Fear and Loathing’s excess enacts right-wing paranoia about the counterculture.

Evidence

I would argue that the pain of being a man derives for Thompson not merely from drug excess, or even from the corruption of the initially idealistic drug culture Duke’s and Gonzo’s exploits represent, but, at a deeper, more comprehensive level, from the defeat of the sixties. The book’s extended orgy of drugs, alcohol, and violence, while based on the excessive actuality of Thompson’s own life (though not, apparently, of his life while he was actually in Las Vegas, or writing the book; see Fear and Loathing in America, 405–06), is more discontinuous than continuous with the sixties in its extremity of excessiveness: it is the fulfillment of the right wing’s paranoid fantasies about the counterculture, enacted in ironic, self-obliterating anguish. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 321

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fear and Loathing simultaneously dramatizes betrayed American dreams and embraces a surface-only reality — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 329