Boozing It Up on the Campaign Trail

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is Hunter S. Thompson's account of the Democratic presidential primaries in 1972 and the general-election contest between the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, and the incumbent, Richard Nixon. The book features Thompson's mordant observations on American politics, in addition to a sharp-eyed analysis of how McGovern won the Democratic nomination, only to get crushed by Nixon in November.

The Democratic primaries in 1968 and 1972 saw the party's liberal wing clash with the party establishment over the Vietnam War, which Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had begun in 1964. In the '68 primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ for the Democratic nomination, campaigning against the war. Although as the sitting president LBJ should have walked to the nomination, McCarthy nearly beat him in New Hampshire and was polling ahead of him in Wisconsin; other candidates, including Bobby Kennedy, entered the race on an antiwar platform.  Realizing that he had lost the support of the party due to the war, Johnson eventually withdrew.

At the '68 Democratic Convention, after Bobby Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles, LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination in a deal brokered by party insiders. Outside the convention hall, Chicago police used tear gas and truncheons against antiwar protesters, many of whom supported McCarthy's anti-war campaign; the networks carried live footage of the clash.

While the police were beating down the protesters outside, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff gave a speech in the convention hall in support of George McGovern's late-starting bid for the nomination. Ribicoff claimed that with McGovern as the nominee Chicago cops wouldn't be using Gestapo tactics against the protesters outside the hall. TV cameras didn’t record the audio of Mayor Richard J. Daley's response to Ribicoff, but his lips could be read, saying, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!"

In the general election, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Humphrey by a margin of 0.7% of the popular vote, with one-time Democrat George Wallace carrying five southern states. Had the white Democrats who defected to Wallace voted for Humphrey instead, he would have won.

In a hilarious flashback to Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, Thompson imagined the crowd showering abuse on the inaugural parade as it proceeded through D.C.:

Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corp ... and as one time Presidential candidate George Romney [Mitt Romney's father] passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

Three years later, the candidates vying for the Democratic Party's nomination to challenge Nixon in November 1972 included Hubert Humphrey, the unsuccessful nominee from '68; George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota; and Ed Muskie, the Maine senator who'd won the support of organized labor and big city bosses like Mayor Daley. In February, during the New Hampshire primary, which Muskie was supposed to walk away with, Thompson came out as a strong supporter of McGovern, who was then a dark horse candidate. McGovern had opposed the Vietnam War from the start (although he had grudgingly voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964). He supported amnesty for draft dodgers and campaigned as an anti-politician who said what he believed rather than what served his political interests. To the consternation of party bigwigs, McGovern established himself as a serious contender for the nomination by nearly beating Muskie in New Hampshire and easily winning Wisconsin.

Thompson hated Muskie and the party establishment that he represented. During the Florida primary, Thompson gave his Muskie press pass to a drunk, acid-fried jailbird, the Boohoo, who used Thompson's credentials to enter the chartered train that carried Muskie on a whistle-stop tour to Miami. When Muskie gave a speech from the balcony of the caboose in Miami, the Boohoo pulled on Muskie’s leg and shouted for the "old fart" to go inside and get him another gin. The Muskie campaign revoked Thompson's press pass in retaliation for the Boohoo incident.

Thompson said that Muskie sounded like he had spent decades trying to overcome a speech impediment only to end up talking like someone in a narcotic stupor. On first hearing a Muskie radio spot, Thompson thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. He wrote in Rolling Stone that Muskie was secretly addicted to ibogaine, a hallucinogen that's used in African spiritual rites. He was amused when this baseless claim was taken seriously by other journalists.

Because of Thompson's enthusiasm for intoxicating drugs and his hatred of the political establishment, he felt like a foreigner in his native country. But he realized that this "sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new." He opened the chapter on the California primary by quoting a 15th-century poem in which Francois Villon said, "In my own country I am in a far-off land / I am strong but I have no force or power." Thompson had used the same poem as the epigraph for Hell's Angels, which dealt with a chapter of the  motorcycle gang that Thompson shadowed for a year. According to Thompson, motorcycle outlaws are socially useless losers who "make good copy" only because of their uncontrollable propensities toward rape, violence, and mayhem. But I think Thompson respected the outlaw's independence, however stupid and impulsive he is. At least while he is at large, the outlaw is the state's equal, not its subject. He recognizes no authority that limits his freedom of action.

