Greg Wright The Literary, Political, and Legal Strategies of Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson: Intertextuality, Ambiguity, and (Naturally) Fear and Loathing For one not in the know, the list of names—Oscar, Zeta, Acosta, Carl Lazlo, Dr. Gonzo, Buffalo Z. Brown, Hunter, Thompson, Raoul Duke, King, and Stonewall—might falsely imply that the cast of characters involves more than two personas. Yet with all of these various quasi-fictional permutations, the "real-life" inspirations for such larger-than-life gonzo personalities remain primarily with their texts’ own authors: Oscar Zeta Acosta and Hunter S. Thompson. This overarching sense of multipositionality within and throughout Acosta and Thompson’s texts presents a viable model for understanding their dynamic ideological stances and unconventional approaches to (re)shaping the American political landscape. As literary strategy, Acosta and Thompson’s chaotic texts morph from scathing satire to civic criticism to nostalgic reminiscence, mirroring the bob and weave of a boxer (albeit a boxer fighting nearly everyone around him, bar brawl style) so that they can defeat the oppositional critics who would attempt to derail the essentially political projects in their texts. This frenzied style of attacking from a constantly shifting counter-cultural vantage point, "essentially the defensive, survivor’s style of the Counter Puncher," affords the two authors the opportunity to maximize their social critique all while deftly slipping beyond their detractors’ reach with feints to parody, ambiguity, even falsehoods. As Thompson formulates his rhetorical strategy, "politics—as used in journalism—[is] the art of controlling [one’s] environment ... In my case, using what politely might be called ‘advocacy journalism,’ I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment." Thompson’s comment focuses on his journalism, but even his sense of journalism goes beyond journalism. Caught within the confines of a stupefying, unbelievable America, his reportage flirts with fictionality almost as a defense mechanism, a (self)reflexive response to its unpleasantness. Is it true? Almost reluctantly, Thompson informs us: More or less ... and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I’ve decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this. Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily "more true" than Journalism—or vice-versa—but that both "fiction" and "journalism" are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. The gonzo style, then, is as much a theoretical exercise for the author as it is for the reader. Is it true? The response comes in the form of another question: Does it matter? The political implications may not in fact change even if the texts are complete lies; and the fact that Thompson’s texts interact with other texts presents further complications. Acosta also adopts a gonzo prose style similar to Thompson’s, where the form is as blurred by ambiguity as the content’s nearly indiscernible shifts between the author’s "true" opinion and comments made solely for shock value. And while Acosta and Thompson have their own separate political agendas, many of their different goals harmonize to the extent that both aim to (re)write their societies from the marginalized position of being both within those cultures and yet outside them as bitterly and severely detached commentators. Despite this larger framework of (counter)cultural associations, the question arises: To what extent can we study Thompson and Acosta’s works together? Parts of the texts may inform, support, and even produce one another, but do such facets allow for a coherent reading of the texts’ characters as inherently interrelated? When examining the range of the texts’ multiple perspectives and exploring where they leave gaps and where they overlap, Acosta’s corpus and Thompson’s corpus become strangely interdependent, just as Acosta and Thompson often relied on one another for support as friends and inspiration. This essay, in a sense, creates meta-reportage, criticizing the social criticism of America’s gonzo virtual landscape. Analyzing their texts together creates a literary web—linking half-truths, conflicting perspectives, and ideological tensions—that allows us to see the larger pattern of their inherently dialogic work. In order to depict the world in its craziness, Acosta and Thompson adopt a critical lens of exaggeration in order to accentuate the insanity, often coming off as jabbering extremists themselves. As part and parcel of individual lunatic writing, or gonzo style, the writing takes on its own distinct form, smudging the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gonzo prose occupies an ambiguous territory in terms of genre; what comes across instead of a clear stance in terms of form—journalism, fiction, autobiography, screed, etc.—is a concretization between what is truly crazy and what ironically inhabits the mere veneer of crazy. Oscar Zeta Acosta playfully explores gray areas of factual-fictional uncertainty in his texts. Throughout The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, for example, hallucinations appear as vocal, well-developed characters while "real" people often fade into the oblivion of the psychedelic landscape without any warning given to the narrator, the reader, or the characters themselves. We can infer that these phenomena are simply the natural extension of topsy-turvy world full of "bad craziness." In Acosta’s text, his illness—thought to be both personal and isolated—reveals itself as symptomatic of larger societal forces. As an effort to avoid malicious manipulation in "dealings with the world," Acosta enacts several models of social resistance, from trying to "outgringo the gringos" in high school to embarking on a "search for a unique racial identity. Here Acosta goes through a personal transformation by ‘trying on’ a number of personalities and weeding through the cultural confusion of his youth." And, true to gonzo style, Acosta presents his textual stance as willfully ambiguous, leaving us as readers uncertain about how seriously we ought to take these attempts and how seriously we ought to take the Oscar narrator himself. Early on, Acosta, as narrator and as author of an autobiography, informs us that his self-identification continually shifts along a spectrum of self-deprecating parody and mean-spirited antagonism with respect to racial identification. An episode near the autobiography’s beginning clearly illustrates that neither Acosta as writer nor as character will allow himself to be pigeon-holed by the racial prescriptions of others, prejudiced or otherwise: All my life strangers have been interested in my ancestry. There is something about my bearing that cries out for history. I’ve been mistaken for American Indian, Spanish, Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Arabian. No one has ever asked me if I’m a spic or a greaser. Am I Samoan? "Aren’t we all?" I groan. He reached his hand toward me. "You don’t mind my asking, do you?" "Of course not," I say calmly as I reverse the lit end of the cigarette so that the flame is cupped in the palm. I reach for his handshake. He screams like a woman in distress with her skirt held high. I puff my meanness as he licks at the burn and whimpers, "You sonafagun. You’ve burned the dickens out of my hand." "I know." "But why? I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know you." "I guess it’s my Samoan blood." Here, Acosta claims to "puff [his] meanness," getting a buzz as much out of the nicotine as out of his violent response and its subsequent rationalization as a component of his false Samoan heritage. More than undermining the stereotypical classification of the white gaze, Acosta’s simultaneous and intertwining metaphorical, literal, and textual journeys collectively serve as an autobiographical deconstruction of the parameters of ethnic positioning, if not of identity itself. At the end of the book, the Oscar character may have his life more together, but it is not through some overly facile realization of his heritage. Throughout The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, few characters even recognize that Oscar plays his own racial identity game like a long-running, one-man in-joke, but upon meeting the fictional Oscar character, Hunter Thompson’s fictionalized self, "King," more than perceives the ironic sport, he spars with Oscar at it. The insults fly, and the two seem to have a greater respect for one another without ever saying so, simply because they both know the parameters and unspoken rules of how to twist witty words into new conceptions of reality at fantastic speeds. Acosta describes the recreational manipulation of race, racism, and racialization: "I’ll bet the town’s just full of Mexicans now the way those bastards multiply," the King said. "Have you been there, King?" Miller asked. "We don’t allow hillbillies on motorcycles," I said. "They’ve just got dirt roads for their burros there," the King said. "And lots of restaurants," I said ... "In case we catch a gringo ... we like to eat them while the blood’s still warm," I said. "You Aztecs still practice those native rites?" the King asked. "Are you an Aztec?" Bobbi asked ... The young chick observed my entire body. "Oh, you’re putting me on. He doesn’t look like an Aztec." "Sure I do," I protested. "Take a good look." "I thought they were all dead," she said. "I’m the last one. My family’s the last of the Aztecs." "I don’t believe you," she said. "Besides, I thought you said you were a Mexican." "No, he said he was a fry cook," the King said. Moving at the pace of Abbott and Costello, the Acosta and Thompson alter-egos scramble to reinscribe each other’s identities into insulting territory, parrying and thrusting with deadpan parodies of serious stereotypes. For all the characters Oscar encounters in his picaresque adventures, only King seems to "get" Oscar’s slapdash humor and (re)visionary bricolage identity. Later, Hunter Thompson as author seems to understand Acosta’s dynamic so well that he questions its capacity for real social change, saying that "[Acosta] was suddenly confronted with the stark possibility that he had never really been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself—and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left." Here Thompson illustrates that he was not only one of the few people to perceive Acosta’s strategy for what it was, he was also capable of helping Acosta revise, refine, and redefine it. And beyond that, while Thompson mentions that perhaps Acosta could not speak for anybody, including himself, Thompson likewise needs Acosta’s help for developing a critical stance of his own through his contribution/participation. Because the gonzo narrative structure is so grossly exaggerated, its unbelievability manages to exculpate its proponents. The problems of such a literary smokescreen stem from the fact that the authors can only be taken as seriously as they ever were at their least serious moment. Gonzo writing is like crying wolf at eardrum-splitting levels, and Thompson has a hard time reigning in the insanity when (if) he wants to do so. Accordingly, after Oscar Zeta Acosta had been missing for many years, Thompson’s eulogy, "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat," necessitated a continuation of the gonzo template. By then, his style demanded that such a piece be full of his trademark humor and vitriol, not sentimentality. Thus, although "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat" attempts to tell us something about Acosta, we can never know how much is there as Acosta and how much is there for effect. There is, obviously, a fine line between labeling Oscar Zeta Acosta a "living American multitext, Latino lawyer yet also Latino outlaw," as A. Robert Lee does, and designating Acosta as "The fat spic for all seasons" as Hunter S. Thompson does. Despite this dissonance in characterization, the Acosta persona expands to extreme levels of excess on nearly any spectrum of measurement. In many ways, he personifies the maximum living someone can do, the limit-pushing and -questioning and -extending of someone teetering on the very brink of existence itself. Thompson muses about his friend after Acosta’s disappearance, addressing him: "Wherever you are and in whatever shape—dead or alive or even both, eh?" This liminal formulation provides Acosta with an unusual kind of agency; even though he might be dead, perhaps he will live on somehow, most likely through gonzo legend. Looking at the grand narrative of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s life at large, his actions and their attendant subnarratives eventually dissipate into the ultimate of ambiguities—disappearance into the unknown—leaving everyone who cared about him to grapple with "the latest of a dozen or so ‘Brown Buffalo sightings’ … Everybody who knew him as even a casual friend has heard stories about Oscar’s ‘secret life’ and his high-speed criminal adventures all over the world." Thompson leaves the loose ends as frayed and uncertain as any of the weird gonzo facts he is faced with, though his article attempts to elaborate on how Oscar Zeta Acosta re-revised the savage rules of engagement he and Thompson utilized. Earlier in their relationship, Acosta struck back against Thompson’s racialized conscriptions of character by actually threatening to stop the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with a lawsuit over his identity. The book unto itself statically yet ambiguously situates the fictional Acosta personality as Samoan, much like the misrecognitions from prejudiced strangers or from Acosta himself. Thompson explains that his "only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with." But it was neither libel nor incrimination Acosta worried about; he wanted full recognition of the role he played in the book’s creation, not any sort of legal asylum in anonymity. Acosta’s frustration over his portrayal branched out of Thompson’s misrecognition/misrepresentation of Acosta’s ethnicity, the racial identification game went too far since fame might be on the line: The only thing that bothered him—bothered him very badly—was the fact that I repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan. "What kind of Journalist are you?" he screamed at me. "Don’t you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Seas mongrels." In the article for Rolling Stone, we have Thompson’s words—which, we cannot forget, are always a fiction in and of themselves, even (especially) when he claims to drop his mask—constructing a version of Acosta attacking Thompson’s professionalism for disregarding the truth. Both men, as a lawyer and a journalist, after all, have complicated occupational commitments to finding ways of mediating the truth successfully. Yet Thompson, as the survivor, always gets the last word in his dialogue with the dead man, ranting that "The truth was not in him, goddamnit!" He mocks Acosta’s public façade of pretending to a "lifelong devotion to defending the truth at all costs" by writing that "a lot of people still ... would like nothing better than to dash out Oscar’s teeth with a ball-peen hammer for all the weird and costly lies he laid on them." Furthermore, Thompson purports that Acosta "never denied he was a lying pig who would use any means to justify his better end." But a positive twist comes in that the "better end" for Acosta was often defined in terms of a collective bettering. The concept and rhetoric of "truth" prove to be simply additional tools for social change. To people reading only Hunter S. Thompson’s prose version of an event, that account is the truth, or the closest thing they have to it; likewise, depending on how Oscar Zeta Acosta constructs a series of events, his clients will either go free or suffer punishment. Both of them shape the social reality of themselves and others in a very direct fashion. As Acosta writes in a private letter to Thompson: "I use the law, within its own confines (they know nothing of my extra-curricular activities). Possibly I make new law ... a thing that happens to one lawyer out of a million." This creative function of developing the law, even while allegedly working "within its own confines," helps Acosta spread justice as he knows it, and through endorsing politicians, criminals, and even their own lifestyles, both Acosta and Thompson author widespread social change. These two authors manage to appropriate the law and alter it through a variety of tactics, leaving a permanent mark on how decisions in America are made. While they both typically subscribe to positions of ambiguity, the (re)shaping of American law and opinions of that law intrinsically takes a definitive disposition. In other words, while Acosta and Thompson frequently opt for the freedoms of indefinite decidability and ambiguity, their impression on America makes judges out of them; their impact can be measured in empirical terms, and some of their ambivalence is irreversibly lost. Jacques Derrida theorizes these differences between indecision and solidity as paralleling