Gonzo journalism is a lost art, a dead horse, irreplicable.
Sandwiched between Burroughs and Sartre, I read Hunter S. Thompson’s roman à clef: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
It works. You can almost hear the flies buzzing.
Popularizing the Gonzo approach to journalism, Thompson thrived in the cracks of the all-American sidewalk. The style was a sort of penumbra; an abundance of drugs eclipsed by beatnik notions. Its fundamental components included personal narrative, the rejection of objectivity, and a zany utilization of free will (and lack of impeding law enforcement). It was the perfect climate to get away with it.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the setting is Las Vegas in the 70s. Recurring depictions of the failures of the ’60s counterculture movement reflect the time. Americans got lost while trying to find the “American Dream.” Ironically, Gonzo journalism was branching into its own counterculture, and it met the same fate.
It’s always time and place. Here and now, we have a new medium to share information and news stories. Hunter S. Thompson has been popularized online, gaining a cult following. I can appreciate an attempt to revive the style, but I can’t help thinking that these “Gonzo today!” websites don’t hold up.
The whole point was to be unconventional and risky. How can recycling that mode be daring if bloggers exist? Everyone’s a Gonzo! What was unconventional to write about then is perfectly ordinary now, trail-blaze something else.
Thompson might’ve been the closest thing to a philosopher at the time. He pioneered a way of thinking that prioritized freedom in exercising one’s own absurdity. Anybody crazy or weird had an advantage in art: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
We can surely pick up the threads of the Gonzo mindset. I don’t know if it’s advisable … but it isn’t impossible. You want to continue the legacy, that’s how. Time will only progress, conventionality isn’t the same as it was half a century ago, using first person and being opinionated isn’t audacious.
Maybe it’s the lifestyle people find attractive, in which case, it can never happen again. It was an anomaly already during the time, but now it’s purely impossible. Recreating it would look fairly different now. If you can do it, evade the law, and not die, who knows.
“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
