Why the message of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo masterpiece can be felt today in Ireland.

I finished the book this morning, the final on the credits on the film rolled by mid afternoon. In all my experience with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas residing on my bedside locker had lasted about a week and a half. It probably wouldn’t have been that long if I hadn’t been pacing myself. I was taking deliberate breaks between chapters, going out for walks to let the whole thing sink in.

I’ll make it clear, this isn’t a review. Fear and Loathing is a quantity almost above reviewing. It’s too far removed from “normal” standards to do a proper review on it. You’d need a Gonzo critic to do that, and I’m not one so sorry to disappoint. Where would you start on a review? The excessive drug use? Actually most people seem to start and stop there. To them it’s all about drugs and the glorification of. Of course there’s so much going on. Political and social commentary are rampant but I find there is no point in trying to evaluate the merits of reading this book. Just read it and then try and make sense of it in your own context.

This article is me trying to make sense of Fear and Loathing in my own context. The context of Ireland in 2014.

The book, set in 1971, only a few years after the “Summer of love”, the height of counter culture in the USA. Five years before, anything had seemed possible. The old walls were being torn down, the creatures of love had broken the barricades. Free love and drug culture would soon reign supreme. And then it all fall apart. Those at the centre were left clutching at their shattered vision of paradise and would spend the rest of their days trying to recapture their former glory.

Sound familiar?

Sure the details are different, worlds apart some would say but the happenings remain the same.

The wave crashes on the shore and the retreats to the sea. All we are left with is the high water mark.

In Ireland today, we’re looking at the high water mark of the Celtic Tiger. As someone who didn’t really see the wave, that water mark is all I’ve got.

The IFSC, the Ulster Bank Building, the Eircom Headquarters, Grand Canal Dock, the Spire. They all stand lording over streets littered with drugs addicts, unemployed and people struggling to make their way. Like in Las Vegas, counter culture of the 1960’s was visible but it was in a shambles. The same is true in Dublin today. The magnitude and quantities are different but the base result is the same.

We can stare at the high water mark and wonder all we like. We can wonder why the wave couldn’t had be ridden for just a little longer. People like me can wonder what the wave was like at all, never having truly been on it, on realising it was their was the foam crashed onto the sand.

It’s something worth considering.