the distinctions between justice and law. Derrida claims that one must not simply apply the law but interpret it anew with each "fresh judgment," and Acosta and Thompson often do so, trying to expand the law for the purposes of asymptotically approaching absolute freedom for the individual. Derrida explains the interpretative work of decision-based justice that the gonzo lawyer and gonzo journalist perform in their various interactions with the law: This "fresh judgment" can very well—must very well—conform to a preexisting law, but the reinstituting, reinventive and freely decisive interpretation, the responsible interpretation of the judge requires that his "justice" not just consist in conformity, in the conservative and reproductive activity of judgment. In short, for a decision to be just and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case, rejustify it, at least reinvent it in the reaffirmation and the new and free confirmation of its principle. The notion of the "fresh judgment" appears throughout the cumulative Acosta/Thompson corpus, and, while it might not seem so at first, they both have a vested interest in "the reaffirmation and the new and free confirmation of [the law’s] priniciple." In their continual efforts to redefine their socio-political climates, Thompson and Acosta push the law to its limits; they break the laws in order to make better ones, thus conserving the law even while destroying it. Their efforts to alter America’s legal landscape through repeated criminal activity culminate into a kind of monstrously extreme civil disobedience. Yet concurrently with their law-breaking (mostly through—but not limited to—drug consumption), they also champion their own underdog causes by ensuring that the law is both conserved and justly interpreted; Oscar Zeta Acosta heads, counsels, and publicizes numerous legal battles concerning Chicano civil rights while Hunter S. Thompson creates, funds, and promotes the Fourth Amendment Foundation. In their own paradoxical way, the cases of Acosta and Thompson—though riddled with fear, loathing, failure, and dissipation—present the American public with a renewal of hope in notions like the American Dream. If examining them together yields any sort of pattern, it is that by adopting a shifting pattern of identification in terms of the mediation between self and society, great changes are possible. The beauty of employing fear and loathing within an ideological system is that it is reciprocal; the writing makes its opponents uneasy. And although the power Acosta and Thompson criticize and attempt to appropriate has not yet come into the hands of the people in order to be disseminated yet, it still could. That is the hope we can take from their failure. Notes 1 Thompson, Hunter S. "Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room." Gonzo Papers, Volume 1: The Great Shark Hunt, Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, at 598. 2 ---. Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, Gonzo Papers, Volume 4. New York: Random House, 1994, at 17. 3 Thompson, Hunter S. "Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream." Gonzo Papers, Volume 1: The Great Shark Hunt, Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, at 106. 4 Padilla, Genaro Miguel. The Progression from Individual to Social Consciousness in Two Chicano Novelists: Jose Antonio Villareal and Oscar Zeta Acosta. Diss. University of Washington, 1981. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2001. 8212603, at 156. 5 Kowalczyk, Kimberly A. "Oscar Zeta Acosta: The Brown Buffalo and his Search for Identity." The Americas Review. Fall-Winter 16.3-4 (1988): 198-209, at 200. 6 Acosta, Oscar Zeta. The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. New York : Vintage Books, 1989, at 68. 7 Ibid. at 139-40. 8 Part of the difficulty with this playful exchange is that many of the derogatory names for minorities greatly outweigh even the most savage names for whites, in terms of hateful cultural baggage. So while the Thompson persona speaks from the privileged position with incredible disrespect for Acosta, Acosta never redefines Thompson any worse than saying he is a "tall, baldheaded hillbilly from Tennessee," when, in fact, he is from Kentucky. See ibid. at 137. 9 Thompson, Hunter S. "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat." Gonzo Papers, Volume 1: The Great Shark Hunt, Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, at 514. 10 Lee, A. Robert. "Chicanismo’s Beat Outrider? The Texts and Contexts of Oscar Zeta Acosta." College Literature. Winter 27.1 (2000): 158-176, at 168. 11 Thompson, Hunter S. "The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat." Gonzo Papers, Volume 1: The Great Shark Hunt, Strange Tales from a Strange Time. New York: Ballantine Books, 1979, at 498. 12 Ibid. at 496. 13 Ibid. at 503. 14 Ibid. at 512. 15 Ibid. at 511. 16 Ibid. at 514. 17 Ibid. at 508. 18 Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist. Ed. Douglas Brinkley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, at 240. 19 Derrida, Jacques. "Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’" Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson. New York: Routledge, 1992, at 23. 20 John Bruce-Novoa claims that it is the relentless faith Hunter Thompson has in the American Dream that continually leads to his fear and loathing. The society continually lets him down, but he desperately wants to believe in its tenets. Bruce-Novoa, John. "Fear and Loathing on the Buffalo Trail." MELUS. 6.4 (1979): 39-50.  © All material found on www.gregwright.info is copyright protected by Greg Wright and may not be reproduced or used in any way without his express, written permission. Thank you.