“Journalism is not a profession or a trade. “Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer?” he rages. Towards the end, the narrator spells out his disillusionment. Even the sensational is heart-sinkingly superficial. He reads about the police attacking anti-war demonstrators, torture by the armed forces, mass murder and drug deaths he watches “Pentagon generals babbling insane lies” on television.Įvery depredation is reported without context, every suggestion of responsibility rebuffed by officials with a mantra of “No comment”. In his most paranoid and introspective moments, the narrator of “Fear and Loathing” turns to news stories so grim that they render his own sins “pale and meaningless” in comparison. You can’t be objective about Nixon,” Thompson once told the Atlantic. “Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. At the narcotics conference, a disturbance in the crowd is presumed to be “a racial conflict of some kind, something that couldn’t be helped”.īesides race, the novel’s main preoccupation is the failure of journalism in an era when the president openly loathed the press. “You Samoans are all the same…You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture,” he opines, before telling a terrified hitchhiker they pick up in the desert that “in spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me”. But, at a time when Thompson was reporting on Mexican-American activism-and what he deemed an attempted cover-up of Salazar’s murder-the narrator repeatedly draws attention to Dr Gonzo’s race. To protect the identity of Acosta (who was to disappear in Mexico in 1974), he is characterised as a 300-pound Samoan. Nixon is long gone but in the bumpy wake of Donald Trump’s presidency-a period of government-led anti-immigrant and anti-media sentiment, Black Lives Matter protests triggered by police brutality, white-supremacist riots and the shadow of impeachment-Thompson’s “gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country” feels unsettlingly contemporary. Half a century on, Thompson’s themes of capitalism and greed, racial tension and the inadequacies of traditional journalism still resonate. Illustrations by Ralph Steadman, a British artist, depict them as twisted and deformed, more animal than human. Most of the cameos are as repellent as the narrator-cruel, ignorant, greedy, prejudiced and occasionally violent. The counterculture of the 1960s is in its death throes with Richard Nixon in the White House, America is sliding towards something darker and meaner. Thompson uses Vegas, a city “so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognised”, as a symbol of a country in the midst of political and ideological change. Its appeal rests less on the depraved antics of the main characters than on their encounters with other people, and its bleakly humorous dissection of the American psyche. But it subsequently achieved cult status, boosted by a film adaptation in 1998. Reviews were mixed when the novel appeared as a single volume in 1972 (“more hype than book”, sniffed the New Republic). Grasping that the many cops in attendance don’t have a clue what they are talking about, they again abandon their assignment and spend a few days in the grip of “amphetamine psychosis”, trawling late-night diners and taco stands in search of the American dream, “burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help”.
They flee the city before the damage is discovered, but return almost immediately to cover the National District Attorneys’ Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The duo attend the Mint 400 but soon embark on a two-day bender amid the glitzy decadence of Vegas casinos, destroying their hotel room and running up a huge bill they have no intention of paying. On the surface, the novel is about the consumption of this arsenal of mind-altering substances and the visions and paranoia, vomiting and violence that ensue.