kleph
16-04-2007, 11:19 PM
The wail of the banshee was loud and long and glorious but it ended with a pathetic bang in front of a typewriter one winter’s afternoon in Woody Creek, Colorado. It is saddening that the excesses of Hunter S. Thompson will probably overshadow the subtle and sharp skills he could bring to bear when he wished, but we have to print the legend, do we not?
Much as with All the President’s Men (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1&v_blog_entry_id=507), I was lucky to find Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 after I had been clasped in the sweaty embrace of journalism. Having been weaned intellectually in the harsh intellectualism of Wittgenstein and Hegel so I was little tempted to follow the book's frantic flights of fancy.
But the ability to pull the curtain away to reveal the great and powerful whatsis? Now that I was very keen to imitate.
Because if, as I have previously asserted, All the President’s Men is a blueprint on how journalists can do deadline work, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is an excellent instructional guide for the neophyte journalist on how to handle beat work. The hard part for the impressionable young reporter is to learn from it rather than imitate it.
Of course that is not always so simple due to the fact the book is much more famous for being an example of Thompson’s famed Gonzo Journalism. Yet Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is a decidedly different work than the New Journalism masterpieces Hells Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Because it was penned as the novelty of this strange experiment began to wear off, there began to be a nagging suspicion about the where all this was actually heading.
Instead of trying to outdo himself (a temptation he latter succumed to fully), Thompson had the brilliance to use his horrible fear of the deadline to keep his senses pure. The work is a collection of his articles that were serialized in Rolling Stone magazine throughout 1972.
Using a first-generation fax machine Thompson pushed deadlines to their absolute limits – often just hours before the magazine went to press. You have whole sections where his notes and errata were assembled by editors at the other end and, in some cases, simply his observations spoken into a tape recorder and rushed off to a stenographer and immediately into print.
It fit his now-famous Gonzo style to a ‘T’ which triumphed, as the late Kurt Vonnegut observed, in becoming “the literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken.”
The advantage was that his excesses seep out and saturate the entire book but don’t overwhelm the work. Oddly, its originality is clearer due to the disorganization. And his unerring sense of what is important in the skewed mess he observes is allowed to surface without being swallowed by the non- sequiturs and strange lines of thoughts he can be prone to at times.
The campaign trail turned out to be a ripe subject for Thompson partially because its inanities and asinine hypocrisy had yet to be truly lanced like the sickening boil it was.
“He once said people will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,” said Thompson’s editor at Rolling Stone, Robert Love. “And he was right."
And that was partly because the very business they partake in is so absurd and there is such an air of gravitas by the people involved. The problem is that at a certain point the public passes a threshold of astonishment and simply accepts the sick drama as status quo. This was where Thompson’s feverish brilliance fell on fallow earth.
With a self confessed agenda to “learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign” while writing “as close to the bone as I could get and to hell with the consequences” you would expect wall-to-wall Thompson-esque anarchy. What you get is one of the more perceptive analysis of what actually goes into the process of how one becomes a presidential nominee and how that process is covered by the press.
So why is this so instructive for the cub reporter taking on their first beat? Well, Thompson’s quest for truth means he omits nothing, and that’s often where something happens that everyone else tends to miss.
In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 you get the mundane agonies of the beat reporter. Getting credentials, fighting the rumor mill, meeting the ball-crushing horror of deadline (which, to be honest, you get the sense Thompson loves pushing his editors to the wall on.)
I’ve been to a few journalism conferences and endured the nigh-endless agony of various speakers holding forth on ethics. Usually these involve topics like “what is on the record and what is not” and speaker tend to use that starting point simply as an excuse to go into great detail about some big scoop they got once upon a time (a fellow journalist called this the "When I was in the Congo..." moment).
(After spending a decent amount of my time in school fighting my way through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason I always found it more than a little frustrating that the categorical imperative neve came up in any of these discussions, even though it would seem a frigteningly apt tool for use in this situation.)
