Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The American Dream Fallacy
The American Dream Fallacy – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…
It’s one of the most memorable opening sentences of any modern novel. It is, of course, the opening line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter Stockton Thompson’s 1972 exploration into the American Dream, and one of his first forays into gonzo journalism[1]. A style of journalism where the reporter is the main protagonist, facts become pointless and truth becomes subjective. The subjective truth in Thompson’s novel is the promise of the '60s counterculture movement is dead and American society has accepted the façade of the American Dream. In the book, the counterculture is represented by drugs, lots of them. The city of Las Vegas represents the American Dream. A city devoid of soul, where winning and losing is the only thing that matters.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is comprised of two long-form articles Thompson published in Rolling Stone magazine about trips to Las Vegas he and his friend. Chicano activist and civil rights attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta[2] took in 1971. The first was ostensibly for a writing gig Thompson accepted covering the Mint 400, a popular offroad race put on by the Mint Hotel and Casino—the second to cover the National Conference of District Attorneys, where he attends various seminars, including one on dangerous drugs. In the book, Thompson does not cover these events in a traditional journalistic sense, he writes in the form of gonzo journalism where he becomes his alter ego Raoul Duke and Acosta becomes a 300-pound Samoan named Dr. Gonzo. For this reason, there is some debate about whether Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is journalism or fiction[3]. While Thompson contends the book is mostly accurate and portions of the book are even taken verbatim from Thompson's audio recordings of the events as they happened, it’s clear that Thompson is creating a heightened reality. It’s not intended to be completely fiction or non-fiction. It exists in a luminal space between the two. Thompson’s Duke is like Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego Kilgore Trout. A facsimile but not the same person and the style of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has more in common with Vonnegut or Charles Bukowski than any piece of traditional journalism. For these reasons, in my opinion, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a novel, based on real events but not journalism.
Thompson had some notoriety in 1971 but had not yet achieved the counterculture icon status that would draw throngs of high school stoners to his work (myself included). It’s easy to look past any deep meaning or true exploration into the depths of American society the book holds because the people who are drawn to it are the same people who watch Cheech and Chong movies. It’s well-written and ahead of its time but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas can feel more like a cartoon than a story about real events. Even though the story is about two real people and their real-life trips to Las Vegas. Thompson may have been exploring the American Dream but in the book, Duke and Dr. Gonzo are not searching for the American Dream in any conventional sense. It’s a rhetorical search. They’re intentionally searching for gold at the end of the rainbow or an oasis that turns out to be a mirage. Because the American Dream is just that, a dream. In one scene while trying to find, “Mexican-style tacos” they ask the girls working at the restaurant if they know where they can find the American Dream. The girls try to help but it’s clear they have no idea what Duke and Dr. Gonzo are truly asking them. The girls direct them towards a nightclub on the edge of town. When our protagonists seek out and find the club, they’re told that it’s been closed for years now. It’s an allegory that sums up Thompson’s take on the American Dream. Even if it did exist, somewhere, at some time, it doesn’t anymore. The book never actually defines what the American Dream is but as readers, we are assumed to know what they mean and why Las Vegas is the place to find it.
Las Vegas is the real-life deus ex machina for anyone pursuing the American Dream. It’s the shortcut of all shortcuts, one lucky roll of the dice, and your problems are solved. Paradoxically Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one of the only books or films about the city where there’s virtually no gambling. That is unless you count the gamble of possible arrest. Duke and Dr. Gonzo bring with them, “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls . . . Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. (pg. 4)”
One criticism of the book is that it lacks a story and there are no real stakes. Duke and Dr. Gonzo have no threat of arrest because Thompson and Acosta were never arrested. Traditional stories follow a basic structure. The character achieves their goals once they’ve changed for the better in some fundamental way. Marty McFly has to control his temper, Scrooge has to overcome his greed, and Neo has to overcome fear. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas though, contains no character growth and no real story. Just two drug-addled, narcissists, grifting, lying, and bullying their way through Las Vegas. Duke and Dr. Gonzo are not trying to find the American Dream, they are living the American Dream. Overconsumption, violence, materialism, life without consequences, baby. Let her rip. Gonzo says so in the book after having just collected a $300 advance for expenses from the magazine, “I tell you my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end. (pg. 11)” Once you’re on the roller coaster, you’re not getting off and one does not have to of taken acid or mescaline to understand this concept. Anyone who’s had one drink too many or one extra toke off a powerful joint understands this. As Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” That’s what Duke and Dr. Gonzo do. That’s what they understand as seasoned drug users and searchers of the American Dream. You can never have too much. Dr. Gonzo belts out the song, “One Toke Over the Line,” while piloting their big, red, American-made, Chevy convertible, (the Red Shark) from Barstow to Baker. This was not the fortitude Horatio Alger had in mind but it’s fortitude nonetheless. Fortitude is what it takes to find the American Dream, and “we are chock full of that, man”.
