Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and the American Dream
Magisterarbeit, 2007, 70 Seiten
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Introduction 3
2. Basic Concepts of the American Dream 3
3. City upon a Hill: The Puritans 7
3.1 Road to Salvation: The Combination of Success and Virtue 9
3.2 The Moral Example: A City upon a Hill 10
4. The 1950s 11
4.1 Suburban Bliss: The American Dream in the 1950s 11
4.2 Cold War Reality 11
4.3 The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the Beat Generation 12
4.4 The end of the decade 14
5. The 1960s 15
5.1 John F. Kennedy 15
5.2 The Port Huron Statement 17
5.3 The Renewal of the Nation 19
5.4 Martin Luther King 20
5.5 A Decade of Disillusion 21
5.6 The Hippies 22
5.7 Vietnam 23
5.8 Violence 26
5.9 Paranoia 30
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 32
6.1 The writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 33
6.2 Gonzo Journalism 36
6.3 The end of the Sixties 38
7. Las Vegas 39
7.1 The history of Las Vegas 40
7.2 The landscape of Las Vegas 44
7.3 Duke and Dr. Gonzo in Las Vegas 46
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8. Horatio Alger 51
9. Searching for the American Dream 56
9.1 The Reality of 1971 56
9.2 Impact of the Vietnam War 57
9.3 Remembering the Sixties 58
9.4 The District Attorneys’ Conference 60
9.5 Standing on the Main Nerve of the American Dream 61
10. Conclusion 63
11. Bibliography 64
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1. Introduction
This thesis examines Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream and the American Dream. In order to do so there will be first given a quick introduction to the constituent parts of the concept of the American Dream and the influence of the first Puritan settlers on them. Then, a comparison between the 1950s and the 1960s shows the change of values in American society during these two decades and tries to explain the increasing degree of disillusion, violence and paranoia which had a determining influence on the American Dream of the late Sixties and early Seventies when Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published. Finally, Thompson’s novel will be the focal point.
2. Basic Concepts of the American Dream
The concept of the American Dream is hard to grasp. Mainly, because the concept of the American Dream does not exist. Although most people claim to be able to define the American Dream it always turns out that there are considerable variations if not complete contradictions in their statements.
It seems almost impossible to pin down the essence of the American Dream in one clear statement or definition. Even if one just concentrates on the most obvious basic ideals represented by the American Dream, one cannot ignore the variety of aspects and the various possibilities of interpretation that lie even within them: freedom, equality, prosperousness, chance, new-beginning, opportunity, advancement, spontaneity, purity, individual fulfillment, unity and diversity, to name only a few. Jennifer Hochschild points out that the “idea of the American Dream has been attached to everything from religious freedom to a home in the suburbs, and it has inspired emotions ranging from deep satisfaction
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to disillusioned fury.” It generally depicts, she continues, “a good world where anything can happen and good things might” (Hochschild 1995: 15). Fossum and Roth note that “the Dream is and has always been comprised of many dreams; no single vision has ever totally dominated the American imagination. (...) Whatever unity it possesses is delicate, its diversity undeniable” (Fossum & Roth 1981: 6). And it may be just this variety of content which makes the American Dream so successful - its paradoxical essence.
On the one hand, the fact that the American Dream is “not bound to a single doctrine” is what gives it its “greatest charm,” as Parrington argues (Parrington 1947: 5). This vagueness, on the other hand, which leaves an open space for interpretation, can also turn the American Dream of one person into the American Nightmare of another: “Americans still disagree on the prescription for an ideal life, and ‘utopia’ is still ‘nowhere’” (Parrington 1947: 5). Accordingly, the concept of the American Dream concerns almost every single aspect of American society.
Still, there are of course various approaches that try to define this complex and diffuse concept and to get to its essence. The term ‘American Dream’ has been coined as late as 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. Giving an account of the history of the United States, in his epilogue he evokes the “vision of something nobler” (Adams 1931: 414) which in his opinion the people of the United States had not yet lost during their struggle to build their nation, and introduces the American Dream as a “distinctive and unique gift [of America] to mankind.” He defines it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” Yet, he admits, it is a concept not without flaws: “(...) too many of ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it.” And he concludes, making a stand against the reduction of the American Dream to its materialistic aspects, that
it is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a
social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to
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the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (Adams 1931: 414).
For all his annoyance of some aspects which - to his mind - have been
attributed incorrectly to the American Dream, Adams presumes that the
quintessential conditions for the fulfillment of the promises the American Dream
has given over the last centuries are still existent in the United States. He claims
that the repressive class structures of other, older nations makes a full
development of people towards becoming better persons, with better moral values,
impossible.
(...) No, the American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.
It has been a great epic and a great dream. What, now, of the future? (Adams 1931: 414-415).
In regard this future, Adams demands that his fellow Americans must not
only focus on economical improvement but that they need to strive for an
improvement of inner values:
(...) if the American dream is to be reality, our communal spiritual and intellectual life must be distinctly higher than elsewhere, where classes and groups have their separate interests, habits, markets, arts, and lives. If the dream is not to prove possible of fulfillment, we might as well become stark realists, become once more class-conscious, and struggle as individuals or classes against one another. But if the dream is to come true, those on top, financially, intellectually, or otherwise, have got to devote themselves to the “Great Society,” and those who are below in the scale have got to strive to rise, not merely economically, but culturally. We cannot become a great democracy by giving ourselves up as individuals to selfishness, physical comfort, and cheap amusements. The very foundation of the American dream of a better and richer life for all is that all, in varying degrees, shall be capable of wanting to share in it (Adams 1931: 422).
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Peter Freese (1994: 94 ff.) classifies the main ingredients of the American Dream into six different subgroups which complement each other: The first and most important constitutive element to him is the notion that everything advances, i.e. the belief in progress. Instead of deterioration or stagnation the American Dream promises “a steady improvement” of the situation, be it “personal, communal or societal.” As a consequence the second fundamental aspect of the American Dream is the firm belief in success: people can reach whatever they aim for, if only they put enough effort into it. Equal opportunity for all. There is no such thing as predestined unhappiness; if somebody is willing to improve, and willing to work hard for it, he will succeed.
The third belief which constitutes the American Dream according to Freese is based on the Puritan belief that God has selected them as his chosen people, a notion that was later transferred to the entire country and its inhabitants. Freese refers to this concept as the belief in manifest destiny. It establishes a certain self-perception which puts the American people on top of the world order:
[…] it is part and parcel [the American] national self-image, […] and it has always affected the way in which [the American] nation “does business” with the rest of the world. The Superpower. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. One nation under God. […] The leaders of the free world. Champions of democracy (Fyfe 1993: 13).
The idea of frontiers that need to be reached and overcome is the fourth vital aspect in the interpretation of the American Dream. This notion can refer to the frontier in the west as well as to more abstract frontiers of individual development - important is the “idea of the continual challenge of respective frontiers.” This is closely connected to the ideas of progress and success and adds the concept of new-beginning.
Liberty and equality are established in fifth place in order to explain “the belief in the American form of government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Even though the political and economical reality of the United States has often been contradictory to these beliefs, they have been a part of the American Dream from the very beginning. Liberty can be explained from the
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belief in the manifest destiny of the American people, and both are of course indispensable prerequisites for a person’s ability to progress and succeed. The notion of equality calls for the promise of the American Dream that the people of America, wherever they may come from “can live peacefully together;” whereas in this regard there are two different strands that one can believe in: either the idea “that immigrants of different nationalities, different ethnic stock and different religious affiliations can be fused into a new nation,” which would make up the American melting pot, or the hope that despite the cultural, ethnic, or religious differences there is a unity in diversity in the American Dream. (Freese 1994: 108)
In their pamphlet The American Dream, Robert H. Fossum and John K. Roth claim the aspect of a new-beginning to be the most outstanding one: “This belief exemplifies better than any other the optimism - some would call it naivety
- of Americans and the fundamental reason why rhetoric about the Dream caught on in the United States” (Fossum & Roth 1981: 6). The myth of a new-beginning in a land of endless possibilities and the promise of reformation that this notion contains can be traced back to the Puritans.
3. City upon a Hill: The Puritans
All the basic elements of the American Dream adduced above can it their origins be ascribed to the Puritan settlers coming to America in the 17 th centurywith the probable exception of the melting pot/ethnic diversity/multiculturalism aspect - these notions evolved later in American history, and it should be fair to say that the Puritans have always considered themselves as an elitist class, God’s chosen exception. “The American dream is the Puritan dream; watered down and individualized, over the centuries, the American dream is a Puritan legacy” (Fyfe 1993: 14). Success and moral virtues, and the progress following from that; the belief in a manifest destiny and the task to reach and overcome frontiers, i.e. the
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notion of a new beginning; all of these ingredients that make the American Dream can be found in the earliest Puritan writings.
The vision of a “mundus novus,” a new world in the west, behind the horizon, which stood for innocence and purity - far from the decadence and decay that had been inflicted upon the “old” sinful Europe - has inspired European thinkers and writers before and especially ever since the discovery of the new continent. There have been utopian images of El Dorado, the golden country, presumed to be in South America, or of a new Atlantis, the legendary island; of the Shakespearean brave new world. “From a very early period America seemed almost a creation or extension of Europe - in a way which Asia and Africa could never be. And with time this relationship became ever more involved as Europeans tended to see in America an idealized or distorted image of their own countries, onto which they could project their own aspirations and fears, their self confidence and sometimes their guilty despair” (Honour 1975: 3).
The Puritans who left England saw themselves as God’s chosen people. Protesting against what they considered to be a too lax and too degenerated interpretation of religious duties and a depraved way of life, they saw the opportunity to start a new life in America, with a clean record, undisturbed from the sinful and bad influences of the old country. America consequently was seen as the future of devout mankind, the chance for redemption, the Promised Land. Comparing themselves to the ancient Israelites (Winthrop 1630: 22), the Puritans established an “Exodus mythos” (Peterson 1997: 5). As the only “pure” people on this earth they were granted a new beginning by their God; they were meant to create the ideal state. It was a new beginning in a new country, on a new continent in the west. This is the theoretical foundation for the notion of the New Beginning which constitutes part of the American Dream.
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3.1 Road to Salvation: The Combination of Success and Virtue
Also, the Puritans felt that it was upon them to prove to God that the human race was worth saving. Its destiny was in their hands. If they failed in their endeavors not only they were going to be lost, but so was the rest of the world. This makes the matter of surviving the first years on the new continent not only a question of personal interest for the pilgrims: it put considerable pressure upon them to prove themselves worthy of the grace of God. The effect of this pressure has two sides to it: a material and a spiritual.
The Puritan ideology follows the doctrine of an individual’s predestination in life. Principally, because of the original sin, the soul of every man is condemned and will have to suffer throughout life and death. The ultimate supremacy and authority of God wills his followers into a humble and obedient existence. During his life on earth, man has to fulfill certain tasks and duties which have been imposed on him by God. Yet, he can try to mitigate the doomed fate by living an exemplary life, both spiritually and economically. The Puritans followed their religious conviction that working hard and striving for success was a way to praise God, to please him and to live according to his will. Their firm belief was that this would increase the glory of God on earth. Max Weber analyses this in great detail in his essay Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus and concludes: “(...) es bleibt, mit steigendem Nachdruck betont, der Hinweis darauf, daß die Erfüllung der innerweltlichen Pflichten unter allen Umständen der einzige Weg sei, Gott wohlzugefallen” (Weber 1920: 71). Thus, leading a successful life was considered as a road to salvation, and thus the notion of success through hard work and profit is implanted into the American Dream.
But, the striving for success had to be combined with a high set of moral values in order to avert a sinful and depraved way of life. Asceticism, contemplation and prayer added to the glorification of God. And in their position
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of God’s chosen people, the Puritans also had the responsibility to act as a model
to the rest of the world.
