***Once Again, On Fear and Loathing-Hunter Thompson’s Kingdom Of Fear

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century, Hunter S. Thompson, Random House, 2003

No question in his prime, in the time of The Hell’s Angels, the early Rolling Stone pieces, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail 1972, the late Hunter Thompson, with, perhaps, Tom Wolfe, was the premier journalist/writer/social observer of what I call the Generation of ’68. That is a voice for those came of age in the late 1950s, and of political age in the mid-1960s. In those days everything Thompson touched, and touched on; the jail-break from our parents’ way of doing business in the world, the break-out from the social and political conventions they had established, and our struggles to create a world that made sense to us, and that we were instrumental in creating rang a bell in every thoughtful young rebel’s head.

For a while we all traveled the same path until the high hopes of the 1960s fizzled out from ennui and our own outlandish dreams. If Thompson was not, and could not be, a fellow- traveler of all that he certainly was a chief chronicler. And then his muse kind of let him down more often than not and as the uneven quality of articles and sketches in the book under review, Kingdom of Fear, put together toward the end of his career testifies to.

His screeds about the right-wing drift in America over the period since that halcyon 1960s dream, his skewering of the justice system both of what was happening nationally with the elevation of Justice Thomas and of his own personal bouts with the law and his sent-up, of all things, of the wealthy Palm Beach and polo circuits scenes are vintage Thompson. The rest though, the commentary on national politics, seemed very dated and old hat as against that fresh madness that he created during the 1972 presidential campaign. On that scene he got catch in an endless niche like had happened to Theodore White before him after his seminal work the 1960 presidential campaign. If you have not read Thompson go back to the works mentioned at the beginning of this review. If you are desperately need to read everything that mad man wrote then grab this one. Enough said.