Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 79

A Countercultural Gatsby

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he has made his literary mark chronicling and lamenting the death of the American
Dream, his personal history has followed what Paul Perry calls “the cresting and
fragmentation of the American Dream. He starts off as an American success story:
an under-privileged kid from the provinces, a problem boy who never graduated
from high school, makes it to the big time as a journalist on his own highly
individualistic terms” (xii-xiii). It is an irony that Thompson himself must keenly
savor. Fear and Loathing documents the death of the American Dream, but at the
same time, it made Thompson internationally famous and is surely the book that
will be his legacy.
Notwithstanding Thompson’s personal success, it’s safe to say that despite its
pervasiveness, the rags-to-riches myth that lies at the core of the American Dream
is “in itself a chimera, without real substance, a delusion so strongly held that no
one dared question it, and so beloved for itself that no one wanted to doubt it”
(Tebbel 8).
W hether there was ever any substance in the American Dream is not
Thompson’s point; what is important is that people fervently believed in the
possibility, which gave a lot of people with no real reason to hope the inspiration to
dream. Naive hope on the basis of a fallacy may not be the best kind of hope, but
it’s definitely preferable to the alternative, which is no hope at all. It is Thompson’s
sad contention that for many Americans even the belief in possibility is now dead;
he recognizes this shift in our national consciousness and, as a result, his fiction,
particularly Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is characterized by its presciently
caustic vision of America, which today increasingly mirrors his 1971 depiction of
Las Vegas. Considering America’s current economic inequality—Bill Gates alone
has more personal wealth than the least wealthy 106 million Americans combined
(Andrews 174)— it’s not surprising that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is just as
relevant today as it was when it was first published nearly twenty-five years ago.
Thompson’s work astutely anticipated the fallout from the dream’s failure which
we are now experiencing.
Las Vegas’ image has changed significantly since Thompson wrote Fear and
Loathing. The criminal element that had long been associated with gambling in
general and Las Vegas in particular has receded. Las Vegas has become legitimate.
Respectable companies have snapped up and refurbished casino after casino. New
casinos, each one more garish than its predecessors, continue to spring up from the
desert floor like so much sagebrush. Families flock to Vegas year round; near perfect
weather makes it a great destination for any time of year, at least that’s what the
advertisements say. But the fact is, most people don’t go outside anyway, choosing
instead to dwell in the climate controlled, windowless, timeless (having no clocks
visible anywhere), re-circulated air environments of the casinos;