James E Hartley

Vonnegut Hits Rock Bottom

As I have noted in this space before, one of the (many) great things about the Library of America is that owning their volumes enables one to easily read an author’s work in the order of publication.

Read that way, Kurt Vonnegut has been an amazing surprise.

Many authors have written books that are all part of a longer storyline. Vonnegut’s books seem like they are all on different topics, but they are surprisingly the parts of a longer argument. Every book reads like a reaction to the previous book. It is uncanny. Each book stands on its own and you would never know that the book is the logical extension of the book Vonnegut finished before starting the one you are reading. But the linkage is there.

The installment of this ongoing saga which I just read was Slapstick. Not good. Not good at all. Indeed, it was a mess, rescued only by the fact that Vonnegut’s style of short chapters and brief paragraphs kept the book moving along at a brisk pace. The biggest question raised by Slapstick: Why is this book so awful?

The answer comes in Vonnegut’s previous book, Breakfast of Champions. Here is what I wrote about that book when I read it not too long ago: “What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page….Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.”

Now imagine that summary of Breakfast of Champions is correct. What comes next? If you have just hurled what remains of your broken self onto the page in a supreme act of nihilism, what do you have left to use for material for your next novel? Absolutely nothing.

And interestingly, starting with absolutely nothing is exactly what Slapstick does. The plot is beyond idiotic, neither believable as reality nor as an alternate reality or as an imaginary reality; it is just an incoherent mash-up of bits of flotsam.

Wilbur is born and he is really ugly and he has a twin sister who is also really ugly and they are both not intelligent at all but when they are physically close together they form a telepathic link and are geniuses so they spend lots of time in super-close and super-uncomfortable-for-the-reader-who-doesn’t-like-incest physical contact until they are separated permanently and Wilbur goes to Harvard and then becomes President of the United States but then the Chinese, who have made themselves superminiature people, start messing around with the gravitational force of the planet by making it variable on a day-to-day basis which destroys just about everything in the world except New York City which was instead depopulated by a plague which has an antidote contained in fish guts and, after communicating with his sister who died a few years previously when she was on Mars after having been taken there by the a miniature Chinese emissary who traded transport to Mars for the ability to read some of the works that Wilbur and his sister wrote when they were very young, Wilbur goes there (the largely uninhabited New York City) and lives in the Empire State Building with his granddaughter who for reasons unexplained just showed up one day and does absolutely nothing afterwards to explain why she is even in this novel.

If that sounds like a book you might like to read I have done a terrible job relating the plot. Maybe I should have included the pointless stuff about the King of Michigan and his wars against the great lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.

The plot (to use the word loosely), however, is totally irrelevant to the message of the book. I suppose this is one of the things that happens when you are a novelist. You have a message that could be summarized in a four word sentence, but instead of just publishing the sentence, you write a whole novel to say what could have been said in four words, but even the novel version of the four word sentence would have only been about 5 (or maybe 10 if you use a lot of adjectives) pages long, so you add another 150 pages of filler.

The Message: We all need friends.

The 10 page story written to say ‘We all need friends”: When Wilbur ran for President of the United States, his campaign slogan was “Lonesome No More.” The plan: everyone in the country will be assigned a new middle name which is a word followed by a number between 1 and 20. Wilbur ended up Daffodil-11, for example. Then, by law, everyone with the same middle name as yours is your brother or sister. Everyone with the same word, but a different number is your cousin. After the plan goes into effect, you suddenly have 10,000 siblings and 190,000 cousins. Presto! You are Lonely No More! You have Friends! You may not like all 10,000 of your new siblings, but surely you will like some of them and since they are your siblings, they will have to interact with you whether they like you or not.

That, let me be clear, is the most philosophically deep part of this whole novel and, yes, it sounds like something a lonely 8 year old would dream up.

Why? Why did this novel happen? As a stand alone book, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder that. The book was savagely criticized everywhere when it came out, so you don’t have to take my word about the quality of this book.

