Gonzo Republic

Hunter S. Thompson's America

William Stephenson

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781441159229
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441163424
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Gonzo Republic looks at Hunter S. Thompson's complex relationship
with America. Thompson was a patriot but also a stubborn individualist.
Stephenson examines the whole range of Thompson's work, from his early
reporting from the South American client states of the USA in the 1960s
to his twenty-first-century internet columns on sport, politics and 9/11.
Stephenson argues that Thompson inhabited, but was to some extent
reacting against, the tradition of American individualism begun by the Founding Fathers and continued by Emerson and Thoreau. Thompson sought out the edge-the threshold of chaos and insanity-in order to define himself. His characters enact the same quest, travelling through the surreal landscape of his literary America: the Gonzo Republic.

1 Stepping into History: Values, Contexts, Influences

I clearly recall thinking: Well, this is it. These are G-Men …

WHACK! Like a flash of nearby lightning that lights up the sky for three or four terrifying split seconds before you hear the thunder – a matter of zepto-seconds in real time – […]. They had me, dead to rights. I was Guilty. Why deny it? Confess now, and throw myself on their mercy, or –

What? What if I didn’t confess? That was the question. (KF, p. 5: emphasis in original)

One summer day in 1946, two FBI agents knocked on the door of the Thompson family home in Louisville, Kentucky. They accused the eldest son of the house, Hunter Stockton Thompson, aged nine, of damaging a federal mailbox, an offence that carried a 5-year prison sentence. They urged Hunter to confess; they already had witnesses, they said, because his friends had squealed on him. Indeed, the boy was guilty. But, acting on impulse, he decided to turn the tables on the G-Men by asking them a question: exactly what witnesses did they have? They had none, and had been lying, and he never saw them again.

With the hindsight of nearly 60 years, writing in his late memoir Kingdom of Fear (2003), Thompson recalled his escape from the agents as ‘a magic moment in my life, a defining instant for me or any other nine-year-old boy growing up in the 1940s after World War II’ (KF, p. 5). Unlike the many hardened gangsters, let alone children, who had cracked under such pressure, Thompson had triumphed over his historical context by refusing to believe the popular myth that the Bureau always got its man: ‘I learned that the FBI was not unbeatable, and that is a very important lesson to learn at the age of nine in America’ (p. 8: emphasis in original).

Thompson then moves his memoir forward with a marvellously detailed piece of self-irony. Without that youthful victory over the FBI, he says, he would not be ‘sitting alone at this goddamn typewriter at 4:23 a.m. with an empty drink beside me and an unlit cigarette in my mouth and a naked woman singing “Porgy and Bess” on TV across the room’ (p. 8). Thompson’s humour arises from the ludicrously specific description of his situation. He does not say ‘without defying the FBI I would not have become a writer’ but implies it through depicting the consequence of his decision: entry into a world of desperate late night deadline pressure, heavy drinking and jaded soft porn consumption that mocks the received idea of a literary life.

Thompson is interrupted when his wife Anita bursts into the room, saying she has just read an online report that the USA has threatened to invade Saudi Arabia if the Saudis do not become allies in the War on Terror (p. 9). When President George W. Bush’s Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appears on TV to denounce this as a malicious rumour, Thompson again makes clear the duplicity and evasiveness of the state. In the 1940s, the G-Men’s lies about their non-existent evidence, along with the popular legend of the invincible FBI, had threatened to ruin the young Thompson’s life by sending him to jail for what was, with the benefit of hindsight, a trivial offence: likewise, in the 2000s, the Bush administration is spreading disinformation and cultivating the myth that it is fundamentally benevolent and morally sound to conceal its own ruthless pragmatism. Rumsfeld rants that he will ‘track down and eliminate’ the source of the rumour, while paradoxically urging sweet reasonableness, assuring viewers that the US would never invade such a close ally: ‘That would be insane’ (p. 9).

