Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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And 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. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Thompson's most famous work and is known as Fear and Loathing for short; however, he later used the phrase "Fear and Loathing" in the titles of other books, essays, and magazine articles. The form of the novel could be seen as an indictment of the American Dream, post-idealistic ‘60s. There are snippets of news stories dropped into the text highlighting that ‘Nam was still ongoing, Nixon was in the White House and

McGovern: There were a number of journalists that were trying to get more information on it, but it’s tough, very hard to do. McGovern: Well, I think we did keep it up. I never did buy the line that we really changed our positions very much from the primary to the general. I can’t see where there was all that much of a shift.The book also makes fun of society and formal education. For example, Dr. Gonzo would say, “As your attorney, I would advise…..” Or, Raoul would talk about being a doctor of journalism. They didn’t take themselves too seriously.

Gilliam said in an interview that his films are actor-led, and the performance of the two characters in Fear and Loathing is hyper realistic but truthful: "I am interested in real people in bizarre, twisted environments that force them to act... to react against." [9] HST: I don’t know. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. What the hell happened and where do we go from here and . . .Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Their reaction to a horde of thugs charging through the crowd towards the Governor’s Box would be safely predictable, I felt. They would club the bleeding shit out of anybody who looked even halfway weird, and then make mass arrests…. Many innocent people would suffer; the drunk tank of the Jefferson County Jail would be boiling that night with dozens of drink-maddened Bluebloods who got caught in the Sweep; beaten stupid with truncheons and then hauled off in paddy wagons for no reason at all… This is the nut of the Pendulum Theory. It is also a recurring theme in McGovern’s personal analysis of why the voters rejected him so massively last November. The loss itself didn’t really surprise him. Not even the Eagleton debacle, he insisted, could explain away the fact that the American people had come within an eyelash of administering the worst defeat in the history of presidential politics to a gentle, soft-spoken and essentially conservative Methodist minister’s son from the plains of South Dakota.

After months of quasi-public brooding on the Whys and Wherefores of the disastrous beating he absorbed last November, McGovern seems finally to have bought the Conventional Wisdom – that his campaign was doomed from the start: conceived in a fit of hubris, born in a momentary power-vacuum that was always more mirage than reality, borne along on a tide of frustration churned up by liberal lint-heads and elitist malcontents in the Eastern Media Establishment, and finally bashed into splinters on the reefs of at least two basic political realities that no candidate with good sense would ever have tried to cross in the first place…. To wit: HST: I haven’t thought about it. But it would naturally have to involve a drastic change of some kind… Maybe just an atavistic endeavor, but there’s no point in getting into politics at all unless you plan to lash things around.Other references to the contemporary condition of America include discussions of Nixon’s perfidy about the Vietnam War. Of Thompson, the anti-war Democrat Senator George McGovern once said: