Generation of swine Book

At first I thought this collection of Thompson's San Francisco Examiner columns, '85-'88, was a shadow of his 60s and 70s writing, but it's not as bad as the first few selections led me to believe. In fact, it's not bad. In fact, there's a good deal here to chuckle over and enjoy. Each of these columns is the same length- approximately 2 3/4 pages in my paperback copy- and most of them include two or three thematically-related elements that bounce off each other with a sharp and dissonant but still pleasing and familiar sound, not unlike that of pool balls breaking in a smoky airport lounge in Phoenix or Denver, where a wager over a Dallas Cowboy's season rushing total or the speed of a motorcycle is being negotiated. Thompson as usual discusses politics, sports and world events in general, but in this collection I found myself most enjoying some of the hilarious set pieces, or just appreciating things like the way he could set a scene with deceptive ease:It was the middle of a slow afternoon on a cold day in the Rockies, and there were only a few paying customers at the bar, all of them deeply engrossed in their own business...they were locals, cowboys and gamblers, and the last thing any one of them needed was a high-speed Italian motorcycle.Nixon is here of course, in these pages that is, as is Coleridge, Frank Mankiewicz, Joseph Conrad ("a Polack with a twisted sense of humor"), Reagan, H.L. Mencken ("he lived like a Prussian gambler"), Susan Atkins, Sitting Bull, and "...the hapless Warren G. Harding, who cared about nothing except stud poker, rye whiskey and bimbos"- all the recurring mental characters Thompson used to try to make some sense of the world. The word "baleful" similarly recurs (quite often actually, clearly an important word for Hunter in the late 80s), as well as its adverb form "balefully."

Disconcertingly, Biden also makes a few appearances. We see him running for the Democratic nomination in '88, at least until he plagiarizes Bobby Kennedy or something equally dumb and unethical that I didn't possess the fortitude to commit to memory; but Thompson's treatment of Biden and the rest of these fuckers reminds me that one of the genuinely subversive things about his writing is not some of his more colorful language or wild antics, but his resistance to ideology, his refusal to ally himself with any one side, which would perhaps be even more subversive in '20 than in '88, though just as justified. Accordingly, I sense some apathy towards national politics here, towards the spectacle that Thompson made so compelling and endowed with such resonance in his book about McGovern and Nixon, but frankly it's hard to blame him for not getting psyched up about Dukakis vs. Bush.

What differentiates this from some of his earlier writing, in my view, is that these topics feel...well, like topics, instead of experiences that he has intimately lived and breathed. He seems like a man out of time. That specific era in which he came of age and produced his best writing has passed; he belonged in the 60s and 70s, but the 80s were a strange fit for him. Despite certain caricatures of him (including those made by himself) as a wisecracking cynic, he was actually a romantic and an idealist, and this was a decade of ruthless competition and greed, fit for a generation of swine, as he called it. I sometimes think that the reason I draw such a blank on the details of the Reagan years is that they must have been so depressing that they sapped anyone's will to write well about them, or even to live (even if, curiously enough, it was during those very years that my parents created new life, but that's a mystery for another day).

Thompson had in the past nailed the zeitgeist, in the Hell's Angels and in Las Vegas. He had been at the center of things- Chicago in '68, sitting in a hotel room in December '72 with McGovern and trying to work out what had gone wrong, once almost becoming sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket- but he doesn't seem as plugged in here. Maybe he was tired of it.

He says as much in his author's note at the beginning: "There are times- and this is one of them- when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? [If that's true], there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation." And as I read this over again I think of another passage, later on in the collection, where Hunter talks about getting his cable TV hookup, 200 channels, and worries about "the danger of too much input." Hunter, you had no idea what was coming down the pike. And I guess we don't, either.