Cara Eaton is a sophomore majoring in Philosophy. She is the Philosophy and Religion Editor for The Lemur.
This piece is part of a new series at The Lemur called “Close Reading,” in which a resident lemur (writer) analyzes a short passage from a favorite work of literature, history, or philosophy, or perhaps a short work in its entirety. Informed by larger insights about how to approach the author’s writing and context about the work as a whole, these mini essays will hopefully provide insight on some of the briefest yet most brilliant passages in world literature.
When I first received a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s sun-soaked, drug-fueled nightmare of a book, it did not take long for me to become immersed in the “savage journey.” The semi-autobiographical narrative of Fear and Loathing follows “Raoul Duke” (Thompson’s author surrogate) and “Dr. Gonzo” (Duke’s attorney, based on a real-life lawyer who disappeared in 1974) frenetically schlepping across Las Vegas, imbibing enough drugs to kill just about anyone (else), all the while musing on the demise of American counterculture. It is sickeningly fascinating to follow their depravity. The experience is perhaps like watching a TLC show about other sorts of indulgent hedonists—of course, I’m appalled and disgusted, but I don’t want their ride to stop because I’m riding with them. Fear and Loathing is pure, if ever so slightly masochistic, escapism.
And, hey, given my humdrum life of laundry and midterms, perhaps the paranoia of a life fueled by mescaline and hippie music is understandably seductive. Maybe you can imagine my surprise when, in the middle of this voyeuristic venture, I was struck by a moment of great poignancy. That moment was the oft-quoted “wave speech,” given as Duke pauses his debauchery to wax on the fading ideals of the 1960s counterculture movement in which Thompson participated. As I reflected on this chronicle of the hippie zeitgeist coming to its crashing end, I realized that Fear and Loathing is not so much a time capsule from a bygone age but an evergreen fable for every confused, anxious, and rebellious generation. It’s about burning bright, burning out, and what’s left in the burnout when the dust settles. The “wave speech” cuts deep to present-day concerns, even in the world of laundry, midterms, and political doom-scrolling. Duke speaks,
“That, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs.”
The counterculture of the 1960s was a blatant rejection of the prevailing cultural regime. The revolution was so loud, so inevitable, so ubiquitous in popular culture (the fact that you, like me, probably have at least heard of or are even intimately familiar with the cultural references Thompson weaves throughout the book—take Bob Dylan or “Sympathy for the Devil”—confirms this notion). Since the peace-and-love revolution’s death in the early 1970s, we haven’t been able to recapture this feeling, or at least not its intensity.
But perhaps all that was unique about that era was its intensity. Every generation has its own “Old and Evil.” My generation is not exempt from fighting the regressive attitudes of our elders. We have our warriors in the “mean or military sense”—someone like Luigi Mangione or Aaron Bushnell might fit the bill, based on who you ask. Still, for the most part, like our predecessors, our movement is silent and ideological. We believe or have believed to some extent that the energy of our youth will defeat the energy of the old regime. I think this idea makes logical sense to young people: we’re newer and stronger and so should naturally prevail over the perceived weakness of our older counterparts. This idea is far from a historical tautology, yet it feels true for every generation in a new way. We’ll get it right this time. (What we don’t account for, it seems, is that even if the older themselves are somewhat weaker, the ideas they represent have strong roots and are harder to defeat than we presuppose.)
Duke continues:
“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
I struggled earlier to write the phrase “our movement is” because it is in the present tense. I get the strangest sense—maybe due to too much doom-scrolling—that the momentum young people once had, let’s say in the 1960s, has reached the decline phase—it’s exiting the present tense into the past. The “high and beautiful wave” that many felt a part of probably gained form in the Obama administration; reached its high-water mark with the first Trump administration, COVID-19, and the BLM movement; started mellowing out under Biden; and now is really and truly breaking.
The wave of 1960s counterculture began breaking, in the minds of some, with 1968: a year that brought Nixon’s election and also the Tet Offensive, a major escalation of the Vietnam War. Or was it 1972, when the Watergate scandal exposed the Leviathan as more powerful and secretive than many could dream; or 1975, with the Fall of Saigon constituting an elegiac end to the ‘60s for good? It’s difficult to assign a poetic idea a hard and fast date, particularly an expiration date.
