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