On Reading Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72” in 2017

I.

I picked up Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 this year for two main reasons. I wanted to know:

1. Are there parallels in Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 campaign to what we’re experiencing in the era of Donald Trump? Specifically, was the Nixon campaign, and was Nixon as a candidate, as depraved (to use a Thompson word) and absurd as what we’re seeing today?

I’ll let Dr. Thompson answer in his own words. From page 389:

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 . . . Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?

How low indeed. You can be a philandering businessman, a failure. You can gain notoriety via a reality show where you feel self-empowered for firing people. You can mock the disabled, insult war veterans, get caught on tape bragging about assaulting women: All this, and your country will anoint you leader. Millions of voters elected Trump because they see themselves in a morally bankrupt authority figure. They love him and his actions because that’s exactly what they would do if they were president. Either Thompson could see it coming or it simply isn’t anything new.

One more on this, from page 392:

Our Barbie doll President, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children . . . he speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable . . . how would the voters react if they knew the President of the United States was presiding over ‘a complex, far-reaching and sinister operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign organization . . . involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail and intimidation.’

Oh yes, there is a wealth of parallels to be drawn between the Nixon administration and that of our current plutocrat POTUS.

2. Is following a campaign a desirable pursuit for a journalist, or do you just become a part of the sausage you’re describing being made?

Thompson seemed to like it. From page 469:

There’s an excitement and pace to the presidential campaign that definitely keeps you wired. It’s a grueling trip, but that insane kind of zipping from place to place . . . on the Monday before the election we did Kansas and both coasts . . . I crossed over my own house in Colorado three times. It’s frantic, kind of chasing after the Golden Fleece, and probably a lot more fun if you don’t win or if you have no real stake in it . . . Yeah, it’s one of the best assignments I can think of.

II.

There are those who fail to realize how deeply Thompson cared about his country. He was a product of it. All the zany, crazy antics came out of living close to the truth of American existence. The drugs, the madness, the guns and fast cars—all how he coped with living, traveling and reporting in America. And he was as vehement of a Nixon hater as it gets.

One more passage, from pages 390-391, written in October, 1972, when it was clear that the candidate Thompson backed had lost the race:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I would rather not write anything about the presidential campaign at this time. On Tuesday, November 7th, I will get out of bed long enough to go down to the polling place and vote for George McGovern. Afterwards, I will drive back to the house, lock the front door, get back in bed, and watch television as long as necessary. It will probably be awhile before The Angst lifts—but whenever it happens I will get out of bed again and start writing the mean, cold-blooded bummer that I was not quite ready for today.

Now that doesn’t sound like he was having that much fun. But it does show how much he cared about his country and what happened to it.

The scores of journalists, pundits and politicos who predicted Hillary Clinton to win the presidency in 2016 know this particular type of hangover well. I’m sure plenty of them had trouble getting out of bed on the ninth of November. But many, just as Thompson did, soon went back to the important work of taking their current president to task for the almost daily outrages coming from our White House, carrying the same torch, shining the same light.

III.

I’ve been in journalism for more than a decade and Thompson’s influence on my profession is outsized. Love him or hate him, no writer in recent times inspires his level of fandom. Every year when you go to out to the bars on Halloween, you see someone dressed up as Johnny Depp’s version of Thompson in the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Green plastic card-playing visor. Cigarette holder. Aviator sunglasses. Drunk, walking bowlegged down the sidewalk. Instantly recognizable. He’s a seductive character to emulate. Drink as much as you like. Do every drug. A famous actor will pay four million dollars to shoot your ashes out of a cannon.

But like Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski before him, if read and emulated too heavily at a young age, Thompson’s influence can be toxic. For an aspiring writer, it’s easy to indulge in the drinking and drugging and chasing women without practicing the craft they all worked at, despite the time they lost on their other individual pursuits.

If you try to be all these men, usually one by one as you discover their work for the first time, soon your twenties are gone, given to experiences and bars in place of actually learning how to write. There is a legion of gonzo fans who want the party and the fame but don’t want to put in the work to make the art. You have to sit down at the desk. You can’t just walk around “in the depths of an ether binge” and think you’ll somehow huff your way to glory.

Although I was aware of falling into this destructive pattern of behavior, I spent far more of my young manhood in the pursuit of experiences rather than at my desk. It was easy to justify months of traveling, for example, by telling myself that I needed to see the world to understand it. I did manage to turn some of those voyages into pieces of writing, but the time spent gallivanting around Asia versus the amount of quality material rendered isn’t necessarily a ratio I want to contemplate. Same goes for time spent drinking.

