Fear and Loathing

...they are, instead, heinous bloodsuckers and rabid beasts (Nixon, he writes, %peaks for the werewolf in us...

...He strives to convince the reader of how much more daring, how much more hip, and how much more on top of things he can be, than the rest of those dismal rubes out there onthe hustings...

...Some of the factors behind present antibusiness attitudes are: a) Economic Illiteracy: Today's high school graduates know next to nothing about the system on which their whole economic future depends...

...As a result, we are continually told less about the campaign itself than about Thompson's ostensibly hilarious antics...

...Of these, only two were willing to say they believed in free enterprise and would assist in designing the course...

...Throughout Fear and Loathing runs the feverish notion, fostered b y Thompson's overblown prose (reminiscent, really, of Howard Cosell) of the terrible significance of the shallow maneuverings going on about him, in caucus rooms and hotel suites...

...Besides being repetitious and silly, the author's frequent phantasms--such as the lbogaine episode--destroy whatever faith the reader may once have had in Thompson...

...Or, in a similar vein: '~Rosenbaurn stared at me...

...And he expresses it in this overwrought string of words which do not, after so long, describe much of anything unless it be the author's own vision of "madness and filigree...

...The Democrats, whose otherwise healthful waters have been fouled with the likes of Humphrey, Jackson, and Muskie, are doomed to self-destruct...

...Sobe it...

...There is simply no way of telling what one can and cannot believe and as a result Thompsen's book can at best only amuse, however mildly, and never truly entertain...

...And finally, on the possibility of a Kennedy-Lindsay floor fight: '~f nothing else, it would turn the Democratic National Convention in Miami this July into something like a week-long orgy of sex, violence and treachery in the Bronx Zoo...

...Since virtually no material was available on this subject, he asked forty economics professors in the three state universities for their help...

...Or this: "Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine...

...Incidentally, the New York Times scored a 65 percent profit recovery--two-fifths more than the oil firms...

...Fear and Loathing A DURING THE DISMAL months of our last national hustings, Hunter S. Thompson dispatched to Rolling Stone magazine a series of columns which have since been put between the covers of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, a book of some 500 pages which, not surprisingly, has attracted the attention of some of our more culturally destitute literati...

...Or are deeper reasons involved...

...With all the special emphasis given to education in recent years, we seem to have raised the level of economic illiteracy...

...We can only solve our social problems by doing away with capitalism and the institutions that support it...

...Convinced that these activities affect the very planets in their orbits, he propagates the idea that at any given moment the whole show will go up in smoke...

...A one-time candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, on the 'Treak Power" ticket who has become an inspiration to New Left journalists already disenchanted with the staidness of Tom Wolfe, he embodies all the virtues to which the above-mentioned aspire...

...Since the Arabs shut off the oil last October and nearly quadrupled the world price, the political demagogues have jumped on the bandwagon as an easy way to harvest votes from public dismay over higher oil and gasoline prices...

...I say not surprisingly because Thompson's book is a natural to fetch the likes of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., J. Anthony Lucas, Nicholas yon Hoffman, Seymour Krim, Saturday Rev/ew, and the Nation-all of whom have heaped uncalled-for praise upon its undeserving head...

...Fear and Loathings main fault stems from its author's serious intellectual deficiencies: plagued by a juvenile self-consciousness, Thompson over and over calls to mind the image of a little boy making a pint-sized muscle or boasting, see-whatI-got-away-with: '~It was dark when we took of[ from Long Beach...

...Capitalism stinks...

...His first book, Hell's Angels: A Savage and Terrible Saga (1967), was a first-hand account of riding with and getting "stomped" by motorcycle morons...

...Recently, for eT~mple, the superintendent of education in a western state wanted to institute a mandatory course in capitalism for the high school system...

...What more could one ask...

...The Republicans are out to foist gangs of organi~ 1 murderers on the nation and the work...

...However humorous these words may be (to some), they are not words to describe our colorless American politicoes nor t h , dingy if quasi-respectable world in which they move...

...Of a Wallace speech, he writes: '~rhe air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five minutes into his spiel, I had a sense that the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us...

...This distrust is not merely the product of Watergate...