Thompson drank a lot on the campaign trail, but the booze didn't cloud his account of the candidates' election strategies. It didn't get him arrested for DUI either, although a lot of his drinking took place behind the wheel. When he moved to D.C. in December 1971 to cover the campaign, he got half drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey on the drive from Chicago to Altoona. (28). Later he drove a rented sports car from Boston to New Hampshire for the February primary, with "a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling onto [his] lap on every turn." (58). At the smorgasbord lunch for the few journalists covering McGovern during the New Hampshire primary, he had three Budweisers. After McGovern sewed up the nomination in Miami, Thompson drank himself into a mean-drunk stupor and swam in the ocean, where a rip-tide swept him out to sea. (318). In May, on visiting McGovern's original campaign headquarters in D.C., he picked up some Ballantine ale at the liquor store next door; the clerk was willing to charge it to McGovern's campaign but Thompson paid anyway. (407). Before sitting down to write his piece on the Republican convention in Miami, he picked up two six packs of Ballantine ale at a beachside shop. (337). He finished the book’s final chapter during an all-nighter at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco, drinking Wild Turkey and coffee and smoking short Jamaican cigars, with the Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" blasting out of four speakers hung from the ceiling. (503).

By the time Nixon trounced McGovern in the general election, winning 48 of 50 states, Thompson was exhausted from the campaign but also hopelessly hooked on politics. He said he would definitely cover the 1976 presidential election, and he was going to look into trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Colorado. He did neither.

On the book’s final page, Thompson described coming across a McDonald's advertisement that featured inspirational remarks about persistence. Without it, the ad claimed, talent, genius, and education were useless. Thompson mocked this message. After discussing it with McGovern's campaign director on the phone he headed out to a bar called the Loser's Club. Thus the book ended. The ending struck me as a statement that Thompson had given up on influencing American politics. Nixon's reelection also may have caused him to give up any ambition of writing serious books. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 marked the end of his peak period. Between 1960 and 1974, he had written four major pieces of literature that were as funny as Mark Twain's best stuff; in the three decades of his life that followed, he produced nothing of comparable quality.

Review of Infinite Jest, Part 2

The first chapter of the book takes place at the chronological end of the story. Hal is competing at a national tennis tournament in the Southwest and interviews with deans at the University of Arizona for a tennis scholarship. Although Hal's first person narration is beautifully written, when he tries to answer the deans' questions, he makes sub-animalistic noises that sound like a goat drowning. They think he has a seizure and send him to the emergency room. There, Hal remembers when he and Donald Gately dig up Hal's father's head, which, the reader will learn about 700 pages later, is where the master of Infinite Jest is.

A few chapters later, Wallace introduces the protagonist and moral center of the novel, Donald Gately, a big man who burgles the homes of rich people to support his addiction to oral narcotics. On a September night two years before Hal's interview at Arizona, Gately breaks into the Brookline, Mass. mansion of a Canadian national, M. DuPlessis, who serves as liaison between Quebecois and Albertan separatists. The loot Gately and his partner, Trent Kite, gain in the burglary includes a non-master copy of Infinite Jest, which they fence and which the Wheelchair Assassins ultimately trace to Antitoi Entertainent (sic) in Cambridge.

In the hundreds of pages between the opening and the climax, Wallace builds intense, enjoyable suspense about the questions the plot raises. What has deprived Hal of the power of speech in the chronologically last scene? Was it the powerful hallucinogen, DMZ, that Hal's best friend, Pemulis, picked up at Antitoi Entertainent? How will Hal and Gately, who have completely separate story lines, come to dig up JOI's corpse together? Will the Wheelchair Assassins succeed in acquiring the master and gaining Quebec's independence? Wallace whetted my appetite for a mind-blowing plot turn that would unite all the story's disparate narrative arcs. Disappointment sets in in the final hundred pages, as Wallace goes deeper into Gately's back story and introduces new side characters and the reader comes to realize that none of the really important narrative questions will be answered.

Another mystery that the book sets up only to leave unresolved is the extent to which Infinite Jest parallels Hamlet. The title of the novel and JOI's eponymous film is taken from Hamlet's description of his childhood clown, Yorick, a "fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." Ellsinore, the setting of Hamlet, is haunted by the ghost of Old Hamlet, the hero's father and recently deceased king of Denmark. Enfield Tennis Academy, the setting of IJ, is haunted by the ghost of JOI, Hal's father. In both stories, the mother of the hero takes up with another man, who has an apparent familial relation to the hero, right around the time the father dies. In both, the second husband of the hero's mother succeeds the father as the leader of the community where the story take place. Do these parallels indicate that JOI was killed by his wife's lover, Charles Tavis, who succeeds JOI as headmaster of ETA? Wallace doesn't say.

