“Political gibberish is not a purely American art form, like jazz and safety blitz. But in only 200 years we have raised it to a level of eloquence beyond anything since the time of the Caesars or even Genghis Khan.” This is from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” The book is a collection of essays Thompson wrote for the San Francisco Examiner between 1985 and 1988. I’m almost finished with it, and I must say, the parallels between that time and ours are both sobering and depressing.
An increasingly unpopular Republican president was in his second term. The White house not only had an intuitive antipathy toward sex and drugs, but its approach to the issue was clouded by a narrow-minded religiosity. And let’s not forget the looming threats from “terrorists” in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This may be surprising to the younger generation, but the concept “terrorist” existed before Sept. 11, 2001, and even before the 1990s.
Thompson’s essays—fearless and funny first-person accounts of everything from his reckless gambling and arbitrary acts of violence to critical analyses of the White House and TV evangelists—are as much about Thompson as the subjects he covers. Such a high level of post-modern self-awareness usually takes away from the subject, distracts the reader, and leads him to become lost in the hall of mirrors.
But Thompson makes it work. Some of his best writing—and this has been the case since “Hell’s Angels”—is his beautiful, angry analysis of the media. “Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum,” he writes, “is nothing compared with the way the editors of The New York Times feel about the need for a major front-page political story on Thanksgiving Day.” What? Journalists need news in the same way doctors need patients? In an essay written a few months prior, he makes a similar point when he compares journalists’ constant expectations for big, wild news to “joining the Navy and expecting to fly gold-plated jets off the deck of a new aircraft carrier that costs more than Egypt and shoot Tomahawk missiles that cost $2 million apiece at crazed communist Arabs in places like Beirut and Tripoli.” Writing as a journalist, Thompson was all to familiar with how the media—especially of the 24-hour cable TV variety—is always waiting for news to come out, sort of like Elmer Fudd waits for Bugs Bunny, only to have him come from behind and casually tap him on the shoulder. Behind you, stupid.
Thompson’s essays are only several pages long, but he rarely sticks to one topic. One of the literary delights of the book is the feeling of a fast-paced treasure hunt for unique descriptions that beg to be stolen like “truffle-eating wine-sucking anarchists” and “the long screw of history” and “trying to rip souvenir teeth out of living sharks.” In his must-read essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell offers six rules—“break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous” is the sixth rule—in an attempt to save the English language from abstraction and meaninglessness. The first rule states: Never use a metaphor or any other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. Earlier in the essay, Orwell points out, “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.” Using original metaphors, similes and other figures of speech while expressing yourself clearly is therefore the ideal. Thompson would make Orwell proud.
Perhaps it is surprising to us that someone who smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey, shot guns, rode motorcycles and consumed almost every drug known to man can write such thought-provoking metaphors. But we shouldn’t be surprised. That’s what Thompson does consistently. He provokes us—as much, if not more, than the people in his stories. But for some reason we can’t get enough of his abrasiveness. Why is that? Because behind the madness and metaphors stand honest, straightforward personal truths that don’t belong to any political party or dogma. And if you find yourself disagreeing with him, as you certainly will, then you should at least be grateful that there existed a writer who wrote about politics without using—i.e. accepting—political language.