Perhaps the most beautiful piece of writing in the novel is at the end of chapter eight when Thompson describes what it was like to be in San Francisco during the mid-60s. Thompson writes, “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.” He goes on to end the chapter with even more gorgeous prose, “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.” It’s hard to overstate the turmoil in America during the 60s, nor the upheaval the 70s had in store. What Thompson describes is a generation that felt righteous in their pursuit of peace and love. The generation that would finally make a difference but has fallen short. Ironically that same generation is still in power today, in this foul year of our lord two-thousand and twenty-three. The hope of the peace and love generation is long gone and only the vapid, bourgeois, consumerism offered in a city like Las Vegas remains.
The counter-culture of the 60s in San Francisco included groups like the Black Panthers, the Hells Angels, anti-war protesters, musicians, dope-smoking hippies, white liberal students, and remnants of the beatnik poets. These groups comprised different parts of the counter cultures that pushed and pulled the country in a progressive direction. But there’s another counterculture that shows up in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that is not as talked about. The Chicano movement in Los Angeles is represented in a somewhat surreptitious way. Dr. Gonzo, the 300-pound Samoan, is based on Oscar Acosta nicknamed, The Brown Buffalo. Whom Duke says is, “Too weird to live, too rare to die!”. Acosta was a Chicano activist and civil rights attorney, who would eventually disappear while traveling through Mexico in 1974. In one of Thompson’s last pieces of traditional journalism, Strange Rumblings in Aztlan[4], Thompson forgoes the absurdist gonzo format for a more grounded in reality, gritty view of East Los Angeles in the early 70s. Thompson was writing that piece in an East L.A. hotel, hanging out in bars and safe houses with Acosta at the time. Because Acosta was constantly surrounded by bodyguards and other associates, Thompson used the Mint 400 as a way to get Acosta alone so they could talk about the Chicano movement. Although the Chicano movement is never discussed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was almost certainly a major topic of conversation between Thompson and Acosta on their trips to Las Vegas.
The Chicano movement in California was growing in the late 60s along with the other political movements. However as so often happens it took a tragic death to bring about national coverage. The article Strange Rumblings in Aztlan is Thompson reporting on the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department killing of Ruben Salazar, a Mexican American Journalist. Salazer had been covering a peaceful Chicano Vietnam War protest in East Los Angeles when he died. Sheriff's deputies moved in to break up the protest and all hell broke loose. People scattered to find safety up and down Whittier Boulevard. Salazar thought he found refuge in a bar, the Silver Dollar, but was shot in the head with what was described as a “tear gas bullet” by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and died in cold blood, on the floor of the Silver Dollar. Salazar was a professional journalist, not an activist. He had been a war correspondent in Vietnam and had seen a lot in his career. When the Los Angeles Times asked him to cover East L.A. it was not an area that he was familiar with despite his Mexican heritage. However, he quickly got up to speed and began publishing a weekly column in the Times that often exposed police misconduct. According to Strange Rumblings in Aztlan[5], Salazar was told three times in the summer of 1970, by the cops, to “tone down” his coverage. After the killing, Acosta said Salazar was, “the only Chicano in East L.A. that the cops were really afraid of.” Therefore, it was hard to believe that the killing was random or accidental. Certainly, Thompson and Acosta didn’t believe that. The incident was a blow to the Chicano movement but also to the freedom of the press. Here’s a journalist, doing his job, reporting on a peaceful protest murdered by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In his article, Thompson ponders what will happen when the cops declare open season on journalists. It’s easy to see why that aspect of the story would both interest and horrify Thompson.