Thompson concludes, with heavy irony, that he would not dare to question the decisions of a president about to send the US to war against the Muslim world, as ‘That would make me a traitor and a dangerous Security Risk’ (p. 9). Instead, he passes to his audience the responsibility to turn the tables on the system, as the 9-year-old Thompson had done to the FBI: to interrogate Bush’s foreign policy and see through the smokescreen laid down by Rumsfeld. The nation, as Thompson saw it, was at a moment of decision: ‘We are coming to a big fork in the road for this country’ (p. 9).

In 2001, just as in 1946, Thompson had to use his liberty or lose it. He did not want the status of a writer to protect him from urgent national questions, from the responsibility to participate in and change history. His response to 9/11 and the subsequent wars was to hit back at Bush, his backers and his hirelings, but not through ‘sudden outbursts of frustrated violence’ such as the childish vandalism that had first brought the FBI to his door (PH, p. 70). Instead, he struck at the government through texts such as Kingdom of Fear, which demonstrate how ideology influences the private sphere, and how everyone must try to respond to history, or even to shape it, in response to their own feelings: ‘Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string’ (Emerson, 1984, p. 31).

Throughout his life, Thompson followed this prompt. He was an individualist. Although he participated keenly in the American political scene as a reporter, activist and candidate, he subscribed to Henry David Thoreau’s construction of the individual ‘as a higher and independent power, from which all [… the state’s] power and authority are derived’ (Thoreau, 1992, p. 245). His life and work affirmed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s repudiation of authority, whereby each person must ‘not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world’ (Emerson, 1984, p. 10).

In a letter written in 1957, when he was only 20 years old and still in military service, Thompson tentatively articulated his ideal of personal autonomy based on ‘a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able – or even have the courage – to achieve’ (PH, p. 70). At this time, he was strongly influenced by Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead – a novel that had ‘really impressed’ him as a high school student (AGW, p. 156). Rand’s narrative is about a maverick architect’s fight against a corrupt and oppressive system. Its protagonist, Howard Roark, sets himself up as a non-conformer even in youth, just as Thompson did. Roark is told by his teachers that a life of self-sacrifice is ‘beautiful and inspiring. Only he had not felt inspired. He had felt nothing at all’ (Rand, 2007, p. 528). The Fountainhead formed an extended metaphor for Rand’s belief that people should aim to be ‘man-worshipers, [who] in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it’, as opposed to the mediocre, conformist ‘man-haters’ who work to stifle human self-realization (Rand, 2007, p. xii).

Thompson found such libertarian rhetoric attractive as it articulated his intuitive sense of himself as a unique individual whose lifelong quest would be to create himself on his own terms. As a relative youth, he had difficulty expressing his principles clearly, but he had faith in his future development as a writer, which would eventually enable him to crystallize his ideas: ‘That will come later [… because the lack] lies not in the ability, but in the scope of perception of one’s own creative ability’ (PH, p. 70).

Throughout his life, Thompson strove to create and develop an authentic, autonomous identity; but he also understood that there was a power structure to which every individual had to adapt, and that history could mould the subject far more easily than the subject could mould itself. Indeed, history did its best to crush Thompson. His quest to reach his full potential was hindered by such outside forces as poverty and the lack of a college degree and social connections; but his strongest opponent was the state. After his brush with the FBI over the mailbox affair in 1946, he spent a month in jail as a teenager in 1955; a cop clubbed him when he showed his press pass at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in 1968; the police raided his home in 1990 and he was charged with sexual assault and the possession of illicit drugs. He weathered all this and consistently refused to accept that historical forces, personified by state institutions, could or should determine his life. Like Emerson, he:

internalized or subjectified history so as to be able to use it, to make it part of his own fiber. He did not step out of history but into it, deciding to make it rather than be made by it. (Porte, 1999, p. 4)¹

Thompson’s belief that the individual subject should realize itself and shape its own place in history was typified by his definition of politics as ‘the art of controlling your environment’ to which he added the anti-establishment caveat, ‘If you don’t get into politics, somebody else controls your environment, your world’ (AGW, p. 156).

