Gonzo journalism

Meanwhile, in MAGA land, things continue to get fucking weird.

And as the late, great Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turns pro." It could be the only way to account for Trump world's continued and desperate attempt to whitewash what happened on January 6th, while continuing to insist that the election was stolen.

The results, predictably, are frightening as frustrated MAGA stalwarts call for armed revolution.

Well, it means that the coup is ongoing.

Hunter S. Thompson's The Curse of Lono is getting a new edition.

This is the 1983 Gonzo classic where a Honolulu marathon assignment completely devolves into a hunt for a Hawaiian fertility god.

Classic Thompson.

It features the original art by Ralph Steadman and a brand-new introduction by Natasha Lyonne.

And then you look at the re-releases which perform the exact same function of legacy cementing but through the lens of securing their genre dominance.

Take Hunter S. Thompson.

For a listener who might not be familiar with his style, he's the godfather of Gonzo journalism.

He is.

So, look, as long as I've known you, you've been a student of media.

I remember you talking about Gonzo journalism when we were in college.

I thought Gonzo was in The Muppet Show.

I didn't know anything about it.

How do you see this playing out? How do you see it? Where will we be in 10 years time?

Hopefully you can't relate to the specific experiences in there because it's about two guys doing an insane amount of drugs and debauchery in Las Vegas.

It's written by Hunter S. Thompson, who's the creator of Gonzo Journalism.

That's not important.

You can replay it by Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion.

That makes, that makes total sense.

So the, the Gonzo journalism thing I think is, is worth discussing.

And that's like you being in there and being part of the story.

And I think that all of that is, is wonderful.

Yeah, the amplification idea of the gonzo journalism stuff is one side of it that I agree with how you framed it.

The part of gonzo, when I think gonzo journalism, I don't I don't first think of amplification and larger than life, although that's obviously what Hunter was famous for.

The thing that I like about Gonzo journalism, for anybody unaware of that in the audience, it's basically, I believe Hunter is credited with essentially creating it or or naming it or sort of surging it back into the zeitgeist uh but it's it's essentially journalism where the writer is not separated from the story like very broadly speaking the writer is not trying to separate themselves from the story they're not trying to take themselves out of the narrative and they are a key piece of the narrative So it's essentially, it's not even like investigative journalism of, hey, I'm Katie Couric.

And this is like, you know, I'm talking to these people to try to figure some shit out.

Not only in the music journalism, of course, that's what most of the readers were interested in, but also other kinds of journalism like their political journalism.

And that's where Hunter S. Thompson comes in, is that by going out on the campaign trail and reporting in this participatory style, as you say, Gonzo in his case, he was telling Rolling Stone readers, this is what I saw when I was out on the campaign trail.

I saw George McGovern did this and Richard Nixon did that.

And this is what Richard Nixon's people were like.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson.

Now, when a little peek behind the curtain this morning, I messaged you and I said, hey, is it okay if my dog Gonzo comes in today, right? And when I said that, you went, well, it's okay because it is fitting.

And I fully in my head was like, we're reading a spot book.

I was like, Dave's gone real, like, simple with it.

That's really good.

Yeah.

See, I haven't had much experience with Huntress Thompson apart from I did a journalism degree and so there was a lot of talk of Gonzo journalism, which Gonzo, my dog, is not named after.

I was going to ask, is it more of a Muppets dog? It's not even

But this kind of discussion of this feeling of the expansion of consciousness through drugs and what that is ultimately a lie.

And I think the way he goes about doing that, especially showing this relationship between the thinly veiled characterizations of Hunter S. Thompson as this character, Raoul Duke, and his associate, this attorney named Acosta, who he barely, again, disguises as Dr. Gonzo, Benicio Del Toro, like... they're basically the entire movie just watching them lurch from you know near sobriety to as far into the pale of chemicals as you can go um and that that is what this is about i mean did this i mean i hate to ask what you do did you feel like oh this is a personal resonance thing for me because i've struggled with addiction or i've gotten really like balls fucking high and like this spoke to me or you know anything like that i

I mean, you know, honestly, this was a work that that prompted me to be more exploratory in that regard, just because of like when like when I like first watched it, I was like nascent into like any sort of of any kind of like drug use.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, complete meltdowns of reality to the point where you start to wonder, like, how can a human body withstand this? Like these both these guys both should have ended up in the ER, you know, from the drugs had, you know, setting aside the fact that they get into some extremely dangerous situations.

situations and i think that's one of the things that's really that works about this is that like it simultaneously makes the idea of you know going on these kinds of mind-altering trips it seems cool but also they they don't like pull any punches on like how fucking terrifying it also can be especially with regards to Gonzo, who is like...

There's a large part of this movie that's about kind of this in vino veritas idea that the purpose of drugs is to kind of pull back layers of protection that coat your psyche and kind of let loose what's underneath.

And it's not the most fun to read, but it's almost forensic and everything is backed up and credible.

Gonzo is not that.

Gonzo is the

polar opposite of

that.

Gonzo is the kind of journalism that might land you on death row.

Well, but see, but there's an irony in there because in a way, right, like gonzo journalism is more true than...

the sort of forensic journalism you're talking about.