Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Thompson and his attorney drove to Las Vegas in 1971 with a trunk full of drugs to cover a motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference, and came back with the most formally radical piece of American journalism ever written. The prose is unhinged, hallucinatory, and completely precise — the unreliable narrator is the argument, because Thompson understood that America in 1971 could only be accurately reported from inside a state of maximum perceptual distortion. The drugs are not the point. The point is the death of the 1960s dream — the specific moment when the wave broke and rolled back, when the possibility that had seemed real revealed itself to have been a story people were telling themselves, and what was left when the story stopped. The formal invention of Gonzo journalism is inseparable from the political argument it makes: that the distance required for objective reporting is itself a lie, that the only honest account is the one that puts the reporter inside the experience and reports from there. The most important American political comedy on this shelf and the ancestor of everything from The Daily Show to CivilWarLand in Bad Decline — every satirist who has looked at American power and responded with laughter rather than despair learned something from how this works.