It is necessary (...) to think of this Great Migration not as some merely human act, undertaken with whatever motives, but to think of it as a necessary step leading to nothing else than the redemption of the entire world. Should they fail, their failure too would radiate outward, and the human race would know that a divine opportunity had been lost, that a chance for progress toward God had been missed. (Baritz 1964: 17-18)
3.2 The Moral Example: A City upon a Hill
Exemplary for the high moral demands the Puritans imposed on
themselves is the perception of their new home, America, as a “Citty upon a hill,”
introduced by John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company
in his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity.” It was held in 1630 on board of
the Arbella, one of the ships which took the first Puritan settlers to Massachusetts.
In this sermon, Winthrop preached to his fellow settlers that
wee shall finde that the God in Israell is among us, when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the lord make it like that of New England.” For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon Us, soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evil of the wayes of god, and all professours for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are goeing (Winthrop 1630: 23).
Winthrop wanted the pilgrims to set a moral example to the rest of the world. To
him, America represented a “seemingly mythical landscape wherein the Puritan
patriarchs could attempt to reinvent themselves as Biblical patriarchs” (Fyfe 1993:
17).
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4. The 1950s
4.1 Suburban Bliss: The American Dream in the 1950s
The American Dream of the 1950s comprised for the majority of the United States citizens a retreat into the safety of a home, a small “nuclear” family and a steady job. After the end of World War II, the American people longed for certainty, rest and peace; for Happy Days. The ideal of a suburban home, two kids, television and a car flourished so that “by 1960, suburban residents of single-family homes outnumbered both urban and rural dwellers and the detached house had become the physical embodiment of hopes for better life” (Foner 1998: 264).
4.2 Cold War Reality
The concept of a universal enemy was worked out plainly through the propaganda of the Cold War. The world had two super powers emerging from the war: the Soviet Union and the United States. The general feeling was a fear of losing freedom to communism. The Truman Doctrine of 1947 emphasized the need to defend freedom against slavery which would befall the American people if they did not defend their moral values and rights (Foner 1998: 252-254). But it was exactly this defensive attitude and the fear of giving in to the alleged communist plan to take over the world that forced the United States into a rigid system of distrust towards new development and new ideas. Additionally, the fear of a recurrence of inflation and mass unemployment, which American society had lived through after World War I, created an atmosphere of intolerance towards anything strange or unknown. Civil liberties were restricted for anyone who was deemed communist. Conformity was patriotic, diversity a threat. There was either friend or foe. Also, this much conjured up freedom did not include African-Americans or other ethnic minorities in the United States.
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After the republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, had declared in February of 1950 that he knew of more than 200 communists working for the state department, an unprecedented sense of hysteria and paranoia spread through the country. Communists were suspected to have infiltrated all important offices of the United States which led to a general repression of all things considered ‘anti-American’ - amongst others liberal body of thought, homosexuality, and ethnical parity. Civil rights organizations were considered suspicious because of their liberal attitude. The malicious campaigns of the McCarthy era subsided after the end of the Korean War and of McCarthy’s political career in 1954, but moral cowardice, mediocrity and conformity marked the general attitude of the average American citizen in the Fifties anyway (Wynn 1977a: 385-386). Under his presidency from 1953 to 1961 Dwight D. Eisenhower and his vice president Richard Milhous Nixon wanted the United States to become a nation which followed a “dynamic” and “modern” conservatism (Wynn 1977a: 387). Eisenhower’s government was composed entirely of conservative and influential leading industrialists, commonly known as the eight millionaires and the plumber; the latter being Martin Durkin, official representative of the plumbers’ union, who resigned after only eight months of government (Wynn 1977a: 388). Eisenhower’s government gave the impression of being reactionary and shutting off towards new concepts or ideas, especially to those of a younger generation.
4.3 The Rise of the Civil Rights Movement and the Beat Generation
The ongoing discrimination of African-Americans and other minorities throughout the country promoted the rise of civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and the Students Non-violent Co-ordination Committee (SNCC). Citizens fought against their discrimination with bus boycotts (for example 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama) and sit-ins (the first one noticed nationwide took place 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina). The
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news coverage of these non-violent forms of protest via television for the first time turned the nationwide attention to the segregation through southern Jim Crow laws as well as to those individuals who stood up to fight against it, most notably Martin Luther King (Finzsch 2007: 106-107). This was the beginning of the movement of a counterculture that would develop to its full extent in the Sixties. Other developments of emancipation concerned the rights of women and homosexuals. The writers of the beat generation - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs - intellectually challenged the conformity and the consumerism which prevailed. By the mid-Fifties they slowly found their audience in students and young people who rejected the conservative values of their parents and longed to fill the inner emptiness. They felt the need to overcome their alienation from the materialistic thinking society. The beat poet Gary Snyder said in 1969 about the atmosphere before 1955: “[today] there are more of them. I can remember at one time we thought it was the life style of only three people” (Charters 1973: 240).
Hence, the end of the Fifties saw an America that superficially lived in an anonymous suburban bliss of conformity while under the surface people organized themselves - despite repression and persecution - in order to overcome social injustice and discrimination. They fought for redemption of the promises the American Dream had given about equality and freedom. The American Dream of the 1960s was implemented in the ideals of the civil rights organizations and the beat generation of the Fifties, yet it only came to full rise in the mid-60s, when the beatnik lifestyle began to take over a whole generation not only of students or intellectuals, but of the whole youth movement: “Commitment, idealism, and dissent had come to replace the patriotic apathy of the 1950s” (Clavir Albert & Albert 1984: 13).
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4.4 The end of the decade
American students in the beginning of the 1960s were said to become ideal employees of whom the future employers, and consequently the whole older generation, would not have to expect anything out of order or extravagant (Anderson 1995: 39). At the same time, the idea of freedom was deemed to be the highest American value, becoming “an inescapable theme of academic research, popular journalism, mass culture, and official pronouncements” (Foner 1998: 260). How did this rigid compliance to rules dictated by society on the one hand and this upholding of freedom on the other hand go together? It seems to be a complex delimitation against the states belonging to the Eastern bloc compared to which the United States aspired to present themselves as the moral example, the proverbial city upon a hill (Anderson 1995: 5) that guaranteed freedom from the communistic uniformity, while at the same time this delimitation did not allow individual freedom or extravagant behavior within American society. The Sixties brought a change to that attitude; during this decade the counterculture celebrated the delimitation from the older generation and the freedom of difference and diversity within America. The idea was to give a moral example by showing tolerance and establishing a world without a fixed concept of an enemy. To rebel against the presentation of the world in black and white, against the unquestioned premise that America was always right, against the self-conception of the United States as the World Police.
The massive rise in birth rates after World War II resulted in what was to become known as the generation of the baby boomers. This generation emphasized the development of individual freedom as opposed to the uniformity imposed on them by the older generations. They essentially shaped the decade of the Sixties.
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5. The 1960s
5.1 John F. Kennedy
The notion that a new decade had begun not only literally but figuratively
came with the election of John F. Kennedy for president in 1960. Kennedy
embodied all the hopes and wishes that the younger baby boomer generation put
into the future. He was - a well-known fact - the youngest president in American
history so far, and he seemed to believe in the future, instead of being stuck in the
past. To many he was an icon for the promise that America could do better than it
did then. Hunter S. Thompson, trying to define the era of the Sixties in a letter to
his editor at Random House, Jim Silberman, in 1970 sums up the hope of the
younger generation ten years earlier:
[It was] that night in September, 1960, when I [...] watch[ed] the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on TV [...]. That was when I first understood that the world of Ike [Eisenhower] and Nixon was vulnerable ... and that Nixon, along with all the rotting bullshit he stood for, might conceivably be beaten. I was 21 then, and it had never occurred to me that politics in America had anything to do with human beings. It was Nixon’s game - a world of old hacks and legalized thievery, a never-ending drone of bad speeches and worse instincts. My central ambition, in the fall of 1960, was to somehow get enough money to get out of this country for as long as possible - to Europe, Mexico, Australia, it didn’t matter. Just get out, flee, abandon this crippled, half-sunk ship that A. Lincoln had once called “The last, best hope on earth.”
In October of 1960 that phrase suddenly made sense to me. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t Kennedy. He was unimpressive. His magic was in the challenge & the wild chance that he might even pull it off. With Nixon as the only alternative, Kennedy was beautiful - whatever he was. It didn’t matter. The most important thing about Kennedy, to me and millions of others, was that his name wasn’t Nixon. [...] he hinted at the chance of a new world - a whole new scale of priorities, from the top down. Looking at Kennedy on the stump, it was possible to conceive a day when a man younger than 70 might enter the White House as a welcome visitor, on his own terms. That was a weird notion in those days. After eight years of Ike, it was hard to imagine anyone except a retired board chairman or a senile ex-general having any influence in Government. They were the government - a gang of rich, mean-spirited old fucks who made democracy work by beating us all stupid with a series of billion-dollar
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hypes they called Defense Contracts, Special Subsidies, and “emergency
tax breaks” for anybody with the grease to hire a Congressman (Thompson
2000: 260-261).
Kennedy seemed to promise a change in national and international politics, moving and modernizing stuck structures, while Richard Nixon, vice president under Eisenhower, who ran for president as the candidate of the Republican Party emphasized the accomplishments of the Eisenhower government; an era which the younger generation came to consider to be repressively reactionary (Wicker 1991: 234 ff.). The division of the United States concerning the future of the country at the beginning of the Sixties can be gauged by the extremely narrow victory of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon: He won by a majority of only 112,881 votes (Wynn 1977b: 407).
With the young president there came a change into the White House as Kennedy sought the advice not only of representatives of the economy, but also of representatives of the academic world and of the civil rights organizations. He met with Martin Luther King and promised to take measures against the discrimination of African-Americans. Although Kennedy de facto missed the opportunity to change the legislative discrimination of African-Americans because of the resistance in congress, he nevertheless had chosen the opportunity to address the problems the United States were facing instead of ignoring them (Wynn 1977b: 406-410). The general atmosphere was one of change. Thousands of young Americans had the feeling that they were meant to improve their country and in the long term reform the world.
The American Dream of the 1960s as envisioned by the counterculture emphasized the aspects of freedom and equality, of individual fulfillment and unity in diversity. The pursuit of happiness did not necessarily ask for prosperousness and materialistic success like it had done in the Fifties. The priorities had changed. The climate was a very idealistic one, and young people believed that it was in their hands to make a difference by engaging themselves for instance in civil rights organizations, students’ organizations like the SDS
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(Students for a Democratic Society), or the newly established Peace Corps, “the love child of his [Kennedy’s] administration” (Anderson 1995: 59).
Kennedy had [...] catalyzed a youthful desire for change that was itself a political power, as yet only dimly recognized, destined to transform the nation later in the decade. Before Kennedy gave it mainstream political meaning, that emerging force had been foreshadowed only in the alienated sullenness of a James Dean, the anarchic sensuality of an Elvis Presley, the restless adventuring of a Jack Kerouac (Hellmann 1986: 73).
5.2 The Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron Statement stands representatively for the ideals of the new generation. It was written in 1962 by one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Tom Hayden, as a manifesto in order to express the dissatisfaction about the hypocrisy of the United States concerning civil rights and individual freedom. Hayden considered it an “Agenda for a Generation,” i.e. his generation: the students at the universities and their coevals. The Port Huron Statement ultimately states a utopian vision of a country that would try to live up to ideals like racial and social equality, a better education, civil liberties and freedom of speech and opinion; ideals, Hayden argued, which were already grounded in the in the very nature of the United States, but were ignored in the reality of the 1950s.
The protest was also directed against poverty in an affluent society, against the bureaucracy and corruption of institutions, and against the allegedly peaceful attitude of the United States in international politics while the nation really was amidst the military frenzy of an arms race with the Soviet Union:
We began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo (Hayden 1962).
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The previous generation was deemed apathetic and ignorant. The generation of
today was to take action and better the conditions of life in America. Hayden
wrote:
We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims - that the individual share in those social distinctions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for common participation (Hayden 1962).