However as a follow up to what has come before, the book makes perfect sense. Vonnegut has nothing left. The increasing nihilism of all his previous books has left him with nothing. In the midst of that nothingness, a small lonely voice cries out. The small voice wants to be lonesome no more; that small voice wants to find community again, someone to love. Vonnegut hears that small voice and tries desperately to construct a structure which might allow that small voice to climb out of the abyss. That structure, shaky and horribly put together (how could it be otherwise?) is this novel. The novel fails as a novel, but does it work in giving Vonnegut a path forward? I have no idea yet. The next novel is entitled Jailbird.

Becoming a Link in a Chain

You will never write anything that is of even remotely the same caliber as what Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens wrote. You just are not that good.

Is that an insult?

I also will never write even a single paragraph which could bear comparison to anything in Shakespeare. Is your instinct to tell me I shouldn’t think that about myself?

One of the strange byproducts of all of us being raised and told we can be whatever we want to be is that we get a warped idea of greatness. Pick a random kid you know and ask yourself, is it really true that if for this kid to be greater than Shakespeare, all that is necessary is the desire to be so? It is true that the kid could be a writer; but is it also then true that the kid could become a great writer, a writer of prose so divine that it makes you weep with joy to read it?

Enter Plato’s Ion. The dialogue (rather short) is between Socrates (surprise!) and Ion, a professional rhapsode. Now that is a career which has died out. A rhapsode was a person in ancient Greece who recited the Greats, particularly Homer. (By the way, when we tell kids they can be whatever they want, does that mean they can become professional rhapsodes? Can you make a career doing dramatic recitations of Homer?)

Ion is, at least in his own telling, the greatest interpreter of Homer alive, delivering prize-winning recitations of The Odyssey and The Iliad. People laugh at the funny parts and weep at the sad parts and Ion merrily collects his payment. The question which puzzles Ion is why he is so amazing when it comes to Homer, but bored to death whenever anyone is discussing, say, Hesiod. Why doesn’t the ability to deliver the best possible interpretation of Homer translate into the ability to do the same thing with Hesiod?

Socrates explains:

The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. (Jowett translation)

The image there is perfect. Homer composed his immortal works not through the art of crafting great tales but because he was inspired from on high by the Muses. You can’t teach someone to write something as great as The Odyssey; such a work comes to the poet from the outside, from the gods or God. Then along comes Ion. Ion also cannot be taught to do what he does so very well. Instead, like a link in a chain, he attaches himself to Homer and the magnetic power emanating from the Muses, flows through Homer into Ion and Ion exhibits the magnificence of the Divine Inspiration. Homer is merely an interpreter of the divine muse. Ion is an interpreter of the interpreter. And, we, lower links on the chain are attracted to the divine message through the magnetic force flowing through Homer to Ion to Socrates to Plato to us.

You will never be as great as Homer. But you could be as great as Ion. Is that an insult?

Imagine for a moment an educational system which worked like that. Instead of a rhetoric of trying to turn every kid into a miniature Homer or Shakespeare or Newton, we instead say “None of you are that good. But you can be an excellent link in a chain passing along the excitement of a Homer or Shakespeare or Newton.”

The first objection is surely that we may be crushing the next Shakespeare. But, can the next Shakespeare be crushed that way? If Genius comes from a communication with the Divine Muses, then the idea that the educational system can either create or destroy Genius is pure hubris. No matter how well I teach, I cannot create the next Eliot, nor would my failures stop Eliot from becoming Eliot.

Instead of telling every student they can be great and that the options in life are greatness or failure, why not say this: “You should aspire to be great and you should know you will fail. But, you can become a link in the chain of greatness; by considering what makes Shakespeare a greater writer than you, you can learn to pass along the Divine Joy of Shakespeare to others.” Ion is a great rhapsode not because he composed verses equivalent to those of Homer, but because he did not do that. Instead, he discovered the inspiration flowing through Homer and passed that along to others. To do this, he had to immerse himself in Homer and because he did that, others were able to see through him the Beauty from on high which an inspired Homer passed along in verse.

We have lost this idea that being a part of a chain is a High Calling. We tell students to be great and when the fail, they become the equivalent of middle management, soulless drones moving paper around. Ask yourself this: who is the divinely inspired artist that everyone who meets you learns to see the amazing insights that artist provided? Jane Austen needs her own Ions, and truth be told, Austen’s Ions are everywhere and you cannot meet one without thinking you really should go reread Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility. But where are the Ions for Plato? Dickens? Newton? Euclid? Locke? Augustine? Dante?

Imagine a world in which everyone you knew was taught in school to find a link in a chain attached to a Divine Muse, to find one of the many Greatest of the Greats, and then to attach to that chain and pass along the magnetic force flowing through that artist. Imagine if we celebrated the idea of those who become the links in the chain, those who inspired us to learn just a bit more about plants or Virgil.

The world is an amazing place, full of beauty and insight. We settle all too often for an education which lacks all trace of that divine inspiration. Which is the better high school Physics class: The one in which a bored teacher marches through a boring textbook, but at least covers all the parts, or the one in which the teacher inspired by Galileo’s The Divine Messenger spends the whole year passing along the excitement of planetary movements, drawing students in by the sheer magnetism passing through Galileo to their teacher to them? The latter class covers far less material, but conveys the beauty of physics. The former class is the one taught in just about every school out there.

A year ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who is a teacher in high school who was having a difficult time getting his class of high school seniors to share his enthusiasm for The Brothers Karamazov. I had no solution at that time for the problem, but I think Ion points out why my imagination failed. I struggled with trying to figure out how to get high schoolers excited by Dostoevsky by imagining what would have happened if I had been assigned that book by my high school teachers. I would have hated it; they would have sucked the life out of the book.

But, now I realize the problem is not the book, but the whole way my high school classes were conducted. Now I imagine having this teacher who wrote me and who loves the book spending a semester doing nothing but sharing his love of the book. Every day is a fresh excitement as he reads out passages and captures the tension of the book. I imagine being asked to imagine what it would be like to have Alyosha or Ivan or Dmitri as a brother or to live in that monastery or to actually meet Father Ferapont. Imagine if every day in class was just swimming in that world with a teacher who was excited to show us the marvels. I think I would have loved this book in that high school class.

So is it possible that our attempts to cover everything in high school have crushed the ability to see the magnetism flowing from on high? What if the goal of school was to have every student find some link to the Muses and simply attach themselves to that link and let the magnetism flow through. What if instead of telling everyone that they can be the next Shakespeare or Newton, we just told them to find a Shakespeare or Newton and enjoy?

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How to Build a Happy Family

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy it its own way.”

I’ve never seen a study of this, but I suspect that is one of the top five most recognizable opening lines in literature. Anna Karenina could indeed be retitled: “Tolstoy’s reflection on what makes us happy.”

Come to think of it, though, maybe it is more properly Tolstoy’s views on what makes us unhappy. The difference between those two ways of thinking of the matter is rather large. Is your default state being happy and then it is things which occur or decisions you make which make you unhappy? Or is the baseline unhappy, and the question is how to become happy? Are the happy families or the unhappy families the ones worth studying? Which is the norm and which is the deviation from the norm?

It isn’t clear if there are any happy families in Tolstoy. Are Levin and Kitty a happy family? Good question for a collegiate paper topic; I have no idea how to answer it.

Thinking on that, though, raised another question—one which I was surprised had never occurred to me before now. Is a happy family a family in which all the members in it are happy? Or is it something different? In other words, can you have a happy family if some or all of the members of the family are individually unhappy? Conversely, can you have a family in which all the members of the family are individually happy, yet the family is unhappy? Is the family more than its parts? Is the happiness of the family equal to the average happiness of the members or to the minimum level of happiness of its members or something else entirely? I don’t know how to answer those questions either.

