Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson and the Disintegrated American Dream

by Chris Barr

“We were somewhere around Barstow, when the drugs began to take hold.”

“We can’t stop here!  This is bat country!!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a Terry Gilliam film about the failure of the American Dream.  It features an eccentric journalist, Raoul Duke and his psychopathic attorney, Dr. Gonzo who travel to Las Vegas for a series of trippy psychedelic exploits.  Duke is assigned to cover a dirt bike race in the desert for a sports magazine but doesn’t really do anything with it, largely because the Vietnam War was blazing in Southeast Asia and the Civil Rights movement was still very much fighting to forge a path of equality, also he was stoned and drugged out of his mind to really pay attention to anything like dirt bikes racing in circles in a dust-filled desert.  Reporting on a sports event at that time in America likely just seemed inappropriate.  The film takes place in 1971 where politics and the American people were still very much out of alignment.  The roaring sixties was still winding down after its crash in 1968 and the achievement of the moon landing in 1969, splashing promise over the many fires of despair.

“We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.  Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

Duke and Dr. Gonzo drive in their rented red convertible shark along the sandy, scalding desert black top, speeding to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.  While there, they check into a hotel at The Mint and proceed to stiff, suck, inhale and drink every mind-altering, consciousness traversing drug known to civilized man.  They were essentially flagrant pulse-pounding drifters in time and space, floating along the Milky Way of the great cosmos, heading nowhere.  Meaning in this place had eluded them, drugs softened reality and in the mind, its weight pushed and pulled at them, creating a topsy-turvy of cellophane enlightenment coupled with existential meandering.  

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on a book, quite accurately and faithfully, by real life gonzo Journalist, the late Hunter S. Thompson.  He was a man that pushed outward toward the edge of existence, the edge that most of the living wouldn’t dare go, out of fear or spite; they see no use for it, the uninspired bastards.  Hunter saw the edge as something to push and poke at, something to die for if only to actually live because of.

Hunter S. Thompson was a rock n’ roll journalist and political impostor, but remained a creditable journalist where one should remain - on the outside.  That place out there where honesty and balance exists, that place that most journalist don’t dare travel.  Today his type of journalism is as dead as those sonar-guided flying rats are in Bat Country, sizzling off the side of the highway in the scorching California desert. 

Nowadays mostly all journalism is a complete sell-out, it’s a contact funnel for politicians and warmongering corporations to ‘connect’ with their servants.  These contemporary journalists are spin doctors for the oligarchy, they ultimately are a disgrace.  Woodward and Bernstein were actual journalists with integrity, as was Hunter S. Thompson, albeit an unconventional one, a man that wrote largely for Rolling Stone magazine but never sold-out to them.

The riots of the sixties were when the American Dream was truly clubbing itself to death, while ‘free love’ wasn’t stopping the bombs from dropping.  This uprising against oppression, against the Vietnam War and centrally, against the totalitarian control the government was enforcing over the people, was what defined that era in American history.  Hunter S. Thompson was in the tornado, waltzing with suicide; he was on the unpleasant edge that society was sleepwalking itself toward, an approaching cliff with no bottom in sight.  The malice of the Chicago Police department during the 1968 riots against the war protests, were a devastating blow for any hope that America might survive as a nation of equals, where race and gender would be words to describe groups instead of targets to discriminate.  Robert Kennedy had been murdered just a couple months prior and along with him, he took hope, which died with him on that kitchen floor, along with any promise for a unifying future for America.

“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 in the world, whatever it meant.  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 in fighting – on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of 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.”

The way out at this point, the only way to escape the menacing angst of the aftermath, of a failed revolution - was drugs.  The hippies smoked themselves toward a simulacrum of happiness, dropping acid and aimlessly dancing naked at outdoor concerts.  Nothing made sense, the body count in Vietnam was rising and actual reasons for American military involvement were lost on most.  What was happening to the world, why was everybody always fighting each other, carving their own names in the foreheads of their meaningless enemies?  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the ‘promise land’, he envisioned an America that discarded its inconsequential differences for a more equal prosperous future, he was greeted with horror by the power structure, who believed they were the privileged and in the end they killed him for that.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” 

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

What they didn’t quite know then but we know now was, it was all about business.  The people wanted peace, but the swine corporations and the government bastards know no peace, their prime directive does not lie in the well-being of the American people, their bottom line is grounded deeply in their power and control apparatuses.

Hunter S. Thompson was a patriot, he was a man that wanted his country to succeed but not by the barrel of a gun in the face of an unnecessary enemy.  He saw the potential in America being bloodied with petty differences and profiteering.  He was a man that believed in the American dream at one point in his early life; however later saw the tragedy of why a journalist like him even had to exist.  Was his early hopes of prosperity all lies, were they ‘lame fuck-arounds’ so business in America could prosper, above the very population of the country?  That is sheer madness, a result of losing every value and tenet that the country was founded on.

The slithering snake with skinny human legs and the nose and ears of a raging gorilla, overflowed the dam in Vietnam into Cambodia and Laos, both countries that were simply guilty due to proximity.  Richard Nixon saw the demonic under-skin of America, he saw what George W. Bush would later see, that America is scared to death of change and is insecure about identity, so killing thousands of people in foreign countries gave the citizens of America something disgusting to be proud of.  The sick reality is; it gave them something, and still does to this day, to call their own.  They are the superpower; genocide and destabilization be-damned.

“All those pathetically 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 the Light at the end of the tunnel.”