All of that is happening in the background of Thompson and Acosta’s trip to Las Vegas. In the Strange Rumblings in Aztlan subheading Thompson, writes, “no light at the end of this tunnel…nada.” Thompson had been part of and had covered various countercultures since the mid-60s. When Thompson writes about the high-water mark of the 60s, it’s possible he was also thinking about the high-water mark of the Chicano movement, or at the very least, doubting its ability to make a difference. The culture of the 70s was shifting and Thompson had a front-row seat to the action. In 1971, the same year Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was published, President Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda’s own, declared a war on drugs. John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon once said, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” In this way, the drugs in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are representative of the counterculture. Drugs were a proxy war that the counterculture had no way of winning. In the same way, Vietnam was a proxy war against Communism that the United States couldn’t win. The war in Vietnam can be looked at as the catalyst for both the rise of the counterculture movement and its demise. Because the anti-war sentiment had become so strong, the Nixon administration fought back against it. Speaking out against the war is reasonable, hell even Walter Cronkite was against the war. But being a commie loving, dope-smoking, criminal, that’s a different story. The Nixon administration tried to shift the conversation and they were somewhat successful in doing so. However, many of the movements themselves also began to struggle in the late 60s. There were incidents like the Altamont Free concert, where a man was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels in the middle of a Rolling Stone set. The Charles Manson cult murders of Sharon Tate and four of her friends in the Hollywood Hills and the rise of violent leftist groups like The Weather Underground. Counterculture was imploding and shifting towards violence[6]. In the end, many of the ideas and themes of the counter-culture lived on but the movements lost steam. There was a feeling that they had been defeated. That feeling of hopelessness is captured in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
A mere ten years before Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man ever elected president. It’s important to say that framing any period of American history as pollyannaish is tenuous. Certainly, there were a lot of problems in the United States heading into the 60s but it was undoubtedly a time of great prosperity. Unions were strong, suburbs were growing, and technology was booming. It was for many people the last time there was a Rockwellian version of America. The day Kennedy was sworn in, the number one song on the Billboard charts was Wonderland by Night a soft, instrumental song by the Bert Kaempfert German orchestra. The kind of song teenagers in 1961 slow danced to while a teacher warned them about getting too close. Swiss Family Robinson was the number one movie at the box office, a wholesome Disney film about a waspy family that gets shipwrecked on an island and has to fight off cartoonish pirates. Ten years later when Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo were screaming across the desert in The Red Shark, the number one song in the country was Me and My Bobby McGee by Janis Joplin, the powerful, soulful, rock artist who had overdosed on heroin months prior, and the number one movie in American was, Get Carter starring Michael Caine. A film about a professional hitman with, “unbridled hate” who has to avenge his brother's death. Americans had lived through a decade of tumult. The demure society of the 50s had turned into the cynical society of the 70s. The 60s started with a young President and hope for the future but that hope was dashed and ground into a fine powder as the decade wore on. In 1963 President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas, Texas. An act some called the end of innocence in America. There were civil rights protests throughout the South. There were the Watts riots in ’65. The Newark and Detroit riots in ’67. Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in ’68 and as all of this was happening, the Vietnam War raged in the background. A war that according to the United States Department of Defense would take the lives of over 58,000 Americans. In 1968 the North Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive, a major escalation of the war. That prompted respected newsman Walter Cronkite to go on television and declare that the war in Vietnam could not be won. The 60s was a decade that left the country confused about its own identity and its citizens questioning their government. That cynicism drips off the pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is often compared to The Great Gatsby[7]. Both novels are about the American Dream. Both feature a main character based on the writer. In the case of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Duke is a stand-in for Thompson, and in The Great Gatsby, Gatsby represents F. Scott Fitzgerald. A man from a middle-class upbringing who finds himself hobnobbing with a wealthy, affluent, crowd. Both novels are narrated by the writer. They both feature an obscene amount of revelry and they’re both about finding the elusive American Dream. The differences may be