Fear and loathing in America
What Hunter S. Thompson got right about fascism
The body arrived still warm, and the coroner got to work right away with the scalpels and bone saws and all the other sharp, nasty things at his disposal.
The autopsy of the 2016 presidential election has been a gory affair with blood splattering an entire nation of witnesses. The autopsy continues to this very day in books, investigative pieces and opinion columns.
Paging through the coroner’s detailed findings we see a small subsection stodgily titled Predictive Literature. Among those titles of American fiction pointed to as unheeded signposts that correctly predicted the election of one Donald J. Trump were Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” George Orwell’s “1984” and Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.”
Conspicuously absent was the work of the lunatic sage of Woody Creek, Colo. Hunter S. Thompson is most often remembered as the author of the dark fantasia “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a blackly comic semifictional search for the American dream. That book is too often shrugged off as simply a drug book. Yes, the protagonists ingest a staggering amount of illicit substances, but it, like most of Mr. Thompson’s best writing, is a hybrid of immersive journalism and political satire.
Timothy Denevi’s “Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism” seeks to pull Mr. Thompson, who took his own life in 2005, and his work into our current political moment.
The author writes that it is “an attempt to reevaluate Thompson’s role as a political writer — as a literary journalist in the essayistic tradition whose activism remains underappreciated.”
Mr. Denevi’s book is meticulously researched and includes nearly 100 pages of detailed endnotes. He mentions early on that he “attended the 2016 political conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia” as well as reported on election night, Mr. Trump’s inauguration, and several of the protests in Washington, D.C. This is the lens he uses to look at Hunter S. Thompson.
If Mr. Denevi had done nothing else here but prove that Mr. Thompson’s writing during his peak years (the author parts with his subject in 1973) is evergreen and that his insights into late ‘60s/early ‘70s America continue to ring true then that would certainly merit this book’s existence. Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72” is one of the finest books on American politics and the electoral process that I’ve ever read. But what Mr. Denevi’s book really does is drop the reader into a wholly disorienting hall of mirrors.
Writing about the final days as president of his nemesis Richard Nixon, Mr. Thompson observed, “The slow-rising central horror of ‘Watergate’ is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it.”
It’s worth noting these thoughts, too, reflecting on the spirited invective he slung at the former president, from Hunter Thompson’s obituary of Mr. Nixon, “Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the builtin blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place …. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.”
Mr. Denevi’s Thompson comes across as a patriot and a family man in this fine book. He’s a man that not only reported on the political process but also who ran for the position of sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., in 1970. (There’s an excellent BBC film available on YouTube that documents his run for office.) Mr. Thompson had yet to become the cartoon character of himself, the Uncle Duke of the “Doonesbury” comic strip.
It’s this less outsized Hunter Thompson that reflects near the end of the 1972 presidential campaign, “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable .... ”
While here in 2019, a year where everything old is new again, the endless autopsy continues.