Someone take the motorcycle keys away from the guy with all the mescaline, okay?

Yeah, read­ing noth­ing but motor­cy­cle-themed books these days.

But Hunter S Thomp­son’s Hel­l’s Angels is more than a book about a motor­cy­cle gang. It’s a great piece of jour­nal­ism. Even when HST goes on a lit­er­ary ram­page here he skins away the lay­ers of lies and lays bare some­thing authen­tic. There’s a real dif­fer­ence between this and some of his lat­er works, like Gen­er­a­tion of Swine, for exam­ple, which may have been amus­ing and point­ed, but did not have the incisors that HST’s ear­ly writ­ing did.

Even *Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*, wide­ly hailed as HST’s mas­ter­piece, seemed to me only like a decadant roller coast­er ride. It was amus­ing, but did­n’t real­ly amount to much mean­ing­ful and did­n’t real­ly ever say much oth­er than «fuck the estab­lish­ment.» Even say­ing that, it nev­er illus­trat­ed what was wrong with the estab­lish­ment it vil­i­fied, but sim­ply took for grant­ed that author­i­ty was to be mocked and jeered.

In *Hel­l’s Angels* HST shows plen­ty of irrev­er­ence, but backs it with sub­stance and wit. Con­tin­u­al­ly he shows the press cov­er­age of the out­law bik­ers to be short-sight­ed fear-mon­ger­ing, in many cas­es com­par­ing the breath­less head­lines to the reports of police and pros­e­cu­tors. This book says some­thing about news report­ing in Amer­i­ca and about a mid­dle class of good peo­ple who are all-to-often often ruled by fear that I think is much more true and impor­tant today than when it was writ­ten in 1966.

Unlike some of his lat­er writ­ing where HST stands on a pedestal and looks down on his sub­jects in judg­ment, Hel­l’s Angels makes judg­ments seat­ed in the bedrock of a view­point with a moral com­pass. Instead of breath­less vit­ri­ol, Thomp­son comes through with scathing, on-tar­get ranting.

>Every­body has heard the joke about the lawyer who used a quill and an ink bot­tle to get his client aquit­ted on a rape charge. He told the jury there was no such thing as rape and proved it by hav­ing a wit­ness try to put the quill in the bottle—which he then manip­u­lat­ed so deft­ly that the wit­ness final­ly gave up.

>
>That sounds like one of Cot­ton Math­er’s jokes, or the wis­dom of some­body very much like him—somebody who nev­er had his arm bent up between his shoul­der blades. Any lawyer who says there’s no such thing as rape should be hauled out to a pub­lic place by three large per­verts and bug­gered at high noon, with all his clients watching.

This is pret­ty far from dry, unbi­ased jour­nal­ism. Yet even here it’s a far cry for Thomp­son’s lat­er self-indul­gent ram­bling. And what comes across is potent and mean­ing­ful as his books about employ­er and court-date dodg­ing road trips nev­er were.

High­ly recommended.