DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet
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I decided Monday that I needed to reread "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72."
I’ve read the book more times than I can remember and I’d always made a point to pick it up during the run-up to those quadrennial political lovefests we like to call presidential elections. The book, by the infamous "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson, has always served as a kind of tonic for me, a brutal, frank reminder of the ugly nature of our national political culture.
Thompson died Sunday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, news that was somehow both shocking, but not very surprising. The Thompson character from his books lived on the edge. He was a committed hedonist and social libertarian, a gun nut with an amazing appetite for all manner of drugs, both legal and illegal and the biographies seem to indicate that the character and the writer were indeed one and the same. He was an amalgamation of several American types: a lone-wolf cowboy gunslinger straight from an early 1960s Western, a dropout rebel a la Henry David Thoreau, a hard-headed political realist and hippie dreamer rolled into one. That he chose to end his life in the same manner as Ernest Hemingway just doesn’t seem all that surprising to me.
Thompson’s death reminded me that I hadn’t read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72" in close to five years. As I said, I had made it a point since discovering the book in 1981 of rereading it every four years during the early presidential primaries. For five straight presidential seasons, Thompson’s book acted as a personal rhetorical pitchback off of which I could toss ideas.
Somehow, I failed to pick up the book in 2004, an oversight that now seems a huge mistake, especially in the wake of the depressing and dispiriting sycophancy that represented the coverage of the Bush inaugural.
Thompson offered a model that was the polar opposite of what we have these days and what existed back when Richard Nixon was roaming the halls of the White House.
"The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis," he wrote in "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72." "When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in … especially not for ‘minor infractions’ of rules that neither side takes seriously; and on the rare occasions when Minor infractions suddenly become Major, there’s panic on both ends."
It’s a criticism that 33 years later neatly sums up the incestuous relations between press corps and government that are poisoning our political coverage today. The stars of our televised political firmament George Stephanopoulos, Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, George Will, James Carville, Mary Matalin, to name a few tend to be recycled politicians or political operatives unlikely to upset their own political party’s apple cart or deviate in any meaningful way from the accepted wisdom.
Thompson, on the other hand, did not believe in the accepted wisdom. "Fear and Loathing" tells the gruesome, sordid tale of the 1972 presidential election, one in which an anti-war, reform-minded liberal named George McGovern managed to ride a wave of disgust with mainstream Democrats to capture the party’s nomination, only to run headlong into defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon.
He was, as he points out repeatedly in the book, one of the first reporters to realize that Sen. McGovern might be able to vanquish the supposed front-runners and capture the Democratic nomination. He also understood how difficult it would be for Sen. McGovern to defeat President Nixon, though he did get caught up in the swirl of misguided hope that anti-war voters were feeling and predicted in one of his many dispatches for Rolling Stone that the South Dakota Democrat would win the White House. True to form, though, when the series of Rolling Stone articles was collected in early 1973 and published as "Fear and Loathing," he left that prediction in and left his readers to ponder what he could have been thinking.
As his erroneous prediction of a Nixon loss shows, Thompson’s political analysis was not always on the mark. He predicted that the conservative bent of the 1972 Republican convention similar to the 1992 mess that is said to have doomed the re-election of the first President George Bush would result in long-term damage to the party, a forecast not born out by 30 years of American political history.
Prognostication, however, was not Thompson’s stock in trade. He was a storyteller and a remarkable one at that. "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72" has a page-turner quality that is shocking given that we know where the story is going before we pick up the book. Several of his other books notably, "Hells Angels" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" have the same quality.
Thompson was not afraid to call a spade a spade, or to blast politicians he finds mean and venal with the lowest and most brutal language. In a Rolling Stone article in October, he referred to President Bush as a "golem" and "a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy." He once called President Nixon "the werewolf in us, the bully, the shyster."
Admittedly, Thompson was a poor model for journalists working for more mainstream outfits. His prose was often self-centered and biased, his dispatches ran on way too long (like this column) and he allowed himself to be sidetracked by wild tangents.
But that was the point, as Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Scott Martelle reminded us in an "appreciation" on Tuesday.
"He took the near-religious embrace of objectivity in journalism and sinned at every turn, a heretic who never got tied to the stake," Mr. Martelle wrote. "And he made it work. His 1967 book ‘Hell’s Angels,’ a trip that no other journalist could have taken, established the voice, a rambling but direct flow of words that felt like a beat poem, like Kerouac was back on the road."
Thompson’s wild forays into subjectivity can be viewed as the natural antecedent of Michael Moore’s documentary op-eds or Jon Stewart’s fake news on "The Daily Show." Both engage with their subjects while commenting on them and both are fairly upfront about their approaches. (The same cannot be said for Thompson’s other journalistic stepchildren, including the disingenuous Fox News channel and conservative blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly.)
Thompson’s work is dated, a product of the time in which he worked. It is no accident that, as the nation moved to the right with the election of Ronald Reagan, he seemed to lose steam, to lose his voice. He kept writing, but the zeitgeist had passed him by. He never matched the unbounded fire and energy he displayed in his first four books.
But with those four books, he leaves an important legacy to American letters.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].