Most of the book is devoted to Don Gately's effort to get and stay sober using the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The ultimate moral value in the novel is avoiding dependency on shit that you can catch a buzz from. The novel suggests that one should do anything necessary to stay sober, and the starting point is getting on your knees every night and thanking God for the day of sobriety that has just come to an end. Gately faults JOI for self-pity when the ghost of JOI complains to Gately that he was unable to connect with Hal and that his critics failed to understand that the purpose of his films was simply to entertain. It dismayed me that in the moral hierarchy of the novel Gately, a recovering narcotics addict, has a higher rank than JOI, a Renaissance man who managed to scale that "high ridge where the mountainside of 'scientific' knowledge joins the opposite slope of 'artistic' imagination." fn1 But Wallace apparently believed that Gately was nobler than JOI because Gately learned to live without intoxication.

Wallace's own life suggests the poverty of a moral system that prioritizes sobriety over everything else. He wasn't enslaved to any intoxicating substance the last two decades of his life, yet he found his sober existence so miserable that he hanged himself at age 46, when he was hundreds of pages into his next novel, Pale King, and married.

Under one plausible reading, JOI is a tragic figure because he cannot want to live without alcohol. This would mean the novel isn't anti-drug because it recognizes that some people are not constituted to live without intoxication. But Gately's success in getting off narcotics through AA's 12 steps suggests that JOI might have been able to give up Wild Turkey if he'd done the same, living one day at a time, praying to God, and going to AA meetings all the time. Wallace's positive portrayal of AA and his lionizing of Gately lend the book a moralistic tone.

Wallace was on firmer ground when he attacked the association between ironic detachment and hipness in pop culture. All the shows telling us that it's cool to be sarcastic and insincere alienate people from themselves by discouraging them from acknowledging that they have true feelings. Instead, they are conditioned to think that it is cool to feel nothing other than patronizing contempt for people who express genuine feelings and opinions. Hal's handicapped brother, Mario, says that pop culture can't depict death and pain with anything other than absurd situations that are intended to make "everybody roll[] their eyes or laugh[] in a way that isn't happy." Tragedy is out of vogue because it requires genuine feelings, and genuine feelings just aren't cool.

Despite its flaws, Infinite Jest is a great piece of literature. Anyone who loves the written word should love this novel. Wallace’s prose style is conversational, relaxed, and frequently obscene, yet it always reads like prose poetry, and every sentence deserves to be read out loud. The drunken monologue that JOI's father gives to JOI at age 10 before the boy's first abortive tennis lesson is among the best 20th-century American fiction I've read. In it, Wallace transcends postmodernism and puts himself in the same camp as Hunter S. Thompson and Kerouac.

Wallace's writing is full of useful but difficult words that caused me to break out the dictionary scores of times. And Wallace had a capacity for inventing fictional personalities that merits comparison to Orwell, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. The novel has dozens of realistic, complex characters. Although the book leaves unanswered the questions that kept me turning pages for the length of the 1080-page novel, the ending has spine-tingling beauty. For good reason the publisher overruled Wallace's decision to subtitle the novel, A Failed Entertainment.

fn1 The quoted line is from Nabokov's memoir, Speak, Memory.

Mad Drunken Americans in the Mighty Land

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road during a three week Benzedrine spree when he was 34 in 1956. He'd made several unsuccessful earlier attempts at realizing the novel. This time he taped together ten 12 foot rolls of tracing paper so that he wouldn't have to break the momentum of his "kickwriting" in order to change sheets.

He wrote frenetic, repetitive descriptions as if he was typing the words as soon as they entered his overclocked mind. He translated into syllables the notes of the tenor sax solos he heard in bee bop clubs. The story and the writing style constantly refer to jazz.

I expected I would disdain On the Road because I dislike improvisation. I decided to read it only because Kerouac influenced artists I admire, like Hunter S. Thompson and Ben Gibbard. I had a pleasant expectation of discovering a self-indulgent, badly written work that would prove the Beats were a bunch of pretentious clowns.

So I was surprised to find that On the Road is a huge amount of fun. It contains hauntingly beautiful descriptions of the American landscape. Kerouac's writing gives the land its actual scale. The reader feels like he is on the terrain that Kerouac describes, as in this passage about raucous drinkers in a Colorado mining town:

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent. (Part One, Chapter 8).

He relates the heft of the North American land mass in just a few lines:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast ... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (Part Five).

The main characters, Sal Paradise, who is Kerouac's alter ego, and Dean Moriarty, who is actually Neal Cassady, are admirable. Their energy never flags. They never complain. They constantly remind the reader that life should be celebrated.

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. (Part Three, Chapter 3).

Kerouac said, "All is mind." I think he believed that the physical world was a veil for the true reality that consisted of consciousness. He regarded his hero, Dean Moriarty, as God's angel, and saw himself as a lesser one. This spiritual outlook is incongruous when considered alongside Kerouac's alcoholism. He drank as hard as a body can drink. Sudden abdominal hemorrhaging killed him when he was 46.