Las Vegas, Nevada is the nucleus of the death and commodification of the American dream.  It is Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’, It’s Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacrum’, it’s Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and it is Karl Marx’s ‘Superstructure’ with a million glittering lights.  This grossly atavistic city is decadent and in some cases inhumane because money is above all else.  It’s hyper-reality is compounded in one pulsating vein that is Las Vegas boulevard, a strip of billion dollar real estate that steals hopes and dreams by simulating hopes and dreams.  It is that fun version of hell on earth, that place you can truly lose yourself and the contents of your wallet along with it.  Prostitution, drugs, alcohol, gambling and no clocks in sight, it’s a dream away from the reality of the machine, that function that most must participate in, in order to buy into the possibility of escaping an expanding debt that is in tandem with the swelling universe itself, never ending.

The illusion that somehow one knows something that someone else doesn’t know is amplified in Las Vegas, people go there to gamble, hoping they will win above all others, they’re special and they are able to beat the almost algorithmic system of gambling.  That’s the true power of Las Vegas, and like Harry Houdini, it shows everything but tells you nothing, it makes you think that you’re winning, when all the while it’s breaking your bank.

The discombobulated savage and depraved reality is Las Vegas is a nightmare disguised as a dream; it’s a place where hearts go to die alone side fast-food wedding chapels.  In that regard, Las Vegas, through its simulacrum, can become real to those that hit the wall of desolation, those that see through the looking glass at its borders, but most fail at such an insight, most buy into its plastic walls that cover the doors and its sprawling pageants that hypnotize the mind, and the atmospheric aromas that tranquilize the soul.  Las Vegas speaks to the werewolf in us when the full moon comes too close, the savage man in a Hawaiian shirt and the 12 hour stink of alcohol on his breathe, peels the cheap paint away while he plays symbolic Russian Roulette with reality.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas entered the vampiric center of the fundamental problem in America and that was/is paralysis, the country froze as a result of disbelief, it never recovered from the reality of its own inferiority.  Like the Freudian narcissistic, egomaniac patient sprawled out on the Indian-rugged couch wondering why he’s the problem, when everyone around him keeps holding him back; America was never able to get over itself.  It’s a self-professed Empire with ringing bells and glitter from coast to coast, attempting to deify itself and angered at any nation that fails to see the illusion they worked so hard to build for themselves.  They are the psychopath that means to force their superiority complex onto the world.  Nations of the world will lay waste to the military power of the American Corporation Complex; they will be battered, beaten and left beyond all recognition.   

The film along with the book that inspired it, clamped down on the beating pulse of the on-going problem in America.  The film showed these two misguided men as representations of dissention against the new world order of McDonaldization, endless consumerism and globalization as we see it today.  The hippie flower movement failed before it even started with the Timothy Leary’s and the sit-in and sing-alongs.  That generation and this one have very little understanding of the enemy of freedom and opportunity.  The sad state today is that enemy knows us, in most cases, more than we know ourselves.  

They studied us like alien invaders, learning our customs, our strengths and weaknesses.  They’ve learnt about our emotional buttons, dreams and desires.  These alien invaders do not plan to assimilate us into their collective though, they plan to control us through pharmaceutical drugs, endless TV programming, color psychology, meaningless music and a slew of other forms of mind control.  These corporations and governments plan and have already succeeded in manufacturing a populace that embraces their enslavement, because they have been too dumbed-down, too distracted to see the chains anchoring them to the post.   There is this sadness within the oxygen permeating in the air and getting into people’s lungs, creating hallucinations that look dream-like but are in fact nightmares.

“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” 

- Robert Kennedy

Robert Kennedy was a speaker for the people and was shot to death in 1968, McGovern in 1972, won the Presidential Democratic Primary election, running on the platform that, if elected president, he had plans on pulling the plug on American military involvement in Vietnam and let the failed war spin down the drain.  Even Al Gore in 2000, represented hope for a new America, imagine if he had won the election; imagine how he would have handled the events of September 11, 2001.  One could certainly argue, had Gore not been cheated out of the election by Bush, 9/11 might not have even happened.  Political leeches like Nixon and Bush are necessary so the evil bankers and power mongers maintain the impaled claws they have dug in the backs of the world’s population.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, along with its drug use and iconoclastic bohemianism, is a profound statement against, maintaining, subservience, control and conformity.  But the real problem is; freedom has its cost, and most people who want, or think they want it, also need a structured society that is for the most part - safe, for them to run amok, or express their individuality.  Here we run into the problem of wanting our cake and eating it too.  

The failure of the sixties and levels of protests today have all parted ways in support for the very system they have fought so hard to crumble.  Maybe that’s realizing that the war between the working people and the aristocracy was already lost, or maybe, and certainly more prevalent today, maybe the people want their Big Mac’s and 500 channels.  Whether it was confabulation or most likely pluralistic ignorance, the people supported what they assumed everyone else supported and didn’t want to say anything otherwise for fear of ostracism.  This is one of the most important issues facing us today, we are afraid to speak out against a ‘norm’ in society because we don’t want to be left out of the group.  The resulting calamity is the treacherous fabricators of war can continue steamrolling over whomever they wish, for their own profit.  As a result of a disruption in their cognitive narrative, the general population of America retreat and seek the comfort of their predictable bubbles while the world destroys itself around them.  The unfortunate thing with this revolution is; truth does not cease to exist when we chose to ignore it.  Peace can never be if we begin by avoiding the reality of why we need it in the first place.  This was likely the forming dark cloud that often rained over the head of Hunter S. Thompson, a man that believed that anything that was worth doing, was worth doing right.

“Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander in a casino any time in the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla.”