Really want to know the state of things when you get on the beat? Thompson lays it out clean with a minimum of bullshit.
Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.” In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them- and to keep them as sources of private information – you wind up knowing a lot things you can’t print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.
To make matters worse, many of the times you can print what actually happened it’s too complicated to explain in a short straightforward manner a daily newspaper requires. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 Thompson gives a fantastic account of the brilliant victory by the McGovern team at the Democratic National Convention – a coup that pretty much every major news outlet covering the event missed completely.
Trying to understand the Byzantine reality of that convention on TV – or even on the floor, for that matter – was like someone who had never played chess trying to understand a live telecast of a Fisher/Spassky duel up in Iceland… On evidence, less than dozen of the five thousand “media” sleuths accredited to the convention knew exactly what was happening.
Of course, Thompson had the luxury of working for a bi-weekly publication but his point is still valid. But, why does this matter?
Because the authority of the press comes from it’s ability to uphold it’s own appearance of credibility, just as much as the politicians it is entrusted to cover. When someone comes in and starts explaining the absurdity of it all (for example, Thompson takes to calling the longtime presidential beat reporters "wizards"), it tends to ruffle a few feathers.
The problem with all this is, refreshing as it was at the time, perhaps the world learned the lesson too well. Cynicism is the watchword now. All is revealed and nothing has any meaning. Didn’t Thompson have a hand in all this by putting his own stake in the heart of the most vaunted ideal of American journalism, objectivity?
“Don’t bother to look for it here... Not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results and the stock market tabulation, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
So why make the effort at all? Because abandoning objectivism doesn’t mean abandoning the truth. And that’s what Thompson has in spades. Something Vonnegut summed up well enough in his review of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 for Harper’s Magazine that Thompson later said (http://www.owlfarmblog.com/blog/2007/04/kurt_vonnegut.html) the assessment was good enough to be the book's epitaph:
Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does. As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.
The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease. I don’t have it this morning. It comes and goes.
This essay previously appeared on my website klephblog.
Much as with All the President’s Men (http://www.kleph.com/blog.php?v_blog_id=1&v_blog_entry_id=507), I was lucky to find Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 after I had been clasped in the sweaty embrace of journalism. Having been weaned intellectually in the harsh intellectualism of Wittgenstein and Hegel so I was little tempted to follow the book's frantic flights of fancy.
But the ability to pull the curtain away to reveal the great and powerful whatsis? Now that I was very keen to imitate.
Because if, as I have previously asserted, All the President’s Men is a blueprint on how journalists can do deadline work, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is an excellent instructional guide for the neophyte journalist on how to handle beat work. The hard part for the impressionable young reporter is to learn from it rather than imitate it.
Of course that is not always so simple due to the fact the book is much more famous for being an example of Thompson’s famed Gonzo Journalism. Yet Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is a decidedly different work than the New Journalism masterpieces Hells Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Because it was penned as the novelty of this strange experiment began to wear off, there began to be a nagging suspicion about the where all this was actually heading.
Instead of trying to outdo himself (a temptation he latter succumed to fully), Thompson had the brilliance to use his horrible fear of the deadline to keep his senses pure. The work is a collection of his articles that were serialized in Rolling Stone magazine throughout 1972.
Using a first-generation fax machine Thompson pushed deadlines to their absolute limits – often just hours before the magazine went to press. You have whole sections where his notes and errata were assembled by editors at the other end and, in some cases, simply his observations spoken into a tape recorder and rushed off to a stenographer and immediately into print.
It fit his now-famous Gonzo style to a ‘T’ which triumphed, as the late Kurt Vonnegut observed, in becoming “the literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken.”
The advantage was that his excesses seep out and saturate the entire book but don’t overwhelm the work. Oddly, its originality is clearer due to the disorganization. And his unerring sense of what is important in the skewed mess he observes is allowed to surface without being swallowed by the non- sequiturs and strange lines of thoughts he can be prone to at times.
