The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their "ethic of total retaliation" against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they'd been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on. What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren't important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell's Angels, that kind of politics is "nearly impossible to deal with" using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left. [...] though Thompson's depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture -- one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals -- is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as "white trash" or "deplorables."
What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren't important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell's Angels, that kind of politics is "nearly impossible to deal with" using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.
[...] though Thompson's depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture -- one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals -- is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as "white trash" or "deplorables."
However at the risk of being dismissed as a white intellectual, it is hard to see hells angels as the vanguard of a new revolution: rather they are more likely the residue of the old, left behind by new technology and globalisation - trends they are unlikely to be able to reverse despite their ethic of "total retaliation".
Trump will have his day and wreck his destruction. It will make damn all difference to globalisation or its losers. Index of Frank's Diaries
Trump will have his day and wreck his destruction. It will make damn all difference to globalisation or its losers.
by Oui - Dec 5
by gmoke - Nov 28
by Oui - Dec 6
by Oui - Dec 41 comment
by Oui - Dec 2
by Oui - Dec 133 comments
by Oui - Dec 16 comments
by gmoke - Nov 303 comments
by Oui - Nov 3012 comments
by Oui - Nov 2838 comments
by Oui - Nov 2713 comments
by Oui - Nov 2511 comments
by Oui - Nov 24
by Oui - Nov 221 comment
by Oui - Nov 22
by Oui - Nov 2119 comments
by Oui - Nov 1615 comments
by Oui - Nov 154 comments
by Oui - Nov 1319 comments
by Oui - Nov 1224 comments