![]() “We had two bags of grass,” Thompson admits at the outset, “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, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.” When I encountered the book in the late 1970s, as a teenager infatuated with the counterculture, I couldn’t see past those details. If “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is recalled at all these days, it’s mostly for its excess, which is prodigious, to say the least. … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.” “Just one hour ago,” his alter ego Raoul Duke reminds his Samoan attorney (a character based on lawyer and activist Oscar Zeta Acosta), “we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned - and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all. Assigned to cover an off-road motorcycle race by Sports Illustrated, Thompson instead produced something weirder, what he called “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.” As with so many of his pronouncements, this one is rife with overstatement. “Fear and Loathing” is on my mind because I am living this winter and spring in Las Vegas, which he skewered, memorably, in the piece. How, Thompson is asking, do we evoke the feeling of a situation? How do we recreate not only the raw facts of a moment or an incident, but also its sensibility? The bats, of course, are a hallucination - but they are also terrifyingly, fundamentally real, and their presence feels like a necessity, rendering the account more pointed (and, in a way, more accurate) than a traditional report. …’ And then suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.” “I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded maybe you should drive. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” he opens “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” which remains, 45 years after it was published in book form, perhaps his signature work. ![]() In such a landscape, Thompson comes across as the most honest person around. Thompson’s adventures in Las Vegas are chaotic not because of him but because of us, because this is the monument we have built to our prurience and half-articulated desires. Thompson, who had an uncanny ability to use hyperbole as journalistic strategy. And yet I’ve found myself drawn back to the work of Hunter S. ![]() It’s hard, I know, to make a case for gonzo journalism in an age when reality is beset by exaggeration, even lies. ![]()
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