It’s ten years to the day since Hunter S Thompson obliterated himself in the most American way, with a shotgun to the head.
Whenever I reread his books, I’m struck by how he was so much more than the crazed self-destructive hedonist of myth. He was constantly trying to understand his world, and above all to make sense of America. Even
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
is subtitled
A savage journey to the heart of the American Dream
. It’s a topic he keeps coming round to, especially in his diary of the ’72 presidential campaign which re-elected Nixon.
Above all, there’s a constant sense of dashed optimism, from someone who had seen the birth of a culture he believed in, then watched it be destroyed in infacy by the counter-revolution of a heartless mainstream. Here’s one of many passages where he laments that death:
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 here 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. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda….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 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.