Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 69

A Countercultural Gatsby: Hunter S. Thompson’s F ear an d L oathing in Las Vegas, the Death of the American Dream and the Rise of Las Vegas, USA Between AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left of what Scott Fitzgerald called “a fresh green breast of the new world.” That was in the last lines of The Great Gatsby, some of the highest and purest and cleanest words ever written about the real beauty of what they were just beginning to call back then, the American Dream, and all its magic and possibilities... So let’s have a look at how the big boys write. Stand Back. As the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware o f the old island here that flowered once for Dutch Sailor s eyes—a fresh green breast o f the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made wayfor Gatsby s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest o f all human drama; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence o f this continent, compelled into aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. Those lines never would have been written if Daisy had been a carrier of AIDS, or if Gatsby’s lonely swimming pool took on a crust of poison water every time it rained. Hunter S. Thompson {Swine 258-59) The American Dream. We hear it spoken of all our lives. It’s an idea that is as elusive as it is pervasive. The term is invariably bandied about in an undefined context, particularly in election years. Nevertheless, when candidates speak of it, they usually receive a generous round of applause. It seems to be a given that all Americans have an inherent understanding of the American Dream, or perhaps we all agree to define it personally. At the least, it seems as if the idea of the American Dream is something we all assume to have in common. But how do people define the American Dream? There are, of course, many possible definitions, but it can be argued that even today the single most accepted definition of the American Dream is found in the rags to riches myth of Horatio Alger, which, according to Alger biographer John Tebbel, is rooted in the belief “that the United States is a place