Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Book Review:               Hunter Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” – Part Two

            Hunter Thompson is a qualified instructor to the movement sometimes narrowly referred to as the “Acid Culture.”  Thompson is a former true-believer who kept his eyes open and meditated on the eventual decline and fall of youthful ideals bred within the peculiar combination of space and time which comprised the sixties California scene.  The reader is light-heartedly taken in by Part One of Fear and Loathing.  It is an outrageous narrative which touches lightly on satire of the American Dream, vaguely presenting the protagonist, Raoul Duke as an educated and skilled professional writer for well known print media.  The reader is largely unprepared for Part Two, in which the author skillfully “eases around the entire cloverleaf at a high rate of speed.”  He transitions from an outrageous action narrative laced with bits of satire into a fully developed requiem for a lost generation.  The supporting references to the broken machinery which generates the reality of American culture are so varied and relevant to time and place, even the most savvy reader will do well to research the seemingly innocuous details of Part Two.

            The backdrop for Part Two is a national convention for district attorneys on illegal drugs.  There are characters, but these are less important than the character types.  The district attorneys’ conference is packed with various officers and officials of law enforcement from across the entire United States.  These are people who should represent the best of American ideals, in person.

 

            Over the course of the convention, however, these emerge as nothing special, just a pack of fairly clueless drones who came to Las Vegas in the spirit of getting away with something for nothing, a getaway paid for by American taxpayers.  The narrative body briefly parades several other individuals across the stage; these are also less important as characters than the concepts they represent.  For example, Chapter Ten relates a sad tale of an unassuming kid who comes to Las Vegas on a whim and, having done nothing wrong whatsoever, is picked up for vagrancy and detained for a week.  By itself, the short account arouses irritation, but Fear and Loathing suggests a wider catalog of human scams and excesses (or at least the table of contents for one); the plight of the truly innocent minded kid blows a mental fuse in the reader and prepares him for the elevated consciousness which the final four chapters provide in lieu of a canned moral.

            When the narrative comes around to the subject of the Catholic Church, the Beatles, and the potential existence of a higher “force” in the universe on page 179 in Chapter Eleven, it is not so much that the author feels disillusioned by the apparent lack of God in the universe as it is that he feels the patent unfairness of the system, not only because the average man is insignificant or left out of the insiders' movements, but because the very representatives of the common man, songwriters and poets, especially the Beatles, sold out to the system in order to get their cut of the material side of the American Dream, the money, as doled out by jaded managers and producers.  A final emphasis on this facet of Thompson’s lament comes on page 191 in Chapter Twelve in a discussion concerning the owner of the very well known casino “Circus-Circus.”  The reader comes away with the definite understanding that the American Dream is real, but it is not a public drinking fountain.  It is a private bar, a place where particular passwords and particular currency is required for entry.

Thompson, Hunter. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  New York:  Random House, 1998.