...d) Industry's Achievements Taken for Granted," Whatever faults their managements may share with the rest of humanity, the oil companies d/d take the risks, invest the capital, and provide the energy at bargain prices which helped enable the 28 The Alternative June-September 1974...

...Each essay will be written by a businessman unless otherwise stated THE UNITED STAZ~ZS has provided greater abundance and longer schooling for more of its people than any other society in history...

...Is it simply because Americans are becoming more cynical as their society comes of age...

...This is precisely the danger of throwing words together, as Thompson does, out of all proportion to their weight...

...It turned out to be a theatrical movie made for television...

...2) The Seeds of Public Distrust: Why does the public hold its institutions in such low esteem...

...Most texts are less biased, but only a few give a balanced view of real-life economic forces and problems...

...The senators now ~investigating" the energy crisis are blaming the oil companies for the price boosts...

...he describes what followed: '~ went deep into the foulest back-waters of my vocabulary for that trip, working myself into a flat-out hate-frenzy for five or six minutes and was drawing smiles of approval from some demonstrators...

...It has been growing since the early 1960s...

...After shouting at the NBC booth during the Republican convention: "You evil scumsucker...

...When he succeeds at being shocking and outrageous, his glee knows no bounds...

...the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding sting-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close...

...To Thompson, they are not mere buffoons, silly and fourth-rate fellows eager to stake out spots at the public trough...

...Hunter S. Thompson Straight Arrow $7.95 author's disordered mind was like at the t/me, and little more...

...Yet continuously we hear public leaders--in government, education, labor, and the press--making or supporting foolish economic proposals that, if adopted, would cause untold damage and disruption...

...c) Incessant Demagoguery: A favorite tactic has always been to charge that big corporations make their profits out of tax loopholes or by bilking their employees and customers...

...We are continuing this series now by publishing essays discussing the American condition from the perspective of individual businessmen...

...Yet the vast majority of its own citizens are back in the Dark Ages as far as understanding how their economic system works...

...You limp-wristed Nazi moron...

...The blasts, played up in the media, are leveled for their emotional appeal and seldom contain any debate on the substantive issues involved...

...With all the frill subjects offered, few secondary schools in the country provide any instruction at all in this important area...

...At the college level, what passes for instruction about our system is often prejudicial...

...In closing I summon Aristophanes to dispatch Thompson and his book...

...And with its happy ending and invincible charactem, the movie loses its humanity and becomes a big confidence game of its own...

...His third, the book before us, chronicles thirteen months of 'Ynadness" on the scent of the candidates, during which our hero gives his press card to a "gin-soaked crazy" who tugs at Muskie's legs during speeches from '~V~ictory Special," interviews McGovern as the two stand, preoccupied, at urinals, and reveals Muskie's "addiction" to Ibogaine, an exotic Brazilian drug...

...Instead it is just a mockery of human tragedy, people pretending to be pretending to have human failings and weaknesses...

...b) Lack of Perspective: Journalists have been placing far more emphasis on their zeal for reform than on informing the public...

...This false bravado is the key to Thompson's literary style as well...

...They lose their meaning, and after wading through 500 pages of such abused and garbled verbiage, the reader no longer entertains any suspicions that the writher might, after all, have something to say and not merely a decorative way of disguising the fact that he does not...

...The nation is in a period of great selfdoubt...

...As a result, when Thompson casts The Alternative June-September 1974 27 his eye upon a gaggle of party hacks entrenched in tawdry hoo-ha over the delivery of votes or the seating of delegations, he sees the War of the Worlds...

...This kind of writing is bad enough here, I grant you, but translated into the lackluster world of modern electoral politics, it is more often ludicrous than, as Thompson would have it, trenchant...

...Nor do the basic principles change from one generation to the next...

...The two great parties are not simply enormous and cumbersome contraptions whose sole function is to wrench jobs from one another and to maintain jobs wrenched...

...I will say this about his diction, it's ravine-like, hairy, mad-bul]-like, crustacean, battering, craggy, shattering--and it makes no sense...

...they are instruments of the Devil...

...It had me convinced that it was the genuine article--a good movie...

