Hunter Thompson: alienation, anomie, and what's wrong with America

Hell's Angels (Ballantine Books, 1967) is perhaps the straightest and best book by Hunter Stockton Thompson, Doctor of Gonzo Journalism. It is more than sensational reportage about a "fringe group with unacceptable views". It is a study in the sociology of California in the 1960s, a dark omen of a darker future, not just for California but for all of America.

Near the end, in Chapter 21, HST has this to say about the psychology which informed the Angels' notoriously antisocial actions, and indeed their lives. The emphasis is mine.

The outlaw stance is patently antisocial, although most Angels, as individuals, are naturaly social creatures. The contradiction is deep-rooted and has parallels on every level of American society. Sociologists call it "alienation" or "anomie". 

It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.

But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President [Eisenhower, in 1960] feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular -- especialy among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place.

Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The lawas they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a  political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger, and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.  

In the terms of our Great Society, the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem.

The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything, it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years.

The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo.

55 years since Dr. Gonzo wrote those lines, it looks more and more as if the Angels were right to "fight the future". Today is the tomorrow they fought against yesterday. And, if things continue as they have, if Western Society continues to be led down the wrong road, the future looks even worse. 

Readers of  WWW sometimes ask me what I'm so angry about. "What is it," they write, "that you're against?" By way of reply, I can do no better than this oft-quoted line from The Wild One.

"Negro" or "black" or "Afro-American"? American historian weighs in

Joseph Chamberlain Furnas (24/11/1905 – 3/6/2001) was an American freelance writer, whose works include a trilogy of social histories of the United States: The Americans (covering the period 1570-1914), Great Times (covering the period 1914-1929) and Stormy Weather: Crosslights on the 1930s (which covers the time between the stock market crash and the attack on Pearl Harbor.) 

Mr Furnas was a Quaker, and a believer in the equality and brotherhood of man. Two of his books, The Road to Harper's Ferry and Goodbye to Uncle Tom, deal with "black" issues, notably slavery, which he viewed as an evil institution which degraded (black) slaves and (white) masters alike.

The Road to Harper's Ferry is an account of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which delves into the lives and motivations of the "Secret Six" who gave him a great deal of his support. Goodbye to Uncle Tom examines how Uncle Tom's Cabin, both as a novel and in its many stage adaptations, has shaped American attitudes towards "Afro-Americans" and slavery.

I've put quotation marks around "black" and "Afro-Americans" for a reason. Mr Furnas wrestled throughout his writing with what to call people of the coloured persuasion. In a footnote at pp 405-6 of The Americans (G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1969), he explains his preference for the word "Negro" to those terms which came before ("coloured") or later ("black"). 

Most of this book had been drafted before the recent shift frm "Negro" to "black" to designate Americans with discernibly West African genetic traits. Many Northern politicians and most of the communications industry [today we'd say "media". Walt] have adoped the term. I have...considered making the change throughout this book. Several rasons have deterred me.

For instance, there is no reliable way to learn how acceptable the term "black" may be to the many million Americans most directly affected. It has been used contemptuously for centuries, particularly by the British. 

Then the change seems pointless as a matter of logic. "Negro" is simply Spanish-Portuguese for "black". Neither term accurately describes either the skin pigmentation or (if "Negro" is used as anthropologists sometimes use it) the genetic makeup of most of the Americans to whom it is applied.

Either word could apply to the many Melanesians who are very disttantly if at all related to the West Africans from whom American Negroes descend. So "black" is no improvement if intelligibility is the test.

There is good reason to believe that the actual motivation, maybe often unconscious, of the current sponsors of "black", of the militant separatist-minded leaders a mong them, is to express alienation from all whites, even their most earnest well-wishers, instead of an effort toward higher accuracy of group-definition. 

Were I to make the shift in this book, I might well find within a year or two that a new token of alienation, maybe "Afro-American", had succeeded "black". 

And that's exactly what happened, except that "African-American" was more widely used than "Afro-American". Then, as "African-Americans" began to visit their ancestral homelands, as members of the Peace Corps or just as tourists, they discovered that they were strangers there, just as much as the evil whites. 

So we don't hear/read "African-American" any more. The current politically correct term is "Black", with a capital "B", as in "Black lives matter." I guess that's better than "black" because the capital shows that progressive people are giving "Black" folks mo' respeck... or something like that. [Should we call ourselves "White"? Ed.] Too bad Mr Furnas didn't live to comment on the current wokeness.