Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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HST: Not necessarily. There’s all kinds of weird energy out there. The Youth Vote, for instance – the first-time voters, the people between 18 and 24 – could have altered the outcome drastically in states like California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Missouri… McGovern could have won those states with a big turnout among first-time voters – not to mention the huge dropout vote, the people between 25 and 40 who didn’t vote at all. What would Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like if it took place today? Call Uber when your car breaks down? Do people even look up from their smartphones to recognize that someone is out of their mind on drugs? You definitely can’t pull your car out on the runway to meet the plane anymore. Where are these hotels that will wash your car when you valet park? The Kent State University protests against the Vietnam War, in which four students were killed when the National Guard opened fire, occurred a year before Thompson published Fear and Loathing. May 4 Collection/Kent State University Libraries/Special Collections and Archives/Handout via REUTERS The 1960s

The two arrive in the lobby of the Mint Hotel, while still under the influence of LSD. Duke has bizarre hallucinations and acts strangely, culminating in him perceiving everyone in the bar to be giant lizards. Gonzo, who is able to keep a level head throughout all of this, signs the two in with press credentials, and brings Duke up to their hotel room. They later leave to get an early look at the Mint Gun Club, where the race will be held. While there, Duke meets Lacerda, a photographer assigned to work with them. I read this years ago and reviewed it, but it seems to have disappeared from my booklist. Did I blot my copybook by slagging off the author's major drug and alcohol habits and thereby get it deleted or what? It's not like the author could object as a) he's dead and b) he was proud of his prodigious consumption of substances that got him off his head. HST: Well, I would have preferred to write about this, but under the circumstances, I’ll try to explain. There were two planes in the last months of the McGovern campaign. One was the Dakota Queen, actually it was the Dakota Queen II– like “junior”– the Dakota Queen Second. McGovern’s bomber in World War II was the original Dakota Queen.There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… HST: Here’s a question you probably won’t like, but it’s something that’s kind of haunted me ever since it happened: What in the hell possessed you to offer the vice presidency to Humphrey in public? Did you think he would take it or if he did take it it would really help?

McGovern: Well, he cut us up in California to the point where we probably never fully recovered from that, either. The conference only serves to demonstrate how out of touch law enforcement is. The second half of the book follows much the same trajectory as the first, with the pair compounding their felonies of (statutory) rape, fraud and larceny.McGovern: Well, I think we did keep it up. I never did buy the line that we really changed our positions very much from the primary to the general. I can’t see where there was all that much of a shift. HST: I don’t know. It worries me and I’ve noticed the predominant feeling, particularly among students, seems to be one of bewilderment and despair. What the hell happened and where do we go from here and . . . A set of cosmetic items in the class-based first-person shooter video game Team Fortress 2 are directly based on one of the outfits that Raoul Duke wears in the book and the 1998 film, both cosmetic items belonging to the Sniper class. The items are named the Hawaiian Hunter and Tropical Camo in-game, respectively.