Hunter S. Thompson- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Fear and Loathing on the Campagin Trail '72

Simon & Sschuster

Hunter S. Thompson

1973

"A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily — but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start."

In hindsight, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 was probably the wrong book for me to choose to read. Like many, many others, my first exposure to Hunter S. Thompson was through Terry Gilliam's strange film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and not longer after that I read and massively enjoyed the source material. That book remains Hunter's most famous work, existing as the prime example of gonzo journalism in action and remaining up there with Thompson's spiritual predecessor William Burrough's Naked Lunch as one of the most popular examples of drug literature an excitable and easily-influenced student can buy. Curiously though, none of Thompson's other work has gotten anywhere near as close to infiltrating the shared consciousness of the wider reading public, and so in that respect Thompson stands out as somewhat of an enigma, yet to be fully explored. When I came across a copy of what's arguably the author's second most famous work (and one that relies on the title of the first to catch a browser's initial attention more than it does its own subject) I couldn't resist picking it up, despite a nagging feeling that the subject matter would alienate me rather quickly.

Initially serialised in the magazine that Hunter will be forever related to, Rolling Stone, this book is essentially a hard mix of Thompson's self-defined gonzo journalism and serious, legitimate political journalism, as the author dedicates himself to covering the race for the presidency between eternal rivals the democrats and republicans across the year of 1972. Now, straight away there was a conflict for me between the subject matter and the literary style that, had I not been so amused by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, could have pushed me away from this book entirely. It's not that I'm completely against trying to read about politics (I even took a module on US government and politics during my late teenage years, albeit rather unsuccessfully), but reading about US politics including its transitory figures and minutia of forty years ago was something this reader was always going to struggle with. I was hoping for the pure gonzo to shine.

The result is somewhere in between; though Thompson begins his coverage with a level-headed approach, sticking to his established, entertaining style to portray the varied characters making the initial moves in the national election race. To me particularly, they were all characters, most of whom I'd never heard of before. Even Richard Nixon, political superstar was someone who I mostly looked at as the President of Earth as a head in a jar. As a result of my own uninformed perspective I lost a lot of the context and with it some of the humour. As Fear and Lo odyssey of Hunter S./Raoul Duke as a twisted, mythical adventure through the overworld, the writing style in this book presented to me a similar kind of effect; real political figures become literary caricatures under Thompson's gaze and collaborative illustrator Ralph Steadman's pen.

As the story continues further and further into the campaign, Thompson seems to become more and more exasperated by his attempts to somehow make sense of the bizarre world around him, and his grasp of coherency suffered in my eyes. It became harder and harder for me to track what was going on, and my interest in the book wained. As I said at the beginning, this was probably the wrong book for me to read, because it became near impossible for me to keep up with. Thompson focuses strongly not only on the campaign, but mainstream US media's coverage and presentation of it. This in itself is interesting, but again the line between fantasy and reality is further blurred as these mainstream presentations almost completely overwhelm any semblance of actual truth, and the whole thing becomes a kind of mutated public relations monster, controlled by nobody but prodded from all angles. Considering the cocktail of drugs Hunter was likely on at the time, it's somewhat of a surprise that he had the mental fortitude to finish the project.

Ultimately, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 will, to a certain extent, live and die with the reader based on his or her prior knowledge of the people and places involved, or at least their willingness to try and work it out. I lack the patience or professionalism to make such an effort, and as a result found this book a mish-mash of satirical adventures that kind of exhausted me on the subject. Thompson's writing is as good here as it is anywhere else, and I don't want to try and downplay any of his efforts, as he delivered a historically relevant journal of an important time in the only way he could, but its intensity just didn't capture me.