Dreaming of America: the Destruction of the American Dream
The sub-title of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” – and the word “savage” suggests Thompson’s overall feelings about the American Dream: he disapproves of it. The epigraph to the book is important too. It is a quotation from the English man of letters Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” In the context of the book, this implies that Duke and Dr. Gonzo turn themselves into beasts in order to cope with the sordid materialistic betrayal of the American Dream that Las Vegas represents. It is as though being completely high is the only way to make sense of this bizarre world – Las Vegas. Thompson at once criticizes the conventional notion of the American Dream, and its manifestation in Las Vegas and modern American culture, even in the foreign policy of the United States, while at the same time offering an alternative interpretation of what constitutes the American Dream, by looking back fondly to the hope of the 1960s.
Towards the end of the book there is a hilarious episode in Part Two, Chapter 9, when Duke and Gonzo stop at a taco stand and tell the chef and waitress: “We’re looking for the American dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area” (Thompson, 164). There follows a bizarre, banal and very matter-of-fact conversation between the chef and the waitress who decide between them that such a place exists nearby: it is the “Old Psychiatrist’s Club, it’s on Paradise” (Thompson, 165), but the chef warns them”the only people who hang out there is a bunch of pushers, peddlers, uppers and downers, and all that stuff.” (Thompson, 165). At the end of the chapter they finally locate it and find
A huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds. The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had “burned down about three years ago.” (Thompson, 168)
This is clearly symbolic of what has become of the American Dream, according to Thompson it is “a vacant lot full of tall weeds” – broken, useless, run-down, discredited.
The intention of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is largely satirical, and, despite most of the book being taken up with the hallucinatory experiences of Dr. Duke and Gonzo in Las Vegas, we are never allowed to forget the real America that surrounds them: that this is 1971, that Nixon is president, that the United State are engaged in wars in south east Asia and that the promise of the 1960s has ended in failure. Early on Thompson refers to “the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971” (Thompson, 23) and towards the end of the book he mentions “this doomstruck era of Nixon.” (Thompson, 178) Thompson makes frequent ironic references to Horatio Alger, the fictional embodiment of the American Dream, and, as a counterpoint, makes repeated allusions to the lyrics of songs by Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones in particular. Just before they leave Los Angeles we are told:
The TV news was about the Laos invasion – a series of horrifying disasters: explosions and twisted wreckage, men fleeing in terror, Pentagon generals babbling insane lies. (Thompson, 29)
On the same page Thompson refers to Lieutenant Calley, recalling the My Lai atrocity of the Vietnam War. As Maier writes (61) : “Thompson never stopped criticizing his nation for losing touch with the most basic American values and giving up the original American dream of freedom for the fake reality of power and wealth. “ Later in the text Thompson reads of Muhammad Ali:
His case was before the Supreme Court, the final appeal. He’d been sentences to five years in prison for refusing to kill “slopes.”
“I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Congs,” he said.
Five years. (Thompson, 74)
Corrupt politics, destructive warfare, imperialistic expansion – compared with these appalling things, Dr. Duke’s and Gonzo’s pharmaceutical experiments are presented as relatively harmless and anarchic, and as a legitimate response to the America they find themselves living in.
The setting for this story had to be Las Vegas, .and Thompson uses it as a symbol of American greed, corruption and materialism. Thompson makes it clear how he feels about it: “The Circus-Cicus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich.” (Thompson, 46) Las Vegas sells a false picture of the American dream: masses of people are still around at four in the morning “still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday n morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.” (Thompson, 57) The tacky commercialism is summed up by the souvenirs that Duke buy at the airport Part One, Chapter 9: “Complete shit, souvenirs of Las Vegas, plastic fake-Zippo-lighters with a built-in roulette wheel for $6.95, JFK half-dollar money clips for $5 each, tin apes that shook dice for $7.50.” (Thompson, 69) Duke realizes that his behaviour in Las Vegas has been criminal, but places his criminality in the context of American materialism:
No mercy for a criminal freak in Las Vegas. This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails – eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. (Thompson, 72)
Maier (139) comments that Las Vegas represents “the vacuity of the American Dream,” and Thompson is scathing about the values it embodies – “In Las Vegas they kill the weak and deranged.” (Thompson, 104) The way Dr. Duke and Gonzo scam and trick their way through Las Vegas is certainly amoral, but it also reveals that Las Vegas is gullible and easily duped when faced with the illusion of wealth and power, and so their criminal skulduggery becomes an ironic commentary on the brazen and superficial stupidity of Las Vegas. Thompson is especially critical of the combination of money and power that Las Vegas represents:
A gold mine like Las Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power poles ... and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the power to protect it. (Thompson, 155-156)
At the very end of the text Thompson brings out the connection between Vegas and politics in this wry aside:
A little bit of this town goes a long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years. Some people say they like it – but then some people like Nixon. (Thompson, 193)
I like Thompson’s use of the word “say” in that quotation which implies they are wrong or deluded if they like Las Vegas. His attitude is clearly critical of Nixon and the overseas wars that America was engaged in at the time.
But what is the alternative? Does Thompson, for all his satirical criticism of the American dream, have an alternative vision? I believe he does. It is partly embodied in the references to songs that have already been mentioned; it can be seen in the opposite of all he criticizes – peaceful, tolerant, non-aggressive behaviour and a laissez-faire attitude to drug use. Very often in the text he speaks about himself as an outlaw or a fugitive, thus bringing to mind an earlier America where the American Dream was intimately connected with the dream of pure personal freedom, so in one sense he harks back to a pre-twentieth century version of the American Dream. Outlaws and fugitives are often idolized in American mythology. William McKeel, quoted by Maier (137), said of Thompson:
I believe his definition of the American dream was just being left alone. And nobody fucking with him. I think he just wanted to be left alone, to blow up his propane tanks, to fire his guns, to sit naked on his porch, he just wanted to be left alone.
But there is a more profound vision in the text. Thompson is vehemently anti-authoritarian, as this passage makes clear:
This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic... a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister... all the way up to “God.” (Thompson, 179)
Only once did Thompson feel that his version of the American dream was within reach. At the end of Part One, Chapter 8, he recalls California in the 1960s –
There was a fantastic sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.... the sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave (Thompson, 68)
In the context of that hope and optimism, Las Vegas in 1971 must have seemed like a reptilian freak show. In conclusion, Thompson feels the real American Dream has been betrayed by commercialism, and greed, and politicians; in contrast, Thompson tries to cling on to his own dream of complete personal freedom.
Works Cited
Maier, Sonja. The Death of a Dream – Hunter S Thompson and the American Dream. 2010. Munich: Grin Verlag. Print.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 1972. London: Paladin. Print.