The distinctively new approach of this manifestation of the so-called New Left
was the implication that had been given by John F. Kennedy before: That a social
change was not only possible, but that it was happening right now, and that the
post war generation of baby boomers were both capable and responsible to take
part in it. Social commitment, awareness for political developments and a concern
for injustice superseded the apathy and lack of interest that had governed the
1950s. Hunter S. Thompson describes the state of the country at the end of the
fifties as an “uneasy vacuum in American life” against which parts of the younger
generation - that came to be labeled as ‘hippies’ - rebelled. He argues further that
[the] hippies threatened the establishment by dis-interring some of the most basic and original ‘American values,’ and trying to apply them to life in a sprawling, high-pressure technocracy that has come a long way, in nearly 200 years, from the simple agrarian values that prevailed at the time of the Boston Tea Party. The hippies are a menace in form of an anachronism, a noisy reminder of values gone sour and warped ... of the painful contradictions in a society conceived as a monument to ‘human freedom’ and ‘individual rights,’ a nation in which all men are supposedly “created free and equal” ... a nation that any thinking hippy [sic] will insist has become a fear-oriented “warfare state” that can no longer afford to tolerate even the minor aberrations that go along with ‘individual freedom’ (Thompson 2000: 7).
This “anachronism” Thompson describes brings back the values of the American
Dream which were not exclusively concerned with the increase of riches and
status, which were less superficial and more idealistic.
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5.3 The Renewal of the Nation
The idealism of the beginning of the Sixties caused a profound and radical change in American society. After the Fifties decade of apathetic adjournment or ignorance of the burning issues the United States were facing domestically, these conflicts were bound to erupt in the Sixties (Wynn 1977a: 404).
The integration of African-Americans and the end of race segregation, especially in the South, was one of the major objectives of the civil rights movement which in the beginning of the Sixties adhered to non-violent protests like sit-ins and freedom marches. In order to overturn the segregation of black and white, activists joined for concerted actions against the hypocrisy of a society which officially declared all of its citizens to be free and equal, but de facto denied a great part of it humane treatment. The participants in those nonviolent actions encountered threats and brute force; they were abused and denigrated, menaced, beaten up, and killed. But they set the tone for the beginning of the decade and lived the example of successful actions through non-violence. They gave hope to many people that something was about to change in America, and that everybody could take part in these changes. The renewal of a nation that had been caught in deadlocked structures for the past decade also aroused admiration: “In sitting down they are standing up for the American dream,” said the former senator and president of the University of North Carolina, Frank P. Graham, in 1961 (quoted in Anderson 1995: 51). The Kennedy administration had given a lot of hope to the young generation at the beginning of the Sixties but in practice failed to keep a lot of promises about a far-reaching improvement of the situation of the African-American population (Finzsch 2007: 113). In spite of the fact that several African-Americans were appointed for important offices within government and administration (e.g., Thurgood Marshall, legal advisor of the NAACP, served as the first African-American on the Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States), the situation for the majority changed only very slowly and tardily. Kennedy could not assert a change of the legislation in congress. His bill which intended an extensive broadening of civil rights by abolishing the
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segregation in everyday life, in education and at work did not pass the congress until after the President’s murder in 1963. Kennedy instead sent in executive authorities in order to enforce civil rights: Thus, the national guard had to oversee the matriculation of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962, and in 1963 the Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, had to be forced to allow African-American students to register at the University of Tuscaloosa (Wynn 1977b: 409 ff.).
5.4 Martin Luther King
The non-violent protests had to face several atrocious and violent attacks which alerted the general public of the complex of problems the United States were facing. More and more citizens supported the concerns of the civil rights movement. In August 1963 more than 250,000 people participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and listened to Martin Luther King’s most famous speech, “I have a dream.” Like Tom Hayden in The Port Huron Statement, King evoked the Declaration of Independence (“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’” (King 1963) in order to point out the discrepancy between the promises made to the American people and the harsh reality which a big part of it still had to face. King asked for the “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and expressed his hope for the reform and the improvement of the American Society: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation” (King 1963). In his speech, Martin Luther King hit the optimistic tone that characterized the beginning of the Sixties as a decade perceived to be one of change and improvement, and he insisted upon the urgency of such change:
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time
to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of
racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of
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racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children (King 1963).
Thus, the beginning of the Sixties was marked by a rather optimistic tone that set its hopes in the future of the country. The young generation was eager to change its nation for the better, and to remember the moral values of the American Dream of their forefathers. There was not yet a feeling of disillusion that would later infect the whole generation and leave it angry, frustrated and disappointed. But the violent reality soon destroyed these hopes and expectations.
5.5 A Decade of Disillusion
The murder of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, symbolizes the trend of violence which would define the 1960s and which would be the cause for the great disillusion that befell the youth of America. It came as a shock to the nation. Kennedy had - despite his failure to accomplish a real change in the social realities of his country - stood for the high expectations the younger generation had held. His assassination caused Hunter S. Thompson to coin the term “fear and loathing” and to apply it for the first time in order to describe his feelings about the development American society was taking: “I am afraid to sleep for fear of what I might learn when I wake up. There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything - much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.” (Thompson 2000: 420). In the very night of the murderwhich he refers to as “that heinous, stinking, shit-filled thing that occurred today”
- he wrote in a letter to his friend Paul Semonin:
The damage that has done to the Left in this country (...) is incalculable. It is the death of reason. From here on out, the run is downhill for us all -and I mean all. [...] This is by far the most profound act of the 20 th century. [...] I would like to be able to define the meaning of this thing, but the further I think, the further the error extends. I see no end to it, and less hope. It will almost surely mean a Goldwater victory on ’64, a wild reaction against “The Reds.” The democratic (small d) camp will be totally disorganized for too long. Now it is a question of either your kind of fascism or the other kind administered by the men with the fish-bellies. If it were fashionable, I would weep for us all (Thompson 2000: 418).
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In this dark mood he foresaw the reactionary setback which the American New Left with all it hopes and dreams would suffer from this event:
The political clock has been turned back to early Eisenhower & McCarthy. This savage unbelievable killing, this monstrous stupidity, has guaranteed that my children and yours will be born in a shitrain. […] I am, at the moment, as low as I’ve ever been. (Thompson 2000: 418-419).
The assassination of Kennedy is a crucial point in the history of the United States and it has been magnified as the loss of innocence and optimism: “In a struggle filled with bigotry and resistance, Kennedy after his death became the martyr for the opposite - for equality and progress” (Anderson 1995: 75). To Thompson, it meant the death of the American Dream for the future generations: “Neither your children nor mine will ever be able to grasp what Gatsby was after. […] No matter what, today is the end of an era. No more fair play. […] The savage nuts have shattered the great myth of American decency” (Thompson 2000: 420).
Violence took over the nation; the fronts hardened. The era of nonviolence as propagated by Martin Luther King and his followers was over. For many participants of the civil rights movement none of the resolutions and decisions made by the government under Kennedy and later under President Lyndon B. Johnson sufficed. Frustration and annoyance about the slow progress led to race riots in the bigger city ghettos across the nation, such as the excesses of violence in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965 and the riots in Detroit two years later with 42 dead which caused the mayor of the city to compare it to Berlin in 1945.
5.6 The Hippies
The counterculture developed into several directions. Through the rejection of the older generation which was deemed responsible for the situation of the nation the various groups which constituted the New Left radicalized. There was the Nation of Islam under its charismatic leader Malcolm X who was murdered in 1965. The Black Panthers propagated armed self defense against the
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often brutal actions of the police. At the same time the image of the peace-loving flower children, the hippies, was coined through the thousands of teenagers or young twens who in an act of rebellion against the rigid and conservative generation of their parents ‘dropped out’ to live in communes and try a new style of life that was quickly attributed with the triumvirate of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (Wicker 1991: 268 ff.). The first hippies appeared in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1965, “[there was] energy, vibrations, and for many questioning youths it became a spawning bed” (Anderson 1995: 170). They also joined in with the antiwar movement which had gained more and more followers as the involvement of the United States in Vietnam had increased. In an article for The New York Times Magazine in May 1967, Hunter S. Thompson anticipated the influence of the hippies onto the entire society:
There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and uncountable is the mass of the intelligent, capable heads who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man’s image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose (from: “The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies,” quoted in Thompson 1997: 599).
5.7 Vietnam
Kennedy had enforced the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia with the intention to contain the progression of communism, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson kept to the policy of America intervening in a war which increasingly encountered resistance within the American population because of the high loss of lives, the cruel methods of combat, and the high costs of warfare: especially the counterculture thought of the war as a horrible tragedy which claimed the lives of more and more soldiers each year. The government under Johnson failed to give a factual picture of the situation the United States found themselves confronted with in this war and suffered the loss of trust and confidence amongst a great part of the population (Wynn 1977b: 420-421). Young men who had no right to vote until
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they were 21 could nevertheless be drafted at 18 and be send over to fight in a war which made no sense to a majority of the younger generation. Official lies about putative victories, about the cruel methods the United States employed and about the horror that soldiers sent over would encounter and have to live with created a feeling of disillusion and suspiciousness against the government.
By upbringing, training, and ambition, these children of affluence [the baby boomers] were winners. They had been raised and schooled to believe in the promise of America and they hated the war partly because it meant that the object of their affections, the system that rewarded their proficiency, was damaged goods. They were the inheritors of the visions of a moral America, and they did not want their moral capital squandered. Though they hated the war and the draft, they still believed that America could be beautiful - if it would live up to its own principles (Gitlin 1987: 295).
Ultimately this disillusion led to the deselection of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969. Richard Nixon won this election by a close vote which again shows the inner conflict of the country. He had promised to bring this war to an end quickly, but failed in doing so during his government.
The impact on the American society was far reaching. Protests against the war grew in the first half of the 1960s and escalated in the mass demonstrations of the second part of the decade: In 1967, 200,000 demonstrators participated in the March on the Pentagon, and in 1969 there were 250,000 people protesting in Washington, D.C. At the same time those young men who refused to fight in Vietnam had to flee the country or find other means to avoid being drafted. Vietnam increased the division of society to a large extent: those who spoke out against the war were deemed unpatriotic and subversive. They on the other hand considered the supporters of the war to be immoral, dishonest and corrupted by the interests of politicians and big industrialists.
It was a decade of war, assassinations, everyday violence, economic uncertainties, embittered domestic relationships - American troops were sent not only to Indochina, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and the Tonkin Gulf, but to Mississippi, Alabama, Detroit and Washingtonenvironmental impairment, and flight from reality (Kendrick 1974: 11).
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The second part of the Sixties saw the rise of Richard Nixon. However, it also saw the rise of the hippies. The life style of the counterculture, the music, the clothes, the drugs and the sexual revolution took over a whole generation and invaded the middle class. The students and the civil rights movement became the peace movement, and the Vietnam War threat was partly responsible for an intrusion of violence into the American society. “It was little wonder,” writes Wicker,
that so many young Americans - with so little of what they could see as useful or rewarding work for them available to them - sought to find meaning in their lives or relief from custom and obligation, in drugs, sex and ‘dropping out.’ […] It was in that atmosphere that the much-derided ‘Tricky Dick’ [Richard Nixon] managed to make himself an apostle of traditional values, social stability and national purpose - perhaps the most remarkable achievement of a man of whom the commentator TRB had expressed the widely shared opinion that he was ‘without a spiritual home, ready to twist any circumstances to his advantage, devoid of any genuine commitment to either liberalism or conservatism but trying to feel at home wherever the tides of circumstance happen to lodge him.’ (Wicker: 1991, 269)
For Hunter S. Thompson, Nixon was the arch nemesis. He stood for the deceitfulness and hypocrisy of American politics, and Thompson dreaded the possibility of this man taking over the highest position of the United States. In 1968 he wrote: “I still tremble at the prospect of “President Nixon.” He is the unlucky personification of all the root problems which I suspect are going to croak us very shortly.” (Thompson 2000: 95). After the election of Richard Nixon, the United States regressed into a nation that considered “‘campus unrest’ a more important problem than the war. […] the sleeping dogs of the Right, having awoken, were baring their teeth” (Gitlin 1987: 414).