The environment Thompson controlled was, first and foremost, his dwelling place. He created his own version of Thoreau’s Walden Pond at Owl Farm – the isolated ranch in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, where he lived from 1967 to the end of his life. There, relatively unhindered by officialdom, he could, in the tradition of a transcendentalist hermit, ‘transact some private business with the fewest obstacles’ (Thoreau, 1992, p. 13). In Thompson’s case, this meant taking drugs, shooting guns, detonating explosives and driving dangerously – but above all else, it meant writing. Thompson’s constant phone calls and correspondence with friends, editors, creditors and others, as well as his tastes for intoxicants and for printed and televised information, meant that he was in some respects the opposite of Thoreau, who ‘would fain keep sober always’ (Thoreau, 1992, p. 145) and despised letters and news as a waste of time and gossip (p. 63–4); but like his nineteenth-century ancestors, Thompson knew the value of freedom in solitude. Owl Farm was an environment that he fought tenaciously to preserve; he resisted all attempts to build on the land around it, as he struggled to keep Aspen uncontaminated by real-estate developers and businessmen hunting a fast buck.

Thompson did not share the spiritual focus of Emerson and Thoreau. He was a humanist in several senses: he celebrated humane values over cruelty and greed; he championed the individual against the system; although staunchly anti-Republican and loosely pro-Democrat, he never actively campaigned for any political party except his own Freak Power movement (see Chapter 3), as he preferred a sceptical, non-aligned stance that allowed free thought; and he was not a religious believer.² He subscribed to the 1960s counterculture’s distrust of grand abstractions and shared its preference for ‘The lively consciousness of men and women as they are in their vital daily reality’ (Roszak, 1971, p. 54: emphasis in original).

And yet he was equally ready to criticize the emerging institutions of the counterculture. He despised the fashionable fusion of drugs and Eastern religion, exemplified by the pseudo-Buddhist doctrines of the Harvard psychologist–turned LSD guru Timothy Leary. He used hallucinogenic substances regularly, but did so in order to achieve a secular form of transcendence of the mental restrictions imposed by law and government. For Thompson, acid was not a spiritual drug but it was, in his own sense, political, as it became a medium through which he could control his sensory environment and mental state and change both for the better. Unlike Leary, Thompson did not get high to abandon his ego. He did so to fashion that ego (see Chapter 2); to follow his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Thomas Jefferson’s creed of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The decade of the hippies, LSD, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement offered many opportunities to live out this ideal. The 1960s were a pivotal time in Thompson’s life: he published his first book, found his lifelong enemy in Richard M. Nixon, discovered hallucinogenics, married and raised a child and founded Owl Farm. Like the 1830s context of Emerson’s transcendentalist movement, the 1960s were a fine time to be a rebel: ‘a moment in history containing both expansive hope and a sense of strife and embattlement, and marked by […] new ethical and political imperatives’ (Robinson, 1999, p. 13). Arthur Marwick has argued that during the decade, ‘various countercultural movements and subcultures’ engaged with mainstream society and ‘did not confront that society but permeated and transformed it’ (Marwick, 1999, p. 13: emphasis in original): Thompson, though, not only confronted the establishment through his subversive, satirical writing and political activism, but also scorned the counterculture’s naïve belief that it could transform society through an infusion of peace, love and dope.

Thompson was a patriot. He sought to rebel against the corrupt establishment, but only in order to return the US to its neglected core values – those of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence – that promised individual fulfilment founded on the principle that all human beings are created equal.³ Like the Founding Fathers, Thompson had inherited from the eighteenth-century radical Thomas Paine the ideal of inalienable human rights, founded on the binary opposition between the individual and government: ‘man, were he not corrupted by governments, is naturally the friend of man […] human nature is not of itself vicious’ (Paine, 1969, p. 230).

