64
Popular Culture Review
While reporters for the mainstream press were writing conventional
news stories objectively chronicling drug experimentation and counterculture
life in 1960s America, Thompson wrote of his own paranoia, fears, weaknesses,
and follies to capture social upheaval. By writing of his own bouts with drugs
and alcohol, he became a mirror for the experimentation that was part of the
social fragmentation of the decade. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
Thompson and his attorney drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where he is to
cover the Mint 400 for a sports magazine. The story is not about the journalist
covering the news event; instead, it describes one drug-oriented adventure after
another in often surrealistic, stream-of-consciousness style. For example, in
discussing preparations for the journey to Las Vegas, Thompson observes:
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of
which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The
trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We
had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five
sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of
cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers,
screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of
rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen
amyls.49
As the journey progresses, Thompson realizes that if experimentation
equates with personal freedom, then the price for such freedom can be steep:
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket,
take the ride . . . and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than
what you had in mind, w ell. . . maybe chalk it off to forced
consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s
all in Kesey’s Bible. . . . The Far Side of Reality.50
Like Wolfe, Thompson examines characters who exist on the fringes of
the American experience. To chronicle their stories, both writers abandon all
notions of objectivity in favor of a subjective reality that focuses on the point of
view of the characters, or on the emotions and psyches of the authors.
Norman Mailer and Michael Herr: Impressionistic Interpretations of
Public Policy
Whereas Joan Didion’s reportorial landscape entailed an introspective
world of moral stagnation and ethical ennui, and Tom Wolfe and Hunter
Thompson explored the fringes of American society, the works of Norman
Mailer and Michael Herr examine the public sphere of the Sixties experience.
More precisely. Mailer and Herr use their own emotions, intuitions, and psyches
to explore the moral depths of American public policy. Like their New
Journalism counterparts, they remain the central characters in the narrative;
however, their differing approach is to test the ethical resilience of public
policies by figuring the factor of “humanness’*into the equation.