There are two times in my life when I felt Hunter S Thompson, the infamous gonzo journalist who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, had missed out on something big. The first was in 2000 when my then boss and Time Magazine editor Walter Isaacson invited Thompson (who had just contributed a cover story) to join us on a reporting trip to Burning Man.
Thompson had never been, and was curious -- but balked at the last minute when he learned the event wouldn't let him bring any of his precious guns. He died 5 years later. I often wonder what the ultimate freak writer would have made of the ultimate freak festival.
The second regret is one I've held for the past two years. I really, really wish Thompson had been around to see -- and to help us see -- the Trump presidency. After all, he was the writer who most clearly understood what had happened the last time the presidency fell into authoritarian hands.
His love of guns aside -- because democracy was more important to him -- it's not hard to see HST providing a major boost to the Resistance had he lived long enough.
Despite the word 'Trump' not appearing once, it is somehow present on every page
That became clear on reading Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic 10-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, which published last week -- and is one of the most important books of this election season. Despite the word "Trump" not appearing in it once, it is somehow present on every page.
Author Timothy Denevi's stated goal is to reclaim Thompson from the drug-fueled caricature of him, best represented by Johnny Depp in the movie version of Fear and Loathing and by Uncle Duke in the long-running comic strip Doonesbury.
(He is only partly successful in this goal, as Thompson starts the book getting hooked on Dexedrine thanks to a doctor, and ends it getting hooked on cocaine thanks to an editor. Still, the point stands.)
Instead, Denevi wants us to get to know the serious writer. The one who saw atavistic authoritarianism deep inside the modern GOP on the day it lurched into being. The one who spent the next decade trying to sound the alarm with half-funny, half-fictional, all searingly true prose.
The extreme conservative wing of the GOP first made itself known at the 1964 Republican convention, and Thompson was there in the pit of the Cow Palace in San Francisco for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech. This was where the party base's champion proudly declared his "extremism."
At that word, the sea of white male delegates around Thompson started screaming and literally pounding their bodies against chairs.
The young reporter was terrified, and at the same time perversely fascinated by this primitive display. What was it in the soul of America that could bring forth this sea of unthinking support for Goldwater, a man who wanted to threaten Soviets with nukes while rolling back Civil Rights reforms at home?
"I was thinking, 'God damn you Nazi bastards, I really hope you win it,'" Thompson wrote to a friend, "because letting your kind of human garbage flood the system is about the only way to really clean it out."
He would soon learn to be careful what he wished for (kind of like Susan Sarandon in 2016). Although Goldwater didn't win, his followers laid the groundwork for the modern GOP. Besides, the thing he had glimpsed, that savage chunk of the American heart, turned out to be everywhere in the 1960s.
Thompson saw it again when he wrote the book that made him a star, Hell's Angels -- the same sense of aggrieved and violent victimhood, the rage that was soon to be unleashed against Vietnam war protestors, was present in the 1960s blue-collar bike gang.
"Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is," Thompson wrote. "They have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill."
These days, they'd be on Reddit.
He saw this same dark spirit in the old South when he wrote his groundbreaking gonzo article, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." He saw it in the casinos of Las Vegas that preyed on suckers, which was his ultimate metaphor for the future of the American Dream.
He saw it in the police state that Chicago became in 1968 for the Democratic Convention, where Thompson was clubbed by cops in riot gear simply for observing their beating of protesters. And of course, he saw it in Richard Nixon, the opportunist who had introduced Goldwater that day in 1964, until Nixon finally crashed and burned with Watergate exactly 10 years later.
Fight from the inside
Nixon's election in 1968 radicalized Thompson, but his immediate instinct was to work within the electoral system. Like many Resistance members 50 years later he decided to run for office himself, almost unseating the reactionary sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, partly in the hopes of stopping Aspen from becoming the elite resort it now is.
Thompson also started reporting on stories like the Chicano Civil Rights movement in Los Angeles. The only reason Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas exists? Thompson needed a place he could talk off the record with Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta without fear of being bugged by the LAPD (which literally had a "conspiracy division" to infiltrate the movement). Where better than a long drive to Vegas with the top down?
On a second trip to the city, which Thompson blended into the first in the book, the pair charged straight into the savage heart of American authoritarianism by attending a police convention while fueled by booze and pills.
(Thompson was too paranoid to smoke the giant suitcase of weed Acosta abandoned when he left, fearing Nevada's repressive drug laws; maybe that's a third regret, that he didn't live to see a weed-friendly Vegas.)
Thompson vs. Trump
HST would have been horrified to see what happened in 2016. The political journalist who opposed Nixon and everything he stood for with every fiber of his being would not have taken kindly to a GOP president who was even more venal, who lied more frequently, who actually looked more like his Ralph Steadman caricature than even jowly old Tricky Dick.
But goddammit if Thompson wouldn't have been the ideal journalist for this moment. There are almost none whose writings have aged this well. (Certainly not Bob Woodward, the Watergate reporter who got so played by the perpetrators of Stupid Watergate that he thought backing the murderous Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia was a good idea.)
HST would have seen through every ounce of Trump's bullshit in a nanosecond, and told us why. He wouldn't have let that guff about voters with "economic anxiety" stand. His columns would have been more essential than any iteration of the Daily Show.
Having seen the Nixonian nightmare earlier than anyone, knowing the playbook better than anyone, Thompson could have been the de facto leader of the Resistance. Perhaps, given his Aspen campaign experience and his frequent musings about running for Senate, we'd be electing this ultimate iconoclast to federal office today.
Or maybe not. Maybe Thompson would be too focused on chronicling the twists and turns these supremely strange times ("when the going gets weird," he famously wrote, "the weird turn pro" -- which is exactly why I thought he'd love Burning Man).
But here's what is certain: at the very least, as the author of a book on the 1992 election that described politics in its title as Better Than Sex, Thompson would tell us to get off our asses and vote.
"I believe he would be voicing with a kind of clarion call not just that our system is fragile but that it’s up to us to protect it and contribute in a manner that protects and upholds Jeffersonian democracy," his son Juan Thompson told Rolling Stone last year.
For those who know how to read his work, HST still is voicing that clarion call.
The question is: are we listening?
Topics Books Donald Trump Politics