...It didn't even mention that oil profits were poor in 1972 or that other depressed cyclical industries had bigger 1973 increases...

...For example, a New York Times editorial cited the nearly 50 percent gain in oil company earnings during last year's first nine months as supporting the 'hq~cl" for subjecting them to an excess profits tax...

...Its long-range interests would be best served if the public understood that our economic system a) is the fairest as well as the most fruitful in the world, b) belongs net to the chosen few but to everyone, c) can adapt to change, and d) preserves and promotes the almost limitless freedom of choice in daily living which has been denied to most other peoples...

...Alan Crawford Lindley H. Clark Jr., the economic news editor of the Wall Street Journal, initiated this column with four essays discussing the practice of business in America~ The series attempted to bring to our readers' attention some of the problems inherent in doing business in America today...

...What first appears to be striking and graphic prose, full of much verve and bubble, at second glance looks very much like the exaggerated and melodramatic prosifying that high school instructors of journalism tell their budding sportswriters not to compose...

...The interviewers also found that most Americans lack confidence in the leadership of nearly every major sphere of activity...

...I was standing in the cockpit with a joint in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other . . . . " Unable to judge what is and what is not important, he continually turns back to himself, and so opts for the latter...

...There was shock and repugnance in his eyes--as if he had just recognized me as lineal descendent of Judas Iscariot...

...Which does not, I might add, take into consideration whether Thompson's brain was fried before or after he took pen in hand to give us this silly and worthless book...

...His second, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972), recalls dope-induced capers at a police convention on narcotics and dangerous drugs...

...For the first time since the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, a majority of Americans--53 percent--answered in the ~mrmative...

...To illustrate, a toxtbeok used in an eastern university opens by saying...

...Thompson's aren't-I-outrageous description of himself as a %veird-looking 35-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned off from overindulgence," betrays this masturbatory delight in self that, more than anything else, seems to be the true theme of Fear and Loathing...

...The troubles with Fear and Loathing are many...

...So it's impossible for most people to separate the wheat from the chaff...

...Its industrial way of life has been widely envied and copied throughout the world...

...This question was asked in a recent nationwide poll conducted by Louis Harris and Associates...

...I t is net the human tragedy we had been led to believe...

...Conceived as a "high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boris down to or how it fits into history," Fear and Loathing can be more accurately described as a solipsistic picture of what the On the Campa/gn Tra//'72 by Dr...

...On top of which, Thompson is unashamedly partisan (Nixon, he writes, 'Yepresents the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise"), and he writes very badly...

...He s e e s . . . Apocalypse...

...At that point, The Sting shows us that what we took to be hunmns were just actors after all...

...They were dutifully chanting the slogans that had been assigned to them in the Ready Room--but I was really into it, and I could see that my zeal really impressed them...

...Childishly disrespectful, boastfully ignorant of his subject ('tpolitical analysis never was my game anyway . . . . "), defiantly egregious, he has successfully applied to the so-called New Journalism all the tenets of the Trousered Ape school of modern fiction...

...He jerked the crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires...

...Secondly too much apocalypse, laid end-to-end, when in reality great cracks are not appearing in the earth's surface and the moon has not collided with the sun, tends to destroy any journalist's credibility...

...The author's credentials are impressive indeed...

...The average person today hasn't the foggiest notion that there is a vital link between profits and jobs, and between profits, technology, and the standard of living...

...For years now, the prize of public opinion has been sought by one group , such as elected officials, charging another group with a serious lack of moral integrity...

...The ABCs of American capitalism aren't very hard to comprehend...

...Of the Super Bowl, for example, Thompsen writes: 'Tney came together on a hot afternoon in Los Angeles, howling and clawing at each other like wild beasts in h e a t . . . They were twenty-two men who were somehow more than men . . . They were giants, idols, titans...

...Their comments on business are nearly always devoid of perspective that would shed light on the subject...

...Furthermore, he adds, it is '~anguage to fry a man's brain...

...1) Is There Something Deeply Wrong in America...

...We wonder if any of them are aware that--thanks largely to the industrfs technological progress---the cost of gasoline has risen far less since 1957 than congressional salaries...