But Nixon was only part of what Thompson began to see as the downfall of the great values of American society in the second half o the 1960s. To him the promises of the era had not been kept - could not have been kept because of the sell-out of the hippie generation and the repression of the counterculture by ridiculous accusations, while the members of those who had ultimately triggered the alternative society of the Sixties, the members of the beat generation, were not
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available anymore. He considered the politicians of the country incapable of
dealing with the nation’s urgent problems and accused them to be lying
caricatures that were in the firm grip of industrialists and the FBI:
[...] [Timothy] Leary’s would-be “drop-out generation” of the 1960s. The Head Generation ... a loud, cannibalistic gig where the best are fucked for the worst reasons, and the worst make a pile by feeding off the best. Promoters, narcs, con men - all selling the New Scene to the Time magazine and the Elks Club. The handlers get rich while the animal either get busted or screwed to the floor with bad contracts. [...] the really big money [...] [is] in the drop-out revolution. Ride the big wave: Folk-rock, pot symbols, long hair, and $2.50 at the gate. Light shows! Tim Leary! Warhol! NOW!
Now what? While the new wave flowered, Lenny Bruce was hounded to death by cops. For obscenity. Thirty thousand people (according to Paul Krassner) are serving time in the jails of this vast democracy on marijuana charges, and the world we have to live in is controlled by a stupid thug from Texas [Lyndon B. Johnson]. A vicious liar, with the ugliest family in Christendom [...]. And California, ‘the most progressive state,’ elects a governor straight out of a George Grosz painting, a political freak in every sense of the word except California politics ... Ronnie Reagan, the White Hope of the West. [...] the honest rebellion that came out of World War Two taken over by a witless phony like Warhol ... the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Lights, Noise, Love the Bomb! And then to see a bedrock madman like Ginsberg copping out with tolerance poems and the same sort of witless swill that normally comes from the Vatican. Kerouac hiding out with his “mère” on Long Island or maybe St. Petersburg ... Kennedy with his head blown off and Nixon back from the dead, running wild in the power vacuum of Lyndon’s hopeless bullshit ... and of course Reagan, the new dean of Berkeley. Progress Marches On, courtesy, as always, of General Electric ... with sporadic assists from Ford, GM, AT&T, Lockheed and Hoover’s FBI. (Thompson 1997: 603-604)
5.8 Violence
The late Sixties and especially the year 1968 marked the downfall of a lot
of hopes and dreams the counterculture had put in to this decade. The year of the
election of Nixon is apt to be considered as the culmination of the Sixties. “[It
was] a year of repeated shocks to what remained of American certainty, of brutal
blows to Americans’ perception of themselves and their country, of devastating
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challenges to old ideas of authority and value” (Wicker 1991: 287). The nation learned about the pointless cruelty of the Vietnam War which seemed to turn itself into a no-win situation. The Tet-Offensive of the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong at the end of January killed 3,416 Americans (Wicker 1991: 287) and ultimately marked the beginning of the military fallback of the United States. It was brought to the shocked American citizens via television and newspapers and destroyed the myth about the inerrability of the army as it showed fleeing Vietnamese citizens being shot from helicopters or complete villages going up in the flames of napalm bombs with a officer of the United States army commenting: “We had to destroy it, in order to save it” (quoted in Anderson 1995: 184). The police chief of Saigon, Nguyen Ngok Loan, executed a captured Viet Cong by shooting him into the head with the cameras running. And in March U.S. soldiers under the command of Lieutenant William Calley killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers in the My Lai massacre. “The myths created by John Wayne movies of the 1950s were devastated by the reality of one television attack called Tet” (Anderson 1995: 184). The assumed great American values which should have been brought to the world were corrupted, deformed and depraved.
1968 also witnessed the assassination of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Kennedy had just announced his candidateship for the upcoming elections, and many activists of the anti-war movement considered him to be a promise for the possibility of peace.
After King’s murder there were riots and uprisings in several U.S. American cities. His version of the American Dream, his vision of a peaceful coexistence of black and white in American society, of non-violence and freedom seemed to have been destroyed: “King’s […] death marked [the] demise [of the freedom surge]” (Branch 1988: 922). The Kerner report from February 1968 had been assigned by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to analyze the reasons for those ‘Civil Disorders’ - really a euphemism for the race riots that had convulsed American cities in the previous summer and had caused leader of the SNCC, H. Rap Brown to conclude that “violence is as American as cherry pie” (quoted in Clavir Albert & Albert 1984: 52). It was stated in this
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report that the United States were “moving towards two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal. […] Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American” - and the reason for this eruption of violence was nothing but “white racism.” The future prospects which the report gave were bleak: “To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968). Thompson echoed H. Rap Browns remark in April 1968 by writing that “[...] I think that Violence in America has a Fat and Happy future” (Thompson 2000: 59).
Robert Kennedy’s death destroyed all hopes for the beginning of an optimistic new era like the one which the election of his older brother started off. “To think about the enormous repercussions of the assassinations of 1968, we need to backtrack to the imagery and mood of a more general Armageddon, for which the triggering moment is the assassination of 1963. Kennedy, King, Kennedy: they sometimes felt like stations in one protracted murder of hope” (Gitlin 1987: 312). Also, now to the anti-war movement it seemed less and less likely that the Democratic Party would find and nominate a candidate in the upcoming elections who would propagate peace in Vietnam as fervidly as Robert Kennedy. The Democratic convention in Chicago in August of 1968 seemed like a good opportunity to demonstrate for peace: “Many activists became convinced that demonstrations at the Democratic convention were imperative” (Clavir Albert & Albert 1984: 30). But what took place in Chicago was the event which would eventually symbolize the social conflicts of the Sixties in American society. The hysteria that had preceded the convention was unmatched. For days and days without end demonstrators of the counterculture were chased through the streets of the city and clubbed by the police in front of television cameras and journalists from all over America and the world. The mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, had sworn to keep “law and order” in the streets of his city, and he intended to keep it by putting a 12,000 man police force on high alert against the alleged troublemakers of the counterculture who, in Daley’s opinion, had “no right to
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demonstrate or express their views” (quoted in Anderson 1995: 216). He had also at his command 6,000 men of the Illinois National Guards surrounding the city, “and could call on the same number of regular army troops armed with rifles, bayonet, gas dispensers, flame throwers, grenade launchers, bazookas, and .30 caliber machine guns” (Anderson 1995: 217). At the same time, the protesters who had come to demonstrate for peace no longer stuck to the principle of nonviolence that had been constitutive of peace demonstrations during the first part of the decade.
Chicago became Götterdämmerung because all the protagonists thought polarization served their larger purposes. […] The movements’ irresistible force collided with Mayor Daley’s immovable object, while the television cameras floodlit the clash into national theater. […] It was as if everyone were playing out a fantasy version of Vietnam: act tough, try to intimidate, win over the center with a show of force, draw the other side into acting every bit as monstrous as you said it was” (Gitlin 1987: 319)
It was the Vietnamization of the American society.
Hunter S. Thompson had traveled to Chicago and he was appalled by the excess of violence which happened during the convention. “I went to Chicago to research part of my book on ‘The Death of the American Dream,’ and needless to say my trip was a rotten success.” (Thompson 2000: 127). “Chicago proved to be the political awakening of Hunter S. Thompson” (Brinkley 2000: xviii). In order to cope with the bizarre and violent scenes he witnessed, he developed his alter ego, Raoul Duke, who would later become the main character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Thompson 2000: 112 ff.). The events in Chicago disillusioned Thompson about the hopes and dreams of the Sixties: “[…] the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away” (Thompson 2000: 117).
The violence had invaded everyday life by the end of the 1960s. The social psychologist Kenneth Keniston wrote about the developments in society: “The issue of violence is to this generation what the issue of sex was to the Victorian world” (quoted in Gitlin 1987: 316). Thompson had gotten the same impression:
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I got what they called an “adult dose” of American political reality in an era when the nation seemed to get up in flames every day of every week. There was no relief from it and no place to hide. You didn’t have to be a “revolutionary” to be part of the Revolution - and even if you were innocent, you could get beaten & gassed just for watching. In a four-year span I was tear-gassed or beaten or chased like a rat by police about two hundred times in at least twenty states (...). I came to know gunfire and panic and the sight of my blood on the streets (Thompson 2000: xxiv).
Recapitulating the year 1968, Thompson wrote in a letter to his brother:
1968 seems to have been a really awful year for everybody except maybe Nixon, that evil scheming bastard. (...) there is no good news. And no hope of any. Nixon is going to win (...). Agnew is the wave of the future, a stupid shithead, so cheap and useless that he can’t understand his own failure. My depression with current politics in this country is so vast that I can’t find words to express it. (...) Maybe it’s because we’re all around 30 and the game is beginning to look more serious than we realized. (...) Maybe this year of black politics has showed us a mirror of ourselves - a gang of aging bullshitters and incompetents, like Humphrey & Nixon. That’s the best we can cough up, to speak for us. I seriously believe this country deserves everything that’s going to happen to it. War, revolution, madness, the whole bag. I’m looking around for another country to live in, it’s only a matter of time. (...) Chicago and the Convention - (...) that was pure horror, much worse than it looked on TV. It was a real Hitler scene, the air smelled of fear and desperation. I’m trying to write about it now, (...) but it’s hard to explain except as a final loss in faith in whatever this country was supposed to stand for, all that bullshit in history books (Thompson 2000: 137).
5.9 Paranoia
Apart from the surge of violence the American society in the end of the
Sixties was also coined by the presence of an overwhelming paranoia which
intruded the life of U.S. citizens. The Harris Poll is an index which analyzes the
degree of alienation in the United States annually and compiled an “alienation
index.” It asks the respondents five questions:
Do you feel that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
Do you feel what you think doesn't count very much anymore? Do you think most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself?
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Do you think the people running the country don't really care what
happens to you?
Do you feel that you're left out of things going on around you?
(Harris Report 2004).
The alienation index is assessed by taking an average of the respondents who would affirm these five questions. In the year they were asked for the first time, 1966, the alienation index constituted 29. In 1968 it was 36, and by the year 1971 it had escalated to 40. At the beginning of the Seventies, after four years of Nixon as president, 46% percent of the American population agreed to the statement that “The people running this country do not really care what happens to you,” while 43% believed that “most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself” (Harris Report 2004). Paranoia seemed to be inherent to almost half of the citizens of the United States. And this notion did not seem to be entirely unfounded. Under its “unscrupulous and racist” (Finzsch 2007: 133) director, J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, had been developed into a giant machinery which kept under surveillance a great number of activists of the New Left, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, or the counterculture in general. The COINTELPRO program, established by Hoover in 1956 as a means against the Communist party, was strengthened in 1967 in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters” (quoted in Finzsch 2007: 133)defining the targets of surveillance vaguely enough to leave anybody with contacts to the left scene anxious about the FBI listening to the phone calls and controlling the letters. Informers were recruited to undermine and unsettle the counterculture, and the FBI was thought to be capable of planting drugs on activists in order to be able to arrest them under false pretenses - and rightly so. “Drugs inflated the spirit of Armageddon, but with conspiracy trials in progress from Boston to Oakland, who could really be certain that the pipe nightmares were only that?” (Gitlin 1987: 314). Under the government of Richard Nixon and his right hand in the Justice Department, Attorney General John Mitchell, the repression of civil liberties came to its climax. Wiretaps, break-ins into activist’s houses and offices, harassment and manipulation set the tone for the next decade,
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the 1970s, during which, eventually, Nixon’s very own paranoia would cause his downfall in the Watergate scandal in 1972 (Gitlin 1987: 413; Wicker 1991: 630 ff.). To Hunter S. Thompson, paranoia is a “central theme” (Brinkley 2000: xx). In 1968 he wrote: “[…] the Nixon era - the death of humor and a purge of profligate crazies” (Thompson 2000: 170).
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Hunter S. Thompson was born in July 19, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky and died February 20, 2005 in Woody Creek Colorado. He wrote several books, both fiction and non-fiction. Among his best known works are Hell’s Angels (1966), The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved (1970), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 (1973), and The Rum Diary (1998).
Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream captures the state of the American Dream at the end of the Sixties in a precise and accurate way like hardly any other contemporary novel (Fyfe 1993: 243). It implies all the ingredients that have coined the myth and the downfall of American values during this era: The myths of freedom and equality, the stories of success and free enterprise, the corruption of society through corruption, hypocrisy, paranoia and violence.
The novel describes the journey of two characters, Raoul Duke, a journalist, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, who are on their way across the desert to Las Vegas in order to find the American Dream. In this novel, Thompson unerringly recapitulates the development the American Dream has taken in the 1960s in America and accurately describes the state of the American Dream in the United States society under the presidency of Richard Nixon at the beginning of the Seventies. It is indeed, as the subtitle of the novel suggests “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.”
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6.1 The writing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
From 1968 on, Hunter S. Thompson was working on a book for Random House which had the death of the American Dream as its subject. In order to research this somewhat ill-defined and imprecise issue, Thompson started collecting all hints for the death of the American Dream he could find in newspapers and magazines, in publications by the government or organizations like the National Rifle Association (Thompson 2000: 91), the Conservative Book Club or the Students for a Democratic Society (Thompson 2000: 186-187). Several letters to his editor, Jim Silberman, written from 1968 until well into the beginning of the Seventies suggest the limbo he found himself stuck in: In spite of the fact that he found numerous proofs that the end of the 1960s had seen the death of the illusion of a better society as it had been aspired by the counterculture in the beginning of the decade, Thompson seemed unable to come to terms with his difficult task. While he kept missing one deadline after another and grew increasingly frustrated with debts and a constant feeling of failure, around him American society crumbled under a surge of violence and hatred. In the summer of 1968, one month before the eruption of violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, he wrote: “Actually, I hadn’t realized what a savage, stupid and dissolute nation this is until I began to clip every article that related to the death of the American Dream” (Thompson 2000: 101). And the same notion is expressed only two weeks later:
The massive “American Dream” filing system that I started building on my return from NY is a bummer. The brute weight of it all has paralyzed my head, flooded my drawers and caused me to initiate a vast shelfbuilding program ... which is not so crucial as the vicious depression that I’ve pulled down on myself by using this awful focus. There is absolutely no humor in the Death of the American Dream. I can’t get out from under it; we are caving in, I’m sure, and it’s happening so fast that only the daily papers can keep up. There is no good news, none (Thompson 2000: 109). It took him almost three years to finally escape from this mantrap he found himself caught in, and when it happened, Thompson at first did not even realize he had found the right approach to handle a topic as complex as this one. Writing to Ralph Steadman, who did the illustrations for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
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Thompson states: “[F&L] is a genuine fucking classic; the overall reaction to the thing has put me seriously off balance ... people are reading far more into the story than I ever intended to write” (Thompson 2000: 459).
In fact, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas emerged as a by-project to an article Thompson meant to write for the Rolling Stone magazine about the murder of Ruben Salazar in Los Angeles. Salazar, who wrote for the Los Angeles Times at the time, had been killed during a mass protest of the Chicano civil rights movement in the summer of 1970 by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy shooting a tear gas shell at him. The sheriff’s office first tried to camouflage its responsibility for the journalist’s death and blamed it on snipers or rioters, but the evidences and the witnesses argued against this misrepresentation. Ruben Salazar became a martyr and a symbol for the suppression of the Los Angeles Chicano movement (Perry 1992: 153 ff.). Tensions were high, and for Thompson - who had no insight knowledge of the Chicano movement - it was difficult to gain information. So he contacted his friend, Oscar Zeta Acosta, in Los Angeles and went to see if he could help with his article.
Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson had met in 1967 when Acosta came to Woody Creek, Colorado. This encounter was the start of a long friendship during which they frequently met and regularly wrote each other letters. Thompson remarked about their relationship: “The thing I liked about Oscar was that he was always willing to go further than I was” (Thompson (2000), 35). Acosta was one of the leading figures of the Chicano “Brown Power” civil-rights movement of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. He was born in 1935 as the son of Mexican immigrants in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in Riverbank, California, later served in the Air Force and started studying Law in the beginning of the 1960s (Tonn, 5). He radically strove for social and economical equality for Chicanos and represented them as a lawyer in court. At the same time he wanted to find and manifest his Mexican-American identity in various screen-plays and novels. He regularly sent his writing attempts to Thompson and asked for his critique. In 1972 he published the first of his two semi-autobiographical novels,
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The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo; the second one, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, was published in 1973. One year later Acosta disappeared during a trip in Mexico; the exact circumstances about his (probable) death are unknown up until today.
Nevertheless, the deep involvement of Acosta into the Chicano movement did not facilitate Thompson’s work on the Salazar article. He felt uncomfortable and awkward, describing himself as “a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia” (Thompson 1979), because of the constant presence of militant Chicano activists around Acosta.
[Acosta was] under bad pressure at the time, from his super-militant constituents, for even talking to a gringo/gabacho journalist. The pressure was so heavy, in fact, that I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy streetfighters who didn’t mind letting me know that they wouldn’t need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger (Thompson 1979).
When the opportunity arose to go to Las Vegas in order to cover a motorcycle race, the Mint 400, for the Sports Illustrated magazine in the beginning of 1971, Thompson took it and asked Acosta to come along, all expenses paid, because he hoped to be able to gather more information on the Salazar piece than he could in the tense atmosphere of Los Angeles. Acosta agreed to come along and thus began “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream.” He had, finally managed to find an approach to his long pondered subject of the death of the American Dream - and despite his foreboding it was possible to insert humor into this dark topic.
Thompson wrote the first part of the novel after his return from the Mint 400 - in the evenings, while finishing the Salazar piece during the day (the article on Ruben Salazar was later published under the title “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan” in the Rolling Stone magazine in April, 1971). The article Thompson had written on the motorcycle race was “aggressively rejected” by the editors of Sports Illustrated who had expected about 250 words in order to fill the captions for the photographs (Thompson 1979). But Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, and David Felton, one of the Rolling Stone editors, liked what they read
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and their enthusiasm encouraged Thompson to return to Las Vegas (Perry 1992: 162 ff.) and take part in the National District Attorneys Association’s Third Annual Institute of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in April 1971 in order to write a second part to the Las Vegas article. The two accounts of the adventures of Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, taken together were planned to be published as two articles in the Rolling Stone magazine and would also make a short book for Random House - Thompson still had to fulfill his assignment of a book on the death of the American Dream (Thompson 2000: 377).
6.2 Gonzo Journalism
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream was first published in the Rolling Stone magazine’s November 11 and November 25, 1971, issues and is what Hunter S. Thompson considered “a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism” (Thompson 1979). The term “Gonzo Journalism” was coined by Bill Cardoso, a friend of Thompson and editor of the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, after he had read Thompson’s article on the Kentucky Derby in the June 1970 issue of the magazine Scanlon’s Monthly, called “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” (Perry 1992: 142). Struggling and failing to meet the deadline of the hand-in of the article, Thompson had simply torn the pages, onto which he had scribbled his observations, from his notebook and submitted them. Tom Wolfe wrote about Hunter S. Thompson’s style:
The upshot was a manic, highly adrenal first-person style in which Thompson’s own emotions continually dominate the story. The approach seldom grates in Thompson’s hands, probably because Thompson, for all his surface ferocity, usually casts himself as the frantic loser, inept and half-psychotic, somewhat after the manner of Céline (Wolfe 1973: 173) The result was a distinctively funny and very accurate picture of the Derby. “The jagged realism of the writing struck a nerve that was directly connected to the increasing fragmentation of American culture” (Whitmer 1987: 87).
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The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines “gonzo” as an adjective which denotes a certain kind of journalism “filled with bizarre or subjective ideas, commentary or the like,” or, as a noun which stands for “eccentricity, weirdness, or craziness” (Flexner 1993: 821). Following this definition, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is definitively “gonzo,” even though Thompson disclaims this notion:
My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive—but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting … no editing (Thompson 1979).
Gonzo journalism puts the reporter into the center of the events. By deliberately ignoring classical journalistic values like the striving for objectivity, combined with a willful clash of facts and fiction, the Gonzo journalist includes the reader in his story. The Gonzo style is extreme, bizarre; it can be sarcastic, very funny and sometimes cruel. It is, however, never apathetic or impassive. “The gonzo spirit,” defines Hirst, “[is] a self-referencing egocentric personality with added shock value: a penchant for rough trade, mind-altering experiences and twisted humour” (Hirst 2004: 11). The general idea behind this concept is the presumption that there is no such thing as an objective truth and that “the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism” (Thompson 1979, quoting William Faulkner). Despite the fact that Thompson sees Fear and Loathing as a failed experiment of “true Gonzo Journalism” because “only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true” (Thompson 1979), the novel certainly has a lot of gonzoesque features which make it so unique and inimitable.
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6.3 The end of the Sixties
Duke and Dr. Gonzo are sent to Las Vegas with the instruction to cover a motorcycle race in desert of Nevada. From the beginning on it is clear that this task is just a pretext for a quest which is by far more difficult to fulfill: “[…] ‘we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream,’ [Duke tells a bewildered hitchhiker they pick up on their way to Las Vegas]. ‘This is a very ominous assignment - with overtones of extreme personal danger....’” (F&L, 6). Thus, the tone is set. Duke and Dr. Gonzo find themselves at the beginning of the Seventies in Las Vegas, in a surrounding in which the myths and illusions of a better society had backfired and collapsed. But they are still optimistic that they can make it:
[…] our trip was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country - but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that (F&L, 18).
In an interview Thompson states about the trip that his two heroes undertake:
I think I was celebrating the last time that it was possible to get away with this kind of stuff [this outrageous and effusive behavior of the Sixties]. […] I had a sense of the closing down of everything. And Nixon was going to be reelected, remember that. […] that was not a happy time (quoted in Ewing 2004).
Duke and Gonzo are, in a way, the successors of the first American settlers who came to this country to find freedom and their individual rights by going westward. But in the case of Duke and Gonzo, doing their journey at the end of the Sixties, this concept has been turned inside out. This myth of the frontier had vanished when California and the Pacific, the end of the continent, had been reached, and Duke and his attorney have no other choice but to go back eastwards while chasing the remains of the American Dream (Fyfe 1993: 245). During the second part of the novel they drive through Las Vegas in a big white Cadillac Coup de Ville which they have dubbed - surely not by accident - the “Whale.” This car is a prestige symbol of the American Dream, and just the fact that in the end it is a wreck, tells us a lot about the state of mind they are in. Both Duke and
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Dr. Gonzo have been shaped by the last decade. They are constantly paranoid and violent. They seem to expect trouble everywhere, but are not willing to “take any guff from these swine” (F&L, 12). These two characters are twisted, “dress[ed] up like human peacocks and get[ting] crazy” (F&L, 12). Loaded with drugs they are subversive and try to obtrude the exaggerated lifestyle of the counterculture upon Las Vegas, a city which clearly emphasizes the superficiality of the American society at this point in American history.
7. Las Vegas
Las Vegas has been (and probably will always be) called “The Entertainment Capital of the World.” It is America’s and probably the world’s capital of gambling and prostitution, of entertainment and of hedonism. It is the site of major sporting events, gigantic show acts, and conventions for all kind of organizations.
The image of Las Vegas is complex and multi-layered, with associations ranging from cowboys to gangsters, from streetwalkers to Folies Bergères showgirls, from high rollers to compulsive gamblers, and from instant riches to economic ruin. [...] both an Adult Disneyland and a family vacation destination (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 68).