Anyhow, at some point or another, disillusionment crept into America’s youth, and a growing allegiance to the “Old and Evil” powers set in. (Of course, this made the “Old and Evil” powers not really “Old and Evil powers” anymore, but instead a new youth movement, a new opposition to what many would consider what now was the “Old and Evil” movement of drug use and sexual liberation.) This new youth movement brought with it shorter haircuts, the election of Reagan, and a bunch of young “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” Americans—perhaps we could call it the “Yuppie Revolution.”
This shift is the chief reason why Duke is a “burn-out.” He is an ideologue without a home. He rode the “high and beautiful wave,” washed ashore, and was left surrounded by younger, more professional types who he did not align with and could not make sense of. This is touched upon when Duke is assigned to cover the National District Attorney’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and is struck by the fact that many of the squares his generation railed against were now vougeish. “Just because you’re a cop, these days, doesn’t mean you can’t be With It,” he muses in chapter six.
It’s not exactly right to say that this new wave of yuppies was a direct response to the nominal degeneracy of acid and Woodstock. It was a culmination of factors, many deeply structural—such as deindustrialization, suburbanization, and migration of people and capital to the Sun Belt, so let’s try to have some nuance here. (On the literary side of things, the fact that the main plot of Fear and Loathing, entirely representative of the death of counterculture, involves Duke’s flight across the Sun Belt is sort of perfect.)
I see Thompson’s same wave breaking as many of my peers become disillusioned with our generation’s fading brand of liberal radicalism. The “Old and Evil” regime is now metamorphosing into our youth movement, as conservatism is on the rise among young people. Now, we’re facing a new zeitgeist that includes a shocking level of hate speech on X (most of which feels strikingly unironic) and a peculiar breed of misogynistic social media influencers telling our young men that “women shouldn’t vote” and that we “bear responsibility for our [own] sexual assault.” Among other fascinating developments.
These examples of our zeitgeist were chosen for no reason other than because they’re kind of weird. Posting racist statements without shame on the most public platform in history is weird. The fact that someone like Andrew Tate has a cult-like following and is even worth mentioning as part of any sort of zeitgeist is weird. A generation that was so publicized for our incessant activism on issues like climate change and LGBT rights now quickly changing our tune is pretty weird when you think about the last few years comprehensively. Culture and national feeling are ever-evolving, hard to document, and often, yeah, weird. So, the grotesquerie of Thompson’s narrative style, characters, and plot—as well as Ralph Steadman’s trippy illustrations—is appropriate. In fact, the “wave speech” is probably the only time the writing i Fear and Loathing can be described as “pretty.” That’s because I think Thompson understands the profound unprettiness of cultural whiplash. It can be thrilling but is only rarely digestible.
Besides using shock and thrill, Thompson never preached, which is part of why Fear and Loathing is such a compelling cultural commentary (when it wants to be). Our generation could benefit from its own philosophical literature as gripping and unpretentious as Thompson’s story of drugged-out degenerates in Sin City. Then maybe we’ll more deeply understand what it’s like to be living collectively in the burnout of our generation’s shiny dream.
By the end of the novel, you can really tell that Thompson met his contemporaries where they were —he offered his perspective on the end of their youth revolution in between pages of bizarre hallucinations and extravagant room service orders. Especially in our epoch of declining attention spans, inspiring sick fascination is an effective mode of garnering attention— when we pay attention, we, like Thompson, find those sober moments of necessary self-reflection wherein we realize our decline.
But maybe burnout and decline aren’t really the final note they seem to be. Yes, Duke is a deeply cynical ex-hippie who uses copious amounts of drugs to cope with cultural change. He’s a burn-out in most every sense of the word (if you’re going by the conventional sociological explanation of drug abuse). Yet, within the novel, he’s also a successful journalist who works for a big-name New York paper and has access to the things we don’t associate with the typical burn-out—an attorney and a seat at the Polo Lounge, for example. He’s paradoxically a burn-out within and without and not a burn-out at all. “Hippie burn-out” Thompson himself was an illustrious writer who is credited with creating a whole new style of journalism—burn-outs can still get stuff done, sometimes.
Take heed of the warnings of American destruction Fear and Loathing espouses. Yet I’m an optimist at my core, and I’d be remiss to end this analysis without reminding you that through cultural and personal turbulence there was a successful career and a pretty meaningful life (by most standards) playing in the background for both Duke and his creator. There’s no use for despair here. Maybe generational burnout is just natural and cyclical. Duke, cyclically enough, flees from Vegas and ends Fear and Loathing in at least figuratively the same place he started. Is it really such a bad place?
By Cara Eaton
