Hello! Today's book is Hunter S Thompson's famous--or maybe not so famous--book. It's a warped version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Actually, in one of the videos or excerpts or somethings we saw or read in Robby D's class actually asked, basically, "Where (or what) would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas be without Kerouac's On the Road?" What I mean by saying it's a warped version of Kerouac's most famous book (actually and for sure famous) is that like Kerouac, Thompson is looking for "it", or, the American Dream, which I think is fair to say could be "it", or a portion of "it". (And now I have a sudden urge to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test... Hm. Strange.) But yeah, I think it's a fair query, and a fair judgment.
So--Thompson (excuse me, Raoul Duke) and his attorney have been sent to cover a story out in Las Vegas. They've stuffed their rented car with... Um. Well... "We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls" (4). So... Yeah. Kerouac just stuck to pot. What I should mention is--well, what I feel obliged to mention is that Thompson doesn't out rightly mention Kerouac anywhere, or not at all that I noticed, but he talks a lot about Horatio Alger. Horatio Alger was a fictional character who was your basic "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" fellow. I've never heard of anyone still 0reading the books he's featured in, and they're not required reading anymore, but you've probably read a description of someone that calls them a Horatio Alger. So that's kind of who they're trying to be--kind of. I think there's a difference between Horatio Alger representing the American dream and Kerouac. Alger was trying to make something of himself and be successful (so I'm led to believe), while Kerouac is just trying to be--living without worries, doing whatever he wants, not being trapped in one state or another--et cetera. (Of course, if Horatio Alger does make something of himself he wouldn't have worries and would have the money to do what he wanted... But it's obviously different.)
Anyways--the book opens with a quote by a fellow named Samuel Johnson. The quote is "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being human". This is the Samuel Johnson is this guy, apparently. Although that is true of the book--the men are ruining themselves with drugs and constantly high and stoned and everything else--but they've fallen into a different kind of pain (or something) entirely.
"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars" (18). Thompson's reasoning for this excursion in the "red shark".
Most of these quotes are here because they were definitely on the sheet Robby D gave us. Here we go: "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... It seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time--and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened" (67).
"There was madness in any direction, at any hour... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastical 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 a high and beautiful wave..." (68). I believe this is where the quote on Robby D's paper ended. The section, however, ends with this: "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" (68). Obviously the hippies didn't work out. There's a better quote some page later: "But what is sane? Especially here in 'our own country'--in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. 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: the desperate assumption that somebody--or at least some force--is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel" (179). This too was on Robby D's sheet, and I think that it's interesting, implying that acid heads were desperately looking and hoping for God--Kesey's band insisted they were all anti-god, didn't need Him or any, but they worshiped Kesey fanatically--religiously.
The only tape they have is a Rolling Stones tape which has the song "Sympathy For the Devil" on it. While listening to it: "Sympathy? Not for me. No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails-eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity" (72).
"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind" (89).
Thompson and his attorney end up at a drug conference. This is filled with people who couldn't tell you the difference between a joint and a tab of LSD. Joints are sometimes known as roaches, and a man presenting says it's because joints look like cockroaches. Any idiot who has seen a movie, read a comic book or can use Google images can see this is not the case. Wikipedia's theory is that the name comes from "joined", as in "joined rooms"--opium dens. There's that mystery solved. Anyways, Thompson goes onto further explain how idiotic and uninformed these people are, and that he can just see people like Timothy Leary making up these BS lines and feeding them to these unwitting people. Although this sort of behaviour is natural for in groups when speaking to out groups, undoubtedly those gags caused troubles and misunderstandings that hurt the hippie/LSD/et cetera movement incredibly. My point then, is just the fact that the disciples of acid and other drugs and such did play with people in this way, and in bigger ways, and basically screwed themselves.
Thompson and his attorney, much later, end up in a little truck stop diner, and the two, possibly strung out and possibly not, explain to the waitress and cook that they're looking for the American Dream. The two of them--the waitress kind of an airhead and the cook kind of a grizzled older fellow--try to figure it out... The waitress asks the cook where it is, thinking it's a physical place. He responds by asking what is that, and then says he thinks that it's the "old Psychiatrist's Club" (165). The club is on the street/road/whatever Paradise... All that is left of the building--the American Dream--is a scorched base in an uncared-for vacant lot that's weed-choked. "The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had 'burned down about three years ago'" (168). In the introduction to this particular chapter it says that Thompson refused to read over this chapter or even discuss this. I would bet that Thompson wrote that himself and it wasn't actually an editor writing. The metaphor is so obvious I don't even feel like calling it a metaphor is quite right. First of all, the cook, old and grizzled, is stuck in a dead-end job, and probably has been since he was the waitress's age--he doesn't know what the American Dream is. He can only guess about what it might be. The building is on paradise. To achieve the American dream would, imaginably, put one in a heaven or paradise of sorts. And the building has been burnt down. Even its foundation is cracked and ruined and dirty. The lot on Paradise is unattended to and ugly and filthy itself. It burned down about three years ago--if you will recall, Thompson said that less than five years ago the hippies and acid generation ruined themselves. That may not be exactly what he's referring to, but it seems to coincide... Either way, it's saying that the American Dream has been almost completely obliterated with barely even the memory of what it was still remaining.
"What sells, today, is whatever F---s You Up--whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia. The Miltown man has returned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining... and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed" (202).
"Uppers are no longer stylish... It is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon" (202).
The book ends without Thompson finding the dream. He boards a plane back to Denver and snorts some amyl, then shambles into the bar. The very last sentence is, "I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident" (204). Presumably, he will start on the same path all over again.
And, not to be overlooked--my favourite lines in the book. The attorney will often start demands or requests or even just statements as "As your attorney, I advise..." My favourite? "'As your attorney, I advise you to tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline'" (119).
MLA Citation Information: Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Vintage Books: New York, 1998.
I'm tempted to put this in the classics shelf just because it's such a nutty bastardization of On the Road and like books. We'll see tomorrow, I guess. Despite its insanity and because its subject is likely to get it written off as--um--just some junky work or something, you can tell Hunter S Thompson is a very bright fellow. I'd recommend it.
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