Yet, the implication about what kind of entertainment is the main focus of Las Vegas has changed considerably from the former to the latter throughout the last decades. Before becoming a corporate family-friendly holiday destination in the 1980s, Las Vegas was the “Sin City” of the United States. It still has this reputation and certainly lives from it to some extent, and it is still a favorite place to go for people who really want to “let it all hang out.” But today Las Vegas has to share the earnings from its casinos with Native American reservations and other states which have made gambling legal. It concentrates more on entertainment that is less likely to corrupt the youth. Of course, the city is also known as a paradise for marriages as well as divorces, but in general it is fair to say that the atmosphere has toned down compared to the wild madness that Hunter S. Thompson describes in his novel.
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In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson sends his hero, Raoul Duke “into the heart of the American Dream,” which in this case is to be found in the Nevada desert, in Las Vegas. For Thompson, Las Vegas stands for America, and this is not a far-fetched claim at all as Gottdiener points out, too: “(...) in many ways Las Vegas represents, though often in exaggerated form, several important trends in contemporary American society as a whole” (Gottdiener et al. 1999: xi). And Joan Didion states: “Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and its devotion to immediate gratification” (Didion 1967: 80).
7.1 The history of Las Vegas
The history of the city reflects the history of the American West. The name “Las Vegas” goes back to November 1829, when the Spanish merchant and discoverer Antonio Armijo on his journey west was looking for an alternative route to the Pacific Ocean which would spare him the longer route southward along the Colorado River and then west just below the Mojave Desert. He found an oasis with water from artesian wells which he called Las Vegas, i.e. ‘the meadows’ or ‘the grasslands’ in Spanish. The route via Las Vegas proved to be the fastest way to get from Salt Lake City to San Diego, and soon a small settlement was established that provided supplies and accommodation to the settlers traveling west (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 2).
The great gold rush of the 1860s drew more and more settlers to this area, who not only searched for gold, but came to fulfill the needs of those who would pause only for a short time and would then travel further. They stayed, and around 1900, when the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad built its way west to Los Angeles on the old Mormon Trail, capable entrepreneurs were ready to buy building sites, and to establish warehouses and residences in order to develop a town alongside the rails that would serve as a provisions site (Fox 2005: 101). The steam locomotives needed the water from the Las Vegas springs, and the railroad
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workers and (later on) passengers could take a break to recover from the exhausting work and journey. Technical equipment for the operations in the gold mines of the area were stored in the new settlement’s depots; housing companies and railroad offices set up shop in what was to become downtown Las Vegas.
Las Vegas was founded with the idea of providing for the needs of people traveling through the area. The fact that people would have to live there to guarantee this provision was merely a side effect. Las Vegas has from its beginnings directed its energies and interests towards travelers and - later ontourists. The number of permanent residents is and always was relatively small compared to the masses of visitors. This city is defined by people coming, staying for some time, and leaving again, a steady flux of varying interests, ideas and ideals. A permanent coming and going has introduced superficiality into Las Vegas which is aimed at the satisfaction of the most obvious needs and wishes of the visitors but would never reach or allow profundity. When there is a fast everyday exchange of those who populate the streets of Las Vegas, “you can’t be subtle in this town,” as Duke says to his attorney (F&L, 119).
Las Vegas was officially founded on May 15, 1905, and the building sites of the town were soon auctioned off to investors and business men from Los Angeles who were eager to make their money through distribution and warehouses. The first hotels were opened; the town began to grow. Even though gambling was declared illegal in Nevada in 1910, it continued to flourish in Las Vegas unofficially until it was re-authorized by the state in 1931 (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 3).
While the rest of the country struggled through the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, Las Vegas gained economic profits from the Boulder Canyon Act which was passed by Congress in 1928 and was concerned with the construction of the Hoover Dam (then called Boulder Dam). Not only did this gigantic project of building the world’s largest dam on the Colorado river bring a rich and steady flow of investments into the area, it also involved thousands of
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workers to build it, to live in Boulder City, and then to spend their wages in Las Vegas which was only twenty miles away. Additionally, the number of tourists who wanted to admire the size of the construction site increased; they would watch the actions at the dam in the afternoon, and then travel on to Vegas to eat, gamble, drink and sleep. “In short, the town grew because of its diverse services built around the influx of federal funds, a growing population of job seekers and tourists, and municipal support for urban services” (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 11-12).
The Hoover Dam not only brought prosperity through investors, workers and tourists into the area, it also ensured an inexhaustible supply of cheap electricity for the city, thus enabling the massive development of Las Vegas into a glitzy neon-lighted tourist gambling mecca. The increase of the number of tourists from the 1930s on well through the Forties and the Fifties triggered the stylization of the Western Frontier theme as one of the main attractions of Las Vegas. “Easily accessible from Southern California, Las Vegas became the place where a contrived “Old West” self-consciously met the New West of Hollywood and Southern California leisure” (White 1991: 519). Here, it was made clear to the tourist looking for adventure, the “real West” could still be found, while in fact a powerful symbiosis between the business oriented Las Vegas entrepreneurs and the movie machine of Hollywood took place. During the Forties and Fifties Hollywood generated the images of an ideal frontier life, Vegas copied them in its theme-styled casinos, and Hollywood re-adopted the air of recklessness in its movies. “(...) the older western fascination with gambling, chance, luck, and getting rich quick merged with the New West’s picture of itself as a land of relaxation and leisure” (White 1991: 519).
This notion was enhanced by the lax laws concerning marriage and divorce, bringing the famous movie stars from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to get married, divorced and re-married, thus establishing a firm “Hollywood connection” (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 14). Major holiday resort complexes were constructed to keep up with the growing popularity of Las Vegas as a favorite destination for a weekend trip to get away from Los Angeles. One of them was the
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Flamingo, established by the East Coast Mafia mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel in 1946, who kept close contact to the Hollywood crowd and wanted a combination of “the sophisticated ambiance of a Monte Carlo Casino with the exotic luxury of a Miami Beach-Caribbean resort. The Flamingo liberated Las Vegas from the confines of its western heritage (...)” (Eugene Moehring, quoted in Gottdiener et al. 1999: 19).
In 1971, when Hunter S. Thompson went to Las Vegas, there were more than 2.5 million visitors coming to the city every year, plus roughly 1,000 new residents per month who came to stay (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 25). During this time, Vegas was characterized more than anything else as Sin City, a place where prostitution and gambling was not illegal, where profit-seeking meddlers had divided up the city among themselves and could afford to entice major show acts like Tom Jones or Debbie Reynolds into the big casino resorts. Elvis Presley played a total of 155 shows during this year, 114 of them in Las Vegas. Even though the entertainment machinery was enormous, gambling was the major source of income for the city’s business people.
Gottdiener identifies Las Vegas as a typical city of the southwest insofar as it was
created with little population and a limited infrastructure, (...) [it] had to attract people and resources in order to grow. Great risks have always been part of the equation in southwest development as most business initiatives were of the speculative kind. If they worked, fortunes could be made. If they failed, however, they added to the stock of abandoned dreams that still dot the landscape throughout the arid regions in the southwest (Gottdiener et al. 1999: 4).
As the American gambling city, in 1971 Las Vegas embodied the success story of both the American Dream and the American Nightmare; i.e. it offered sudden riches or could be the complete ruin of those who try their luck. Las Vegas promised instant happiness and fulfillment of all dreams and wishes, but underneath the surface it was run by profit seekers and gangsters.
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7.2 The landscape of Las Vegas
The trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas follows Interstate 15 all the way through the Mojave Desert, with the Death Valley to the North and Devil’s Playground to the South. For 272 miles, there are no larger towns or settlements along the interstate, no change of landscape, just desert. Fox points out that deserts stress the reciprocity of men and nature because of their sparse vegetation, the high temperatures, the wide open space; in general the extreme demands they make on human condition. He writes:
We lose our sense of physical scale and perspective in such landscapes, which opens a gap between what we think we are seeing and the reality. (...) The greater the dissonance between perception and reality, the more extreme our cultural responses become in order to compensate. The Mojave Desert is one of the most arid places in the world, and Las Vegas therefore a correspondingly strong presence in it. Between the open field of view presented us by the desert and the exaggerated gestures we make in response to its foreign nature, we are provided an unparalleled opportunity to examine social behavior (Fox 2005: xi).
A similar idea is expressed by Lash who notes on the claustrophobic nature of deserts. The “horizontal space determines extent” (Lash 1995: 18), and this extent has a great impact on the traveler crossing it. This landscape creates extremes. On the one hand, an apocalyptic “ultimate space annihilates time and consciousness (...) [and it] points steadily to entropy and death” (Feltskog 1995: 84). It conveys a feeling of displacement, challenging the boundaries not only of space but of identity (Feltskog 1995: 85). Yet on the other hand, the loosening of boundaries also implies a feeling of freedom and liberty. The Mojave Desert functions like a threshold between the relaxed Californian reality of Los Angeles and the exaggerated madness of Las Vegas. The effect of crossing it is described by Fox as a “[liberation] of the senses [which are] loosened from reality” (Fox 2005: 3). The beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas depicts the very same experience, yet enhanced by the use of drugs:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. ...” And suddenly there was a
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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 (F&L, 3).
Going from Los Angeles to Las Vegas for a weekend trip becomes a liberating and “disorienting experience, and thus one quickly romanticized as an adventure into the exotic” (Fox 2005: 3). Duke and Dr. Gonzo follow the same notion of going to Las Vegas because
every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether. (F&L, 12)
The vastness of the desert demands a certain counterbalance, and Las Vegas architecturally provides the approaching traveler with that. Tom Wolfe wrote that “Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs” (Wolfe 1965: 8). Neon lights, the Strip, the enormous hotels - the exaggerated artificiality of Las Vegas is just as unlimited as the natural emptiness of the desert; and it evokes the same loss of reality as the desert does. Joan Didion calls this the “geographical implausibility” of Las Vegas and observes that it “reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with ‘real’ life” (Didion 1967: 81). Because of the vast desert that surrounds it, the big nothing, Las Vegas has an even more spectacular effect upon the traveler than it would have in a densely populated area. It appears to Duke in the distance on the horizon like a fata morgana, “the strip/hotel skyline looming up through the blue desert ground-haze: The Sahara, the landmark, the Americana and the ominous Thunderbird - a cluster of grey rectangles in the distance, rising out of the cactus” (F&L, 22).
The Las Vegas reality celebrates what other cities would hide from its visitors or shove to the outskirts of town: gambling, prostitution, drinking
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(Gottdiener et al. 1999: 68). “Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution” (Wolfe 1965: 8). It clashes with every Puritan moral principle - except for one (which nevertheless must be called one of the decisive, all-defining foundations of the American Dream): The imperative of being successful. It is the Puritan ethic of success minus the moral values. This city “has flourished as the unique cultural ‘Other’ to the puritanical, provincial, and hard-working industrial ethos of the American heartland” (Gottdiener 1999: 69). Here, the conditions of success have been rethought and re-defined: It does not depend on hard work, on thrift and industry, but merely on the way the dices roll, whether a person is successful or not. It depends on chance. But superficially the all-American promise is being kept: Everybody can make it. It is the city of a thousand opportunities, and none at the same time. Las Vegas, as described in Thompson’s novel, is “the perverted antithesis of the Puritan vision of a city upon a hill; capitalist America’s ultimate pleasure dome” (Fyfe 1993: 245).
7.3 Duke and Dr. Gonzo in Las Vegas
In this grotesque and bizarre madhouse Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, have to “make it” (after having come into the grace of an Horatio-Algeresque lucky coincidence of an assignment in Las Vegas with all expenses being taken care of) in order to be judged fit for surviving the American Dream. In the beginning, the chances are not bad for Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo: loaded with a wide variety of drugs they enter Las Vegas in order to cover the Mint 400. The hypocrisy of Vegas is obvious from the moment they cross the city border and see a huge sign announcing a 20-year sentence for the sole possession of marihuana, and a life sentence for trying to sell it (F&L, 42) - in the very same place that has legalized prostitution and gambling of any kind. Yet, in a town “full of natural freaks” (F&L, 190) with a reality as twisted as in Las Vegas, they manage for
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some time not to attract too much attention. When Duke has a paranoid fit while trying to check into their first hotel (the Mint), the receptionist remains unimpressed: “[she] shrugged as he [the attorney] led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak” (F&L, 24). The same impression is given later, when Duke and Gonzo cruise the Strip, personifying the prototype Vegas tourist:
Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the window down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it is all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapplered convertible ... stoned, ripped, twisted ... Good People (F&L, 29).