Thompson believed in acting like a human being, and in treating others as such, by defying whatever degrading cruelty convention might demand. The word “human” always carries positive connotations in his writing, and usually also suggests a value under threat from hostile forces. In a 1965 letter to Lyndon B. Johnson, he exhorted the president to start ‘acting like a thinking human instead of a senile political beast’ (PH, p. 497). In 1970, he explained his search for a house and land in Aspen, Colorado, as a quest for a refuge from the brutal modernity of Johnson and Nixon, for a place where he could live ‘like a human being’ (FLA, p. 273). In a 1973 letter to the right-wing Republican ideologue Pat Buchanan, then one of Nixon’s speechwriters, he said he was pleased that political opponents could ‘sit down at night as friends and human beings’ and that he welcomed ‘a human talk with you, if things work out’ (FLA, p. 531). Later, in 1975, Thompson railed at Jann Wenner, his editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for betraying him over a book proposal, after having acted at first ‘like a human being’ (FLA, p. 610).

To Thompson, being or becoming human meant realizing an authentic self. Like his contemporary, the novelist Ken Kesey, whose work he greatly admired, Thompson ‘began with the urge to create from within himself and to involve himself in his world, drives which suggest a need to experience fully what it means to be human’ (Bredahl, 1981, pp. 76–7). ‘He took it seriously – being a decent human, seriously caring about the rights of man’ (Ralph Steadman, cited in Wenner and Seymour, 2007, p. 437).

In Thomson’s lexicon, human beings were always opposed to the inhuman drones who served the corrupt establishment, whom he often called “pigfuckers” or “scumsuckers”. Swine was another consistent term of abuse in Thompson’s work, and was often linked to venality. He entitled one anthology of his newspaper columns Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s. In it, he wrote, ‘Heaven will be a place where the swine will be sorted out at the gate and sent off like rats’ (GS, p. 11). Thompson’s excoriating denunciation of mindless conformity recalls Thoreau: ‘The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines […]. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs’ (Thoreau, 1992, p. 228). In 1972, Thompson debated, with dry irony, whether Richard Nixon qualified as human: ‘Is Nixon “human?” Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. […] It is one of those ugly realities […] that we will all have to face and accept’ (Wenner and Seymour, 2007, pp. 168–69).

Thompson’s humanism was never self-satisfied or complacent: he was often bitterly self-critical, and did not spare the counterculture. The debauched drug abuse of Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas represents an escapist, animalistic retreat from the human condition, as well as an exaggerated parody of Thompson’s own drug-centred lifestyle. The novel carries the epigraph from Dr Johnson, ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ (LV, n.p.). This is amply demonstrated in the opening chapter, where the stoned protagonists bait a hapless hitchhiker, and the guilt-ridden Duke wonders, ‘Had we deteriorated to the level of dumb beasts?’ (p. 8: emphasis in original).

Thompson realized his own humanity through writing as much as through life: paradoxically, the authentic self that he wanted to create and maintain was to a great extent evolved on the page through a series of more or less autobiographical characters. Italo Calvino, the prolific Italian fabulist and experimental novelist, once remarked that ‘The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work’ (Calvino, 1989, p. 111). Calvino situates the author outside biography: the composer is no longer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1  Stepping into History: Values, Contexts, Influences
• 2  Riding with the Angels, Tripping in the Haight: Drugs, Authorities, Countercultures
• 3  Gonzo Fists, Guinea Worms and Freaks: The Political Circus
• 4  The Elusive American Dream; the Edge, the Lodge and the Frontier; Gonzo Sex and Gender
• 5  ‘Bash the Buggers Silly; Bomb the Insane’: Thompson and the American Empire
• 6  Conclusion: ‘The Place of Definitions’
• Appendix I. Thompson on Film
• Appendix II. The Gonzo Net
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright