What I Am Reading: "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson is another writer who has been grandfathered in as one of my favorites, even though most of my consumption of his canon comes from reading it when I was a teenager. In that era, I enjoyed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72, but his subsequent pieces are a mixed bag that I nevertheless scoured for interesting takes on ever-obscurer political campaigns. I do, however, highly recommend his obituary of Richard Nixon, which I have returned to many times during this Trump era.

This is a book from a different era of writing, unplumbed by me: Hunter S. Thompson before he became The Man, The Myth, The Legend. This is the book that made him famous, and his writing is more straightforward than his gonzo style; and from what I've found of his media appearances he had also not flowered to his full countercultural aesthetic. It still had many classic Hunter S. Thompson elements, however: the deadpan absurdities in storytelling, the cutting allusions to larger political currents, and the social analysis of the anomie of his time.

Before going any further in praise, I must bring up the bad part, which I think would justifiably be a deal-breaker for some readers: the book makes constant references to rape at the hands of the Hell's Angels; and many of those references, including those in two long sections on the topic, qualify in my opinion as rape apologia. This includes statements that women lie about rape (generally and in specific instances), that some women want to be raped, that all men want to rape, and other such items. The subject isn't handled uniformly badly, but these segments gravely marred the book for me, and I wish they weren't in it. I wouldn’t blame anyone who skipped the book for that reason (or at least skipped Chapter 17 specifically)

For readers venturing past this: the book is about the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang in the mid-'60s, the time when they were first coming to public consciousness. One thing I was hoping to find, in a good introduction or postscript or online coverage of the book, was its place in the motorcycle canon. Motorcycle gangs are fairly mainstream now, and this time period would seem to be when that came about in the cultural consciousness; but how much of a role did this book play? It did apparently play a large role for Hunter S. Thompson’s career, the book put him on the map as an author.

Thompson rode with the gang for a year or so, and chronicled some of their doings (including a ride to the resort town of Bass Lake in 1965, which went off without a hitch despite perennial tension with small-town California police). He treats the group with varying levels of fascination, respect, and horror, especially at the end when they ended up beating the crap out of him. He never uses the term, but it seems to be that the book is mainly intended as a debunking of the Hell's Angels legend: considerable amount of it is given over to criticism of media and law enforcement panic and overkill about minor Hell's Angels trips and parties, though at the same time he does chronicle their commitment to property damage and general overkill in the name of score-settling. Later, the book turns to commentary on the group's mythology in the counterculture, which was short-lived and in decline by the book's end.

The Hell's Angels started out as just one of many small motorcycle gangs in the late '40s and '50s, made up of disaffected, blue-collar and urban young people who had no other place in society. Thompson traces their ancestry as (despite some slowly increasing level of diversity) white trash westward migrants, the same descendants of indentured servants who populated Appalachia and points west. Their ancestors weren't rugged pioneers, but instead the "sleazy rearguard camp followers" of the great western migration. Many members of this demographic, Okies and Arkies who had reached the ocean, settled down into middle-class suburban life after the purpose and drive of WW2 had concluded; the Hell's Angels are a subset of those that didn't.

By the ‘60s, their boorish antics and publicized (exaggerated, according to Thompson) crimes bought them a positive feedback loop of media attention, and interest from the over-intellectualized counterculture of Berkeley (right next to one chapter's headquarters in Oakland) and New York. However, after some time discovering LSD with Ken Kesey and philosophizing with Allen Ginsburg, the Hell's Angels had a falling-out when the antiwar movement discovered that their swastikas were not just for show. The only thing that the Hell's Angels had in common with the more left-wing counterculture was their sense of alienation from mainstream society. Thompson says:

"In 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. (Ch. 21)

In late '65, the Angels attacked an anti-war demonstration with the tacit support of the police; this is not the first time that Thompson points out that, despite their differences in temperament and relationship with authority, the police and the club have the same base mentality. Some even analyzed that they would be used an ally of the police as well in the event of racial unrest, given the group’s blatant racist leanings (a few positive relationships with individual African Americans and a Black biker gang not withstanding). A thought of mine is that an interesting link could be made between increased police mobilization and militarization in response to Hell's Angels panics, and those used later on antiwar demonstrators, at least in a California context. This came to mind because Thompson ends up sounding very anachronistic in Ch. 9 when he says:

"American law enforcement procedures have never been designed to control large groups of citizens in rebellion, but to protect the social structure against specifically criminal acts, or persons. The underlying assumption has always been that the police and the citizenry form a natural alliance against evil and dangerous crooks, who should certainly be arrested on sight and shot if they resist."

However, he does immediately follow with how:

"[m]ore and more often the police are finding themselves in conflict with whole blocs of the citizenry, none of the criminals in the traditional sense of the word, but many as potentially dangerous - to the police - as any armed felon...It may be that America is developing a whole new category of essentially social criminals ... (sic) persons who threaten the police wand the traditional social structure even when they are breaking no law ... (sic) because they view The Law with contempt and the police with distrust, and this abiding resentment can explode without warning at the slightest provocation."

A real-time chronicle of the country shifting into one we find recognizable today.

There are a lot of other solid quotes that I could have included. Insights like these, and how "[i]n a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws," (Ch. 21, in the course of explaining the Hell's Angels' cultural appeal), and commentary on The Edge (“[t]here is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still out there”), are why I found this book interesting despite its retrograde opinions on rape and other topics. I am sorely tempted to re-read at least Las Vegas now, Thompson's postmortem on the ‘60s counterculture, to trace the development of the same disillusionment chronicled here. In fact, it even seems strange to me to see a discussion of the Hell's Angels in the '60s without closing on Altamont, and the role they played in the end of one cultural era and the inauguration of a darker one, of a decade (at least) of more alienation and more disunion. This book was published a couple of years too early for that. This brings me full-circle to how it needs greater contextualization, within the context of Thompson's later writings or in culture as a whole.