Additionally, one of their favorite drugs, ether, even proves to be perfect for this strange environment of theme casinos and big hotel resorts, despite the fact that on the way from Los Angeles Duke expresses his concern about using it: “There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge” (F&L, 4). Irresponsibility and depravity turn out to be just the right ways of behavior in the Circus-Circus casino:
This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it. (...) Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. In this town they love a drunk. Fresh meat. So they put us through the turnstiles [of the Circus-Circus] and turned us loose inside (F&L, 45-46).
Despite their gross appearance, Duke and Gonzo more often than not fail to make any impression on Las Vegas, a city which seems to have seen it all. In accordance with this notion is an article by Tom Wolfe from the mid-Sixties in which he describes the “typical Vegas tourist” as a pill-popping, neurotic bundle of nerves, “gambling and drinking and eating (...), but mostly hopping himself up with (...) amphetamine, cooling himself down with mebopromate then hooking down more alcohol, until, after sixty hours, he was slipping into the symptoms of
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toxic schizophrenia,” all in order to come to terms with “Las Vegas’ unique
bombardment of the senses” (Wolfe 1965: 5-6). Duke perceives the other guests
in the lobby of the Mint Hotel as blood lecherous lizards, having deteriorated into
beasts; an impression conceived under the influence of acid but accurate
nonetheless (F&L, 23-24). Like the desert around Las Vegas, the drugs in Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas are employed to enhance the perception of reality:
they do not fabricate any experiences but stress what is already there.
Las Vegas is “a city where mainstream social parameters are bent and even
violated as a primary way of attracting customers” (Fox 2005: 150). The Circus-
Circus as a typical casino stands in for the bizarreness of the Las Vegas lifestyle
in which the grotesque behavior of Duke and his attorney pales compared to what
goes on around them, and despite their eccentric (to say the least) behavior the
reader realizes - depravity is on Las Vegas’ side:
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. (...) The madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhousetype booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice massage. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.” Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!” We will close the curtains tonight. A thing like this could send a person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to live with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of trip.
But nobody can handle the other trip - the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted (F&L, 46-47).
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The Circus-Circus represents of course the essential Las Vegas approach to reality; and in Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this city in turn stands for the state of the American society at the beginning of the Seventies. Duke considers it to be a “grossly atavistic” (F&L, 173) town in which the only way to survive is to give up all ideals and humanistic ideas in favor of falsehood, fraud, violence and bribery.
Duke sees through the policy of deception that the casinos employ to lead the tourists into believing that this is the ultimate embodiment of the American Dream. To him the corruption and the immorality are obvious: “For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth” (F&L, 42), and he continuously rages against the hypocrisy of pretending that anybody would be welcome in this city or - by extension - in this country: “Sympathy? Not for me. (...) This place is like the Army; the shark ethic prevails - eat the wounded” (F&L, 72); and - again picking up this notion later in the story: “In Las Vegas they kill the weak and deranged” (F&L, 104). He learns to make his way through the “sharks,” but only by adapting to the Las Vegas’ code of behavior:
This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. The only bedrock rule is Don’t Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big (F&L, 105-106).
His behavior is outrageous and hideous, but because he acts according to the rules he always gets away with it. Also, throughout his experiences in the book, Duke again considers the possibility that whatever he is doing does not seem out of the ordinary for the average occurrences in Las Vegas, for instance when he and his attorney try to catch a plane:
I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegascars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild-eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise. Maybe so, I thought. Maybe this kind of thing is standard procedure in this town ... (F&L, 172).
But for all his outrageous deeds Duke cannot suppress the feeling of shame and pity for those who did not make it, and his rage against the American society
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which allowed this development to happen. He can look behind the facades of the
neon-lighted Strip and knows parts of Las Vegas which most tourists do not
bother to see; the dark side of all promises about success made by the casinos, the
mercilessness and the cruelty to those who did not make it:
North Las Vegas is where you go when you fucked up once too often on the Strip, and when you’re not even welcome in the cut-rate downtown places around Casino Center. [...] North Vegas is where you go if you’re a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide that you’re no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers ... or if you’re a pimp with bad credit at the Sands ... or what they still call, in Vegas, a “hophead.” This can mean almost anything from a mean drunk to a junkie, but in terms of commercial acceptability, it means you’re finished in all the right places.
The big hotels pay a lot of muscle to make sure the high rollers don’t have even momentary hassles with “undesirables.” Security in a place like Caesar’s [sic] Palace is super tense and strict. Probably a third of the people on the floor at any given time are either shills or watchdogs. Public drunks and known pickpockets are dealt with instantly - hustled out to the parking lot by Secret Service-type thugs and given a quick, impersonal lecture about the cost of dental work and the difficulties of trying to make living with two broken arms. The “high side” of Vegas is probably the most closed society west of Sicily - and it makes no difference, in terms of the day to day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes. In an economy where Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week for two shows a night at Caesar’s [sic], the palace guard is indispensable, and they don’t care who signs their paychecks. A gold mine like Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money / power poles ... and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.
So once you get blacklisted on the Strip, for any reason at all, you either get out of town or retire to nurse your act along, on the cheap, in the shoddy limbo of North Vegas ... out there with the gunsels, the hustlers, the drug cripples and all the other losers (F&L, 155-156).
Las Vegas, as depicted in Fear and Loathing, signifies the state of the American
society at the end of the 1960s. It is all a giant glitzy facade that is supposed to
hide away everything that is wrong and does not fit into the pattern of those who
rule. It misrepresents the ideals of the American Dream by pretending that
everybody can make it, while in fact the city (and the country) is in the firm grip
of gangsters and a general regression that has shattered the accomplishments of
the Sixties: “A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in
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Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like itbut then some people like Nixon, too. He would have made a perfect Mayor for this town; with John Mitchell as Sheriff and Agnew as Master of Sewers” (F&L, 193). To Raoul Duke, Las Vegas is the degeneration of the American Dream.
The notion of success, the possibility of an instant rise from rags-to-riches is a deep-seated trait of the American Dream. And it is also one of the promises Las Vegas uses in order to lure tourists into its casinos: “Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers … house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd” (F&L, 41). In his novel, Thompson constantly refers to the author Horatio Alger in order to enunciate this idea.
8. Horatio Alger
Horatio Alger was one of the best-selling United States authors of juvenile literature of the 19 th century whose books have been read by millions of young Americans all over the country. He created a unique prototype of the achiever in the United States through various novels and biographies. His protagonists symbolize some of the central promises of the American Dream.
Alger was born in 1832 into a deeply religious Unitarian family. His father was a priest and after attending Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School, Alger aimed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Yet, his only employment as a priest in the Unitarian Church of Brewster, Massachusetts, ended after two years in 1866, when Alger was forced to leave for New York due to accusation of homosexuality and pedophilia (Hollweg 2000: 21). He then decided to become a full-time writer of boys’ stories and to support the New York Newsboys’ Lodging House which gave a temporary home for messengers, shoe blacks and newsboysquintessentially the heroes that populate each and every single Alger novel or story. Until his death in 1899 he published about 120 novels and stories (Fink 1962: 7), most of which - to his mind - should serve the education and
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entertainment of children, especially young boys. He considered this approach to be of more impact than the teaching in school or the preaching in church (Hollweg 2000: 21).
Horatio Alger’s protagonists can be called the epitome of the rags-toriches version of the American Dream. His novels rarely distinguish themselves through literary quality or sophisticated exceptionality (Fink sums up: “As literature, the less said of his books the better. [...] Alger is a monument to bad taste.” Fink 1962: 15-16); but they follow a recurring pattern, which is interesting because of its popular social implications: A young boy with a humble background who is forced to live in impoverished and adverse circumstanceswhich he usually cannot be blamed for - makes his way up the social and economical ladder - both through to his own will to succeed and due to a chain of lucky circumstances. Thus, Alger has created the blueprint of the American ragsto-riches social success story, depicting, over and over again, “the vast horizons which America offers to the young, the ambitious, the enterprising, and the good” (Behrman 1967: v).
Alger firmly believes in the promises the American Dream makes, and he propagates them constantly, along with a certain manner of conduct as an infallible recipe for personal success and contentment in life. He shapes his guidance to young readers after the fashion of the maxims in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, written from 1733 to 1758, which is as well brimming with good advises, such as:
In success be moderate (Franklin 1733-1758: 1191)
Diligence is the Mother of Good-Luck. (ibid. 1200) He that can have Patience, can have what he will. (ibid. 1201) God helps them that help themselves (ibid. 1201) If thou hast wit & learning, add to it Wisdom and Modesty. (ibid. 1208) Industry pays Debts, Despair encreases [sic] them. (ibid. 1224) Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is. (ibid. 1254)
Franklin incessantly propagated the self-made man who - through industriousness, moral sincerity and thriftiness - can rise in the society of the
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United States to any position he strives for; and Alger’s characters represent the all-American prototype of this pattern.
Alger’s first novel, Ragged Dick (1868), gives a good example of the schematization and simplification of the American Dream success story roughly sketched above. The main protagonist, Richard Hunter, is called Ragged Dick by everyone and is a somewhat unkempt orphan shoe shine boy who smokes, gambles and curses and knows his way on the streets of New York, yet seems to have a heart of gold. His moral values deep inside are never in doubt; Dick would for instance never steal or cheat (Alger 1868: 40), and is eager to help others whenever he can (Alger 1868: 43). He is tough, industrious, smart, honest, and never at a loss for words. The underlining implication is that he could make it if only he was given a chance. Alger strongly emphasizes the notion of social mobility in the American Dream. He writes, “in this country poverty in early life is no bar to a man’s advancement” (Alger 1868: 108). The poverty Dick lives in does in no way corrupt Alger’s young hero; instead it fires his ambition to gain economical success which - as Alger implies in a fairly unsubtle manner - can be easily reached through the right mixture of eagerness and zeal, luck and fortune, and a certain temperance which closely follows the main ideas of Protestant ethics: “energy and industry are rewarded, and indolence suffers” (Alger 1868: 46). This connects Alger’s hero with the very beginnings of the American Dream and its interpretation of success by the Puritans.
Accordingly, Ragged Dick learns to refrain from going to vaudeville shows and instead invests his spare time in a decent education. In combination with some lucky coincidences that appear in the novel in the manner of the deus ex machina (Dick is given five dollars for showing a wealthy kid around New York (Alger 1868: 55-111); Dick saves a child’s life and consequently is offered a job by the child’s father (Alger 1868: 208-214), he finally makes his way and becomes a successful businessman who leads a prosperous life. In a transferred sense he represents the hopeful and promising future that America as a country can have if it sticks to his values and is ready to accept challenge and education,
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and learns some moderation in order to gain maturity and stability. Ragged Dick is - after having gone past his uncouth adolescence, and on behalf of all of Alger’s heroes - the synonym for All-American self-made man (Hollweg 2000: 20) - “even to generations who have never read one of the books that were bestsellers a century ago” (Colombo 1988: 306-307).
Horatio Alger writes about Dick Hunter, the protagonist of Ragged Dick and two subsequently following novels (Fame and Fortune and Mark, the Match Boy):
[...] our hero was very much earnest in his desire to improve. He knew that, in order to grow up respectable, he must be well advanced, and he was willing to work. But then the reader must not forget that Dick was naturally a suave boy. His street education had sharpened his faculties, and taught him to rely on himself. He knew that it would take him a long time to reach the goal which he had set before him, and he had patience to keep on trying. He knew he had only himself to depend upon, and he determined to make the most of himself - a resolution which is the secret
of success in nine cases out of ten (Alger 1868: 167).