more interesting than the similarities though. The Great Gatsby is a tragedy. There are consequences to Gatsby’s actions. He doesn’t get the girl and, in the end, he dies alone and no one cares. He achieves the American Dream but it doesn’t matter. Duke on the other hand, never faces any consequences. He traffics illegal narcotics across state lines, skips out on massive hotel bills, and at one point tries to purchase an orangutan. Dr. Gonzo’s transgressions are even worse than Duke’s. He attempts suicide, threatens people with a knife, threatens a waitress who’s working at a diner by herself in the middle of the night, drugs up an underage girl, and presumably rapes her. Whether or not this particular part of the book is true or an allegory for how American society views women is worth debate. However, Dr. Gonzo is deplorable and he also faces no consequences for his actions. As an aside, Acosta’s only issue with the book was that Thompson didn’t use his likeness and called him a 300-pound Samoan. Thompson tried to explain to him why it would not be good for Acosta’s career to be named in the book, to no avail. The compromise is why there is a picture of Acosta and Thompson on the back cover of the dust jacket of the original hardcover print. Acosta refused to sign the release without it. For as much chaos, confusion, and violence as there is in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, no one gets the girl, saves the day, or dies heroically at the end. In the final scene, Duke is in the Denver airport where he lies about being a doctor to obtain prescription Amyls, and heads to the airport bar to start the party all over again. Thompson would ride the “Fear and Loathing” brand until his death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound ended his life in 2005.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a hard romp through a counterfeit city. Just as searching for the American Dream, fueled by the belief that if you push a little further, you’ll find it, is an illusion. That’s what Thompson is telling us. Push it as far as you can, smoke’em if you got’em, it doesn’t matter. We’re all stuck in the same nightmare and it’s only getting worse. The book is about a disillusioned young Thompson, discovering there’s no Tooth Fairy. Thompson was a cynic by nature and there is no greater lie in America, than “The Dream.” It’s not surprising Thompson found it great satirical fodder. If one digs into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, past the drugs, past the comedy, past the fun. It paints a terrifying reality. But who cares, it’s a fun ride and maybe that’s the point, sometimes you just have to say fuck it. None of us will be here forever. Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Bibliography
Sickels, Robert C. “A Countercultural Gatsby: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Death of the American Dream and Rise of Las Vegas, USA.” Popular Culture Review 11, no. 1 (2000): 61–.
McDonagh, Magnus Wilhelm Kevin. “Fear and Loathing in the Cultural Hegemony: An Analysis of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream from the Perspective of Antonio Gramsci’s Theory on Cultural Hegemony.” NTNU, 2021.
Walker, Madeline. “Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autofictions.” MELUS 34, no. 4 (2009): 145–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20618104.
VREDENBURG, JASON. “What Happens in Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson’s Political Philosophy.” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 149–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23352511.
Thompson, Hunter S. “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.” Essay. In The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 119–51. London: Pan Books, 1981.
Zimmerman, Nadya. “Helter Skelter.” Essay. In Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco, 155–75. Ann Arbor: Univ Of Michigan Press, 2013.
Lawson, Steven F. “Civil Rights and Black Liberation .” Essay. In A Companion to American Women’s History, 397–413. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
[1] McDonagh, Magnus Wilhelm Kevin. “Fear and Loathing in the Cultural Hegemony: An Analysis of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream from the Perspective of Antonio Gramsci’s Theory on Cultural Hegemony.” NTNU, 2021.
[2] Walker, Madeline. “Conversion, Deconversion, and Reversion: Vagaries of Religious Experience in Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autofictions.” MELUS 34, no. 4 (2009): 145–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20618104.
[3] VREDENBURG, JASON. “What Happens in Vegas: Hunter S. Thompson’s Political Philosophy.” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 149–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23352511.
[4] Thompson, Hunter S. “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.” Essay. In The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 119–51. London: Pan Books, 1981.
[5] Thompson, Hunter S. “Strange Rumblings in Aztlan.” Essay. In The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 119–51. London: Pan Books, 1981.
[6] Zimmerman, Nadya. “Helter Skelter.” Essay. In Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco, 155–75. Ann Arbor: Univ Of Michigan Press, 2013.
[7] Sickels, Robert C. “A Countercultural Gatsby: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Death of the American Dream and Rise of Las Vegas, USA.” Popular Culture Review 11, no. 1 (2000): 61–.