The campaign trail turned out to be a ripe subject for Thompson partially because its inanities and asinine hypocrisy had yet to be truly lanced like the sickening boil it was.
“He once said people will believe almost any twisted kind of story about politicians or Washington,” said Thompson’s editor at Rolling Stone, Robert Love. “And he was right."
And that was partly because the very business they partake in is so absurd and there is such an air of gravitas by the people involved. The problem is that at a certain point the public passes a threshold of astonishment and simply accepts the sick drama as status quo. This was where Thompson’s feverish brilliance fell on fallow earth.
With a self confessed agenda to “learn as much as possible about the mechanics and realities of a presidential campaign” while writing “as close to the bone as I could get and to hell with the consequences” you would expect wall-to-wall Thompson-esque anarchy. What you get is one of the more perceptive analysis of what actually goes into the process of how one becomes a presidential nominee and how that process is covered by the press.
So why is this so instructive for the cub reporter taking on their first beat? Well, Thompson’s quest for truth means he omits nothing, and that’s often where something happens that everyone else tends to miss.
In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 you get the mundane agonies of the beat reporter. Getting credentials, fighting the rumor mill, meeting the ball-crushing horror of deadline (which, to be honest, you get the sense Thompson loves pushing his editors to the wall on.)
I’ve been to a few journalism conferences and endured the nigh-endless agony of various speakers holding forth on ethics. Usually these involve topics like “what is on the record and what is not” and speaker tend to use that starting point simply as an excuse to go into great detail about some big scoop they got once upon a time (a fellow journalist called this the "When I was in the Congo..." moment).
(After spending a decent amount of my time in school fighting my way through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason I always found it more than a little frustrating that the categorical imperative neve came up in any of these discussions, even though it would seem a frigteningly apt tool for use in this situation.)
Really want to know the state of things when you get on the beat? Thompson lays it out clean with a minimum of bullshit.
Covering a presidential campaign is not a hell of a lot different from getting a long-term assignment to cover a newly elected District Attorney who made a campaign promise to “crack down on Organized Crime.” In both cases, you find unexpected friends on both sides, and in order to protect them- and to keep them as sources of private information – you wind up knowing a lot things you can’t print, or which you can only say without even hinting at where they came from.
To make matters worse, many of the times you can print what actually happened it’s too complicated to explain in a short straightforward manner a daily newspaper requires. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 Thompson gives a fantastic account of the brilliant victory by the McGovern team at the Democratic National Convention – a coup that pretty much every major news outlet covering the event missed completely.
Trying to understand the Byzantine reality of that convention on TV – or even on the floor, for that matter – was like someone who had never played chess trying to understand a live telecast of a Fisher/Spassky duel up in Iceland… On evidence, less than dozen of the five thousand “media” sleuths accredited to the convention knew exactly what was happening.
Of course, Thompson had the luxury of working for a bi-weekly publication but his point is still valid. But, why does this matter?
Because the authority of the press comes from it’s ability to uphold it’s own appearance of credibility, just as much as the politicians it is entrusted to cover. When someone comes in and starts explaining the absurdity of it all (for example, Thompson takes to calling the longtime presidential beat reporters "wizards"), it tends to ruffle a few feathers.
The problem with all this is, refreshing as it was at the time, perhaps the world learned the lesson too well. Cynicism is the watchword now. All is revealed and nothing has any meaning. Didn’t Thompson have a hand in all this by putting his own stake in the heart of the most vaunted ideal of American journalism, objectivity?
“Don’t bother to look for it here... Not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results and the stock market tabulation, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”
So why make the effort at all? Because abandoning objectivism doesn’t mean abandoning the truth. And that’s what Thompson has in spades. Something Vonnegut summed up well enough in his review of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 for Harper’s Magazine that Thompson later said (http://www.owlfarmblog.com/blog/2007/04/kurt_vonnegut.html) the assessment was good enough to be the book's epitaph:
Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does. As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.
The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson’s disease. I don’t have it this morning. It comes and goes.
This essay previously appeared on my website klephblog.