Hunter S. Thompson’s protagonist, Raoul Duke, may at first glance seem like the depraved villain of an Alger novel, but is in fact a strong believer in some of the maxims expressed above; one might even argue that he represents them to some extent - and if only in a twisted and distorted fashion. Admittedly, Duke does not exactly follow the maxim of modesty; and he is also equipped with a sense of humor and sarcasm, as well as a good portion of paranoia and madness which no Alger hero will ever come close to experience.
Nevertheless, Duke believes firmly in the American Dream. He explains so early in the novel to his attorney who - he claims - cannot grasp the concept because he is Samoan:
“You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago 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
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cash for no reason at all ... 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.” (F&L, 11).
Like the protagonists of any Alger novel, Duke depends on a variety of lucky coincidences that serve as a sine qua non for his success. Duke receives his tasks, his instructions and his money from complete strangers, the newspapers in New York or San Francisco, and manages only through various twists of fate to evade severe punishment and to receive further jobs. He is determined - like any good character in Alger’s novels - to follow through with what he considers to be his task until the end, thus following, in Alger’s words, “a series of upward steps, partly due to good fortune, but largely to his own determination to improve, and hopeful energy” (Alger 1868: 221). The debatable point would be without any doubt whether Duke’s journey leads him anywhere “up,” but he clearly has internalized the corresponding business concept: “But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream.” Duke sees his story as “Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas” (F&L, 12). And he constantly asks himself how Alger would have arranged his fate: “Do it right; remember Horatio Alger...” (F&L, 95).
Like the Alger heroes, he is surrounded in Las Vegas by casinos (i.e., vaudeville shows) and other temptations which Ragged Dick and the other Alger protagonists soon learn to refrain from; Duke watches the action in the casinos with a certain disdain as well (“Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real” (F&L, 57)), but throws himself into them at the same time in order to grasp the impact of what he sees:
Still humping on the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. [...] Beat the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel [...] (F&L, 57).
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Dick retreats from the streets of his youth into a hotel room which is supposed to keep him nice and warm and away from the streets, where - Alger implies - he would probably spend to much money or might pick up “wrong habits, which eventually led to ruin or [would] shorten (...) [his] life” (Alger 1868: 223). Duke yearns for some rest in the hotel rooms as well (F&L, 58-52), but is barely able to find them; the circumstances he lives in are by far too twisted, and the hotel rooms are always on the verge of total destruction; their falling apart also symbolizes the falling apart of Alger’s ideals and Alger’s naïve version of the American Dream. In Las Vegas, it becomes obvious that it takes a special kind of Alger hero to survive. And accordingly, in the end of the novel Duke feels like “a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger ... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident” (F&L, 203-204).
9. Searching for the American Dream
9.1 The Reality of 1971
“‘(...) we’re on our way to Las Vegas to cover the main story of our generation,’ [claims Duke at the beginning of the novel] And then I began laughing....” (F&L, 19). Las Vegas of 1971 - “this foul year of Our Lord” (F&L, 23) - has very little in common with the idealistic values of the young generation of the mid-Sixties. It is after all, as it was already mentioned above, a city which Richard Nixon would have been a worthy representative of (F&L, 193). Las Vegas stands for the victory of the “dark side of American” (Thompson quoted in Whitmer 1987: 93); it embodies the violence and the paranoia which had characterized the second half of the decade. Signs can be seen everywhere: When Duke reads one exemplary edition of the Las Vegas Sun he learns about the typical news of 1971: A heroin overdose killing a young woman whose body is found stuffed into a refrigerator; drugs in the U.S. army killing 160 soldiers per year, especially in Vietnam; police fighting against young anti-war demonstrators; torture in Vietnam on Vietnamese prisoners, subsequently defended by superiors of the army; a sniper wounding five
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persons in New York; a pharmacy owner arrested for illegally selling dangerous drugs (F&L, 72-74), the son of a prominent Republican pulling out his eyeballs after having mixed animal tranquilizer and LSD (F&L, 101-102). The average newspaper reports show a society gone awry. They even make Duke feel like a “relatively respectable citizen - a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous” (F&L, 74). He can be sure that he is by far less guilty than those that make the headlines these days. And consequently he is aghast to read “a small item” about one of the countercultures icons, Muhammad Ali, having been sentenced to five years in prison because he refused to fight against the Viet Cong (F&L, 74).
9.2 Impact of the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War has an implicit, unavoidable presence in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As soon as Duke and Gonzo enter their hotel room the news on the television show the invasion of Laos, “a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men fleeing in terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. ‘Turn that shit off!’ screamed my attorney ‘Let’s get out of here!’ A wise move” (F&L, 29). But leaving the room does not help: when Duke and Gonzo try to adapt to the Vegas lifestyle and cruise the Strip in their red Convertible, the radio plays “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley” (F&L, 29-30), obviously a battle song praising the man who was responsible for the My Lai massacre in 1968 (Anderson 1995: 329-330). In 1971, Calley had just been sentenced to life in prison - only to be reprieved by Richard Nixon three years later. It is obvious that the Vietnam War has become so ubiquitous that American society has numbed itself to its presence:
[Duke shouting at the desk clerk in the Flamingo hotel] ‘What do you want? Where is the goddam ice I ordered? Where’s the booze? There is a war on, man! People are being killed!’ ‘Killed?’ He almost whispered the word. ‘In Vietnam!’ I yelled. ‘On the goddamn television! ‘Oh … yes … yes,’ he said. ‘This terrible war. When will it end?’ (F&L, 123).
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9.3 Remembering the Sixties
Duke and his attorney are the last survivors of an era gone by, and Duke
cannot help but feel a certain nostalgia for the spirit of the mid-Sixties that had
exhibited the innocent and idealistic values of freedom and equality and had tried
to establish a society that was not entirely self-centered and mercenary:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era - the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. [...] There was madness in any direction, at any hour. […] You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning....
And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point of 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 (F&L, 66-68).
In Las Vegas the decline of the American Dream of the 1960s becomes obvious,
at least to those who have not yet retreated into the blissful callousness of the
Seventies. By imposing their lifestyle, their music, and their drugs on Las Vegas-
possibly for the last time - Duke and Gonzo are paying their last respects to the
hopes and ideals that vanished in a society full of violence and paranoia.
But Dukes sarcastic and critical world-view does not exclude the
generation of the hippies from his criticism:
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Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetic eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel (F&L, 178-179).
The end of the Sixties had meant a disintegration of the counterculture into
smaller groups which could not prevent the rise of Nixon and the reactionary
forces in the United States. A change towards a better society as it seemed
possible in the optimistic days of the beginning of the decade had been destroyed
- to Duke’s mind - when this generation failed to hold together. The increase of
violence and paranoia had just added to this problem:
First “gurus.” Then, when that didn’t work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson’s primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler of Avatar, and What’s His Name who runs “Spirit and Flesh.”
Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be one a historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of the SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists.
Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation. (179-180)
Duke’s attitude towards the “pressure” (F&L, 66) which is now inflicted upon
him is to look after himself in order to survive “this doomstruck era of Nixon. We
are all wired into a survival trip now” (F&L, 179). He gazes in awe at the young
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generation of the Seventies who are oblivious of the promises and the disappointments of the elapsed era, attending a university which might never see student protests or riots:
... and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonymity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas ... no tension on these faces; I stopped at a red light and got lost, for a moment, in a sunburst of flesh in the cross-walk: fine sinewy thighs, pink mini-skirts, ripe young nipples, sleeveless blouses, long sweeps of blonde hair, pink lips and blue eyes - all the hallmarks of a dangerously innocent culture. (F&L, 172)
9.4 The District Attorneys’ Conference
The attendance of Duke and Gonzo of the District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs during the second part of the novel shows how large the gap between the older Middle Class generation and the counterculture/youth generation by the end of the Sixties was, how little understanding and communication existed and how different their values were. The speakers of the hi-fi system in the conference ballroom are just one indication to what extent the District Attorneys are out of touch with the reality, as Duke immediately compares it to the sound system of a rock festival he had attended a year earlier: “Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg” (F&L, 138). The anachronistic setting shows the degree of ignorance which the authorities of the United States have, and Duke concludes: “It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehistoric gathering” (F&L, 138). With a communication gap of this size, misunderstandings between the generations are bound to happen. And as these misunderstandings might criminalize a whole generation because of smoking “cockroaches” (F&L, 138), the horror and the dismay of Duke and Dr. Gonzo are quite understandable. “Here was the cop-cream from Middle America … and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers!” (F&L, 140).
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Duke and his attorney stand alone with expressing their criticism and mockery; additionally Dr. Gonzo is dressed better, and probably his made-up name-tag (expert in Criminal Drug Analysis) is far more fitting then those of the so-called experts. The DAs seem to have gathered at this conference for the sole purpose of enjoying themselves on state costs in Las Vegas: “[…] it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to Learn anything and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any Teaching. [...] These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni” (F&L, 143).
The District Attorneys believe in the downfall of the moral values in America - in fact, they believe anything they hear without scrutinizing which shows just how far the authorities of America are from grasping reality and from what is really happening in this country; they are completely clueless: “all I learned was that the National District Attorneys’ Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they have only recently learned to call “the Drug Culture” in this foul year of our Lord, 1971” (F&L, 201).
9.5 Standing on the Main Nerve of the American Dream
In the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Duke and Dr. Gonzo manage to find the American Dream - actually they find two versions of the American Dream. The first, one might argue, is the Dream of the counterculture of the Sixties. Consequently, it is not in the best state. Said to be right on Paradise Road, it is described as
the old Psychiatrist’s Club, but the only people who hang out there is a
bunch of pushers, peddlers, uppers and downers, and all that stuff. […] it’s
a mental joint […] Twenty-four-hour-a-day violence […] all painted black
and real weird looking (F&L, 165-167)
When Duke and his attorney finally get there they find - “a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds. The owner of the gas station across the road said the place had ‘burned down about three years ago’” (F&L, 168).
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The second version of the American Dream represents the Las Vegas
version of success which gives Dr. Gonzo - that “refugee from the Love
Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure” (F&L, 66)
- the “fear” (F&L, 48): it is the Circus-Circus casino, “the Sixth Reich” (F&L,
46). When are you taking off?” Bruce asked.
‘As soon as possible,” I said. ‘No point hanging around this town any longer. I have all I need. Anything else would only confuse me.” He seemed surprised. ‘You found the American Dream?” he said. ‘In this town?”
I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now,” I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? He always wanted to run away and join the circus when he was a kid?” Bruce ordered two more beers. He looked over to the casino for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too.’ He nodded. ‘You’re right - he’s the model.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s pure Horatio Alger, all the way down to his attitude. I tried to have a talk with him, but some heavy-sounding dyke who claimed to be his Executive Secretary told me to fuck off. She said he hates the press worse than anything else in America.’ ‘Him and Spiro Agnew,’ Bruce muttered (F&L, 191).
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10. Conclusion
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream is a classic of American literature, addressing a topic that has influenced and affected American authors not only since but even before the discovery of this new continent in the West. Hunter S. Thompson’s approach was as unique as it was true; he wrote with a great sense of humor and never lost the focus on his subject - the downfall of the American Dream in the Sixties society. Yet at the same time, he was as deeply rooted in the history of the literary traditions, political events and the cultural diversity of his country. This thesis wanted to show these aspects of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “His exaggerated style may defy easy categorization, but his career-long autopsy on the death of the American Dream places him among the twentieth century’s most iconoclastic writers. Outsized truths are Thompson's stock-in-trade, and the comic savagery of his best work will continue to electrify readers for generations to come.” (Douglas Brinkley)
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• Feltskog, E. N. 1995. “The Range of Vision: Landscape and the Far West, 1803 to 1850.” In: George F. Thompson (ed.). Landscape in America. Austin: University of Texas Press. 75-92.
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Ein filmischer Erzählstil zwischen Do...
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