Hunter Thompson once wrote a novel called Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Journalists love it: it’s a litany of stupidity and ignorance and behavior asking for a fist in the face. Journalists can totally relate.
Why Las Vegas is dragged into it at all is an insight into Hunter’s brain: Las Vegas bases its existence and success on the premise that life is fun. Fun for Thompson was being annoying to people.
Thompson was allowed to be an annoying presence with the Hells Angels for a while because Sonny Barger, an unappreciated mega genius in understanding others and knowing how to surround himself with people just as sharp as he was, saw that Thompson was useful: a depressed moron with a Jack Kerouac destiny who would make the Hells Angels part of a best seller.
Hunter Thompson did not present the Hells Angels as glowing role models for others to emulate. That was fine with the Hells Angels. They don’t want to be role models. They want to be left alone. They did beat him up but not because of anything he wrote. He interfered with a domestic dispute.
I’m guessing he laid hands on a Hells Angel. If there are other Hells Angels around and you do this, they beat you up first and then decide if you had it coming later. If you didn’t have it coming….you still got beat up. Maybe you’ll get an apology! But you still got beat up. And you will again if you do whatever you did again. You get beat up….you have a sit-down later.
Unlike how the Mafia operates: there’s a sit down first. THEN you get beat up if it doesn’t go well. We’re looking at two different ways of doing things. Getting back to Las Vegas, only Hunter Thompson would drag the most upbeat place on earth into his idiotic well-written shit-show of useless, pointless, drug-addled homeless-level idea of how to spend your time there.
NATURALLY it was hailed as a brilliant analysis of normal American life by the “critics.” “Literary Criticism” is a category of Failed Novelist who goes into journalism after he realizes writing fiction that’s INTERESTING is hard. Much easier to become a “news” writer where you can interject bits of fiction into something someone else did or said.
–J.J. Solari
