Generation of Swine (1988)

I read a lot of Hunter Thompson in the '70s but that changed in the '80s. He never seemed as effective after the ascent of Ronald Reagan. In fact, a critical turning point is even documented here. As far as the "Gonzo Papers" go, Generation of Swine is not as ambitious or strong as The Great Shark Hunt, but I have a lot of regard for it anyway. It's a collection of syndicated op-ed columns he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner during Reagan's second term. As such, the pieces are of a uniform length, and pretty short—I'd guess a little short of 1,000 words each. What I like is how he manages to compress his persona down to size, preserving his maniac shtick (I know I know, everyone says it was real), but sometimes working almost poetically with the form itself of the newspaper op-ed. The first piece, for example, is covering his assistant ("Maria") getting a tattoo, obviously an exotic activity in the mid-'80s. Even in its short space you're not sure where it's going, until you do, and then it's over, though the headlong momentum lingers. Mostly Thompson is covering politics in these pieces and unfortunately for all of us he's somewhat less than prescient. At one point he predicts the Reagan Revolution would be a dim memory in 2000. Instead it was more virulent than ever—still is, in the demented Bizarro orange form. So some of Thompson's projections, 30 years later, look more like wishing. The usual vocabulary is in place—"savage," "bull fruit" (a prison term I had forgotten), "depravity," "pimps," etc.—as well as the gray area between his joking and reality. He drops Ed Bradley's name quite frequently, but I'm sure Bradley never said most of those things. I feel sad when I read Thompson nowadays. Everything has gotten so much worse than even he seemed able to imagine. The period covered here is a funny little backwater, though it contains at least one key moment, as Thompson charts it, and that is the overnight conversion of Oliver North in 1987. First he was a skulking criminal (there's another Thompson term) about to take the Reagan administration down in scandal and then he became a hero of popular culture, simply by using his testimony to Congress to throw the now-familiar entitled white guy tantrum. See also Brett Kavanaugh. (North and everybody also had some strategic help in the ultimate cover-up of Iran-Contra by none other than Bill Barr, but I digress.) It's even possible to say North invented the tactic in a way. Fox News was not even around then. Better days, better days. But rapidly going bad. Thompson's account of hanging around in a bar watching TV news, as was his wont, seems poignant now when he realizes the yahoo salt-of-the-earths he's sousing with are on North's side. Generation of Swine has about 100 individual bursts of rapid-fire typing and some solid numbers and analysis about the period. But it certainly comes from another time than the one we live in now, and last time through I thought nostalgia was mostly what this book had to offer.

In case it's not at the library.