Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I’ve seen (through the movie adaptations) and heard so much about Hunter S. Thompson, but have not up to this point read him. Yes, this was everything I’ve been told it would be — hallucinogenic, vulgar, deranged, incredibly political incorrect (to say the least) ect. But I also totally get it — why people love his writing. In his own way, it is almost as if this stream of altered conciseness is the necessary language to explaining a deep underlying truth about America. This is a quality that reminds me in some ways of the great comedic news and politics shows — in absurdity you are able to most directly communicate truth. Doing otherwise is to almost euphemize the actual state of reality that surrounds us.

You finish this book, and what stays with you is a deeply profound critique of American society, and how what makes it great is also what degrades it.

We are currently experiencing a reckoning about the very same issues — social, sexual, military, environmental, and so much more — that this book is in many ways about. It is about how these critical problems in American society were continuing to foment deeper and deeper during the 1970s, and while many were focused on addressing them, there was an even stronger pull towards escaping them via industry, bureaucracy, individualism, and austerity.

There is perhaps one way to look at this today with a bit of silver lining; we at least now (mostly) agree that these problems actually exist. Whereas past eras ignored our crises, consciously or subconsciously, and it took writing like this to fight for exposure, we now are in the phase in which we have widespread discourse on them. That discourse is of course muddied with far more noise than signal, manipulated and toxic. But it does exist — I hope that it can be built upon.