Still, what young male writer wouldn’t want to have Bill Murray or Depp play them in a movie? To have the film version of yourself cast next to young, gorgeous Amber Heard?

IV.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went on a nine-day road trip around Colorado. Our first few days we camped near Aspen. Before we drove south we pulled off at Woody Creek and drove the canyon road where Thompson used to own a house. It’s common for his fans to make the pilgrimage to the area looking for the Owl Farm, where Thompson had lived since the ’70s, where he killed himself, and where the cannon Depp paid for turned his remains into fireworks.

I’m not convinced we found his place, but we drove the road, talking about how Thompson had stolen antlers from Hemingway’s home in Idaho, regretted the theft, and his second wife eventually returned them to Papa’s descendents in recent years.

When we came down from the ranch road we might have asked the bartenders at the Woody Creek Tavern, Thompson’s favorite bar, exactly how to find his estate, but they’re rumored to point people in the wrong direction on purpose. It’s enough for them to have sections of the bar walls dedicated to portraits of the writer as a young man, along with handwritten notes from him and a framed poster from his Freak Power ticket—the logo a two-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button inside a police badge—when Thompson ran a failed campaign for sheriff of Aspen. I went over to take a picture and noticed three other people doing the same.

In my travels I’ve seen few writers honored in the same way. The Beat writers, particularly Kerouac, have murals on the walls of San Francisco and Denver buildings, and you can find plaques that a writer lived or drank in New York bars and hotels. The South boasts a few benches with Mark Twain and William Faulkner forever trapped listening to the people sitting next to them.

Hemingway has statues and busts and bars named after him in Spain, Cuba and elsewhere. The Parisians keep plaques where great authors lived and worked—Voltaire’s grave in the Pantheon is worth the visit alone. The Russians surpass any country I know of with its statue after statue of great authors in parks throughout that vast nation.

Yet it remains rare to find such an instantly recognizable person of letters in our country. It’s an accomplishment that shouldn’t be undervalued. We can argue about Thompson’s literary merit elsewhere, but his influence on the culture can’t be denied. What also can’t be denied is that he did enough important work to get him there.

For all the unhinged, comedic moments in his body of work, specifically Las Vegas, there’s a deep seriousness to his reporting. He might not have believed in the same code of ethics that straightforward journalists adhere to—not injecting yourself into the story, for one—but he was dogged in his pursuit of the truth of what it means to be a product of this country, using himself as a main example, and the other characters he loved to put down on the page all told different stories of what it meant to be made in America.

In Campaign Trail, his political reporting isn’t objective. It’s not told in the sparest newsperson’s prose. If you’re looking for that you came to the wrong place. Thompson used a different lens. He wanted the reader to connect emotionally to his writing, and, above all, he wanted to entertain. Obviously by the way he lived and died and wrote the man held a deathly fear of boredom. It’s also obvious that his writing has endured this long because of how funny it could be while bringing to life the absurdity of goons like Nixon.

V.

There’s nothing wrong with having heroes, but I distanced myself from the myth of Thompson long ago. Or, more accurately, I tired of trying to live up to that myth. I still love to read him, but I can find my own style and tone reaching to harmonize to his voice if I pick up his work while I’m crafting similar material. He casts a long shadow.

Like Matt Taibbi, himself a Thompson acolyte, writes in the introduction to Campaign Trail, “nobody was ever more fun to read.” It’s true. Thompson accomplished that most difficult feat for a writer—he developed a style and vocabulary so singular you could pick up one of his books without knowing the author and recognize within a page who had written it. That’s one thing to strive for.

What I learned in reading and imitating Thompson as a young man might be the real wisdom he wanted to impart to all of us who came after. I learned the only way to do this was to do it my own way. To swim for a goal rather than float with the tide, as he put it in a letter as a young man. The world doesn’t need another Hunter Stockton Thompson, but it does need more true originals. People unafraid to like what gives them kicks. People unafraid to be weird. People who can find the edge, and go past it.

VI.

The comments on any posthumous article on Thompson, which seem to come out about every month, even though he committed suicide more than ten years ago, unfailingly include speculation on what he would have thought about the Orangutan-In-Chief. They’re usually a variation on “we need you more than ever, Hunter,” or “I wonder what Hunter would have to say about this cretin in the Oval Office.”

Those of us who have read him know it would be brilliantly inventive in its utter contempt. I’m sure he would have thrown in some “swine,” a few “pigfuckers” and a few terms he would have come up with special for one Donald John Trump. His voice would be welcome. He’s still missed.

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