What gets lost behind the aviator shades isn't so much a brain seething with chemicals, like a saucepan left too long on the stove, but a pretty good writer. And more than that—Thompson's furious, snarling prose style was the perfect vehicle for a social commentary that trained its gun-sights in a 360-degree circle, a set of variations on the theme mouthed by Jack Nicholson (not yet wrapped in the image that became his own public shroud) in Easy Rider: "This used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's gone wrong with it." Thompson did have a handle on what happened, though, and that's the kind of knowledge that leaves one bitter—and in Thompson's case, incendiarially so—rather then merely wistful and nostalgic.
A country's niceness is measured by more than the ability to fire off one's household ordnance in the woods—another trait Thompson shared with Hemingway, though the latter was more likely to be juiced-up rather than cranked-out. Thompson's wrath as political commentator was more directed toward the Left than the Right, for dropping the ball that once, so long ago, seemed as though it would be an easy, inevitable run into the end zone of complete social transformation, dawning of a new age, etc., etc. If Thompson was rough on hippies, poor numbed fools that they were and still are, there was always the undisguised sense that he knew he was screwing up as well, the typewriter lost in a haze, the big book unwritten, the last ones dug out of the trunk or cobbled together from the short pieces he had left along the way.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas will stay in print, if for no other reason than to provide the brace to prop up the cardboard cut-out the author vanished behind. If so, fine; there's a passage in it that's one of the best in 20th-century American prose. The drug-&-cartoon-violence circus takes a break and Thompson, both the character and the writer, wanders out into the desert and can see the exact line left in the sand where the tide of the sixties broke and receded. Leaving him behind, doing again the job that journalists of his day started out with. Writing obituaries, his own and ours.