little luck and “true grit,” went out in search of the American Dream, catapulting themselves into the literary pantheon as Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo in the process.

What was two separate Las Vegas trips–the Mint 400 motorcycle race and the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Drug Abuse—The Doctor of Gonzo Journalism compresses into a hellbroth week of blistering Sin City excess: Drugs. Psychoses. Booze. Rape. Fraud. Larceny. Fear and Loathing.

Thompson’s emotional linchpin was his stunning imagery of the grotesque death spiral of the American Dream: a giant manta ray-sized, batshit crazy universe teeming with failed seekers, institutionalized greedheads, hucksters of journalism, and Pentagon generals babbling non-stop lies about insane wars. At its core, Fear and Loathing is a bitter, nostalgic swan song to the Sixties. The death knell of what might have been.

That sense of a paradise Age of Aquarius lost is never more poignant than in Thompson’s famous “wave” passage:

“You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning….Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Oh, it rolled back. And we all got sucked down its vortex. Rereading Fear and Loathing after the Great Dumpster Fire of 2020 is like entering a demented time capsule in search of clues to stop a serial killer. Every single savage nightmare Hunter pieced together about in the turbulent Sixties, from drugs, race conflict, violence, war, has metastasized. Hell, compared to the cruel shitheads hunkered deep in the festering cankers of 21st-century American military-industrial-corporate-political power, Richard Nixon’s Watergate seems quaint. Fifty years after Fear and Loathing, the corporate coup d’etat is complete and we have are self-righteous celebrity influencers re-tweeting their brand and precious too few mad seers who sprechen truth-to-power. Now, with the infestation of all the hired, social mismedia psyops bullshit, making sense out of modern Amerika is a bit like playing chess while being held down and ravaged by some shit-eating Grendel forged out of a dystopic Orwell/Huxley tentacle porn novel. But if there was ever a raging critic who could take the electronic shitbeast, The Good Doctor would have been my pick.

“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laugher… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. 

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Nearly every page of Fear and Loathing captures America’s drug problem in eye-piercing geysers of blood detail. The Good Doctor himself lived through the great hippie counterculture burnout of the ’70s, the “Just Say No” War on crack cocaine of the ’80s, and the shambolic prisons for profit in the ’90s.

But what would he make of an entire degeneration of American swine feasting off the oxycontin prescription teet and the fentanyl phenomenon?

Through Raoul Duke’s drug-fueled escapades, Thompson implies that America’s chemical addiction is a response to being trapped in a society of sociopathic greedheads. After all, if we truly live “in a world of thieves” where “the only final sin is stupidity,” what is left of morality? Most of us will be used as consumer chattel, forced to work soulless, brain-deadening jobs for a sadistic billionaire class. If that is, in fact, the spiritual reckoning being force fed on a daily basis in a bizarro, morally-addled nation, then why not a little “forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.” No sympathy for the devil, and until we overcome the profits-over-people paradigm, not much will cure America’s thirst for drugs.

“. . . Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”

Despite binges of madness, Raoul Duke, like Hunter Thompson, sees himself as a “professional journalist” who will “cover the story, for good or ill.” Thompson saw Gonzo journalism’s melded of facts with a fictionalized narrative as an antidote to traditional journalism’s objective dogma, which allowed monsters like Nixon to slither into power.

Most writers couldn’t manage in a thousand lifetimes the delicate characterization and narrative balance that Gonzo journalism requires. So now they don’t even try. Instead, today’s “journalists” have been co-opted by content creators like Twitter and Facebook into a propaganda system that seeks to calibrate reality to the masses. It’s a toxic multiverse of blatant misinformation, toxic social mismedia, fake news, cancel culture, woke-ism, and corporate-sponsored thought control that breeds conspiracy theories faster than a fluffle of Energizer bunnies pumped full of Viagra. Want a Satan-worshipping, pedophile sex ring run by freemason ancient aliens disguised as 911 hijackers in a DC pizza parlor where they manufacture COVID tracking chips? Take to the interwebz.

“Well, we’ll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can’t cut him loose. He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs.”

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raoul Duke is constantly bombarded with propaganda about the Vietnam War. The ’60s counterculture doesn’t want the war, and put up a valiant fight opposing it, but become ground down trying to stop it, like a tragic Greek chorus forced to pay taxes to watch a mass snuff film looped from birth to death. Nowadays, the body counts of Vietnam have given way to the homicidal whack-a-mole rubblization of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, and Yemen.

“Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas.”

With a White Whale’s worth of irony and after consuming a killer mountain of drugs, violence, and Fear and Loathing, Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo hit the the jackpot and stumble upon the American Dream’s vital nerve at the Circus Circus casino. It’s a perfect setting for their quest for excess: a Las Vegas circus casino whose owner had a childhood dream of joining the circus, and “now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too.” Fifty years of Fear and Loathing and Thompson’s writing’s still as relevant as when the whole wild drug-fueled adventure was written.

The failed seekers, the institutionalized greedheads, the journalist hucksters, and especially the generals babbling insane war lies, they’re all still here, “still humping the American Dream.” The brutish, foul truth hasn’t changed, though: everybody can play at the American Dream, but the odds will always favor the house.

We miss you, Hunter.

Res ipsa loquitur