I’m micro-teaching next week, and I’m having my classmates read selections from “Winter Dreams,” which, if you know me, you’ve probably heard me go on about. In preparation of teaching this, of course, I’ve been rereading parts of Gatsby—for the first time in years. This passage really struck me, from the closing pages. Tom has just explained to Nick why he felt justified in sending Wilson off to murder Gatsby:
I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .
You can read this as about Bush, as about the GOP in general, as about UofC undergrads, or as about people I’m more personally involved with.
Thing is, as every good fan of HST knows, Fitzgerald was a crucial influence on him (as I hint here), and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was imagined by the author as a new Gatsby. See how much the above matches this:
No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit … What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
And then, does it feel so different than what we have today? Of course not. As I recently quoted Benjamin:
The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the [current] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
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