Maybe the problem gets simpler if we just think about how to attain individual happiness. But then we run into the Vronsky problem:

Vronsky meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is in the realization of desires. (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation (of course—why use any other?))

The eternal error people make. You have a desire. You think the fulfillment of that desire will make you happy. The desire is fulfilled. You are still not happy. So you try again. This process has been dubbed the hedonic treadmill, which is a great term. You are walking toward happiness, but since you are on a treadmill, you never get any closer to your goal.

But Tolstoy goes one step further in the analysis of this condition:

He soon felt arise in his soul a desire for desires, an anguish. Independently of his will, he began to grasp at every fleeting caprice, taking it for a desire and a goal.

This image of a soul desiring things to desire fascinates me. What if the soul is doing that at an unconscious level; what if you don’t even notice your desire for desires? All you would notice is a constant stream of desires popping into your conscious mind. Some of those desires are easily attained—“I really want to reread Anna Karenina.” Some are harder to attain—“I really want the Raiders to win the Super Bowl.” But, all these desires carry with them the promise that if attained, you will be happy.

Why then do all those things not bring lasting happiness? If your soul is just casting up desires to fulfill its own need for desires, then of course fulfilling those desires will not bring happiness. It just causes the soul to desire another set of desires. There is something deeper missing here, something which will bring happiness, something for which the soul is longing that is being masked by the steady stream of desires passing into the conscious mind.

We can hold that thought for another day. Let’s go back to the family. What makes a happy family? Well if you imagine all the members of a family are copies of Vronsky, then they are all individually chasing after these desires created by the soul’s desire to have desires. Each person wants to be happy, each person believes that a happy family will make them individually happy. But will it? If you live in a happy family, are you happy? If your desire for a happy family is realized, is it too only a grain of the mountain of happiness which you expected?

It would seem that the happiness of the family is not a stable state. If the members of a family all find their desire for a happy family is realized, then as soon as that happens, each member of the family recognizes that the realization of the desire for a happy family did not make them individually happy, and thus the happy family suddenly consists of people who are individually unhappy. It seems unreasonable to say that a family in which every person is unhappy is a happy family. The family is thus unhappy. Each family is unique in its unhappiness because each individual unhappiness is unique. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

How then can there be any happy families? If the happy family is doomed to become instantly unhappy, is there even such a thing as a happy family? Can we imagine a family in which all of the members of the family have individually realized not merely a grain in the mountain of happiness, but the whole mountain of happiness? Can we imagine a family in which each member of the family upon realizing that the happy family goal has been reached, no longer has a soul questing to desire new desires? It is hard to imagine that is a possibility.

The solution to the quandary must be in the way we think about what it means to be happy. If I think happiness is the fulfillment of my desires (the eternal error), then there is indeed no possibility of a happy family. But what if that way of conceiving the matter is the mistake?

What if a happy family is one in which every member of the family believes that the happiness of the family itself is the important thing, that the happiness of the individual is irrelevant? I no longer ask if I am happy; I ask if my family is happy. I no longer have a category in my mind of my own happiness. Set aside for a moment whether you think such a thing is possible for you or anyone else. Just imagine a family in which everyone thought like that. Is that a happy family? It sure seems like it would be. And, curiously, a family like that, in which each member is only thinking about the happiness of the family and not their own individual happiness, would indeed look just like every other happy family. In all those happy families, people wake up and only do what is best for others in the family.

Now that I am considering this, I think this is what Levin is groping for in the long rumination at the very end of the novel. The need to replace love of self with love of your neighbor. That is what would make a happy family. Why are families unhappy? Because we all have an impossible time replacing love of self with love of neighbor. It would almost take a Divine Love, a Love Supreme, to be able to do that.

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Is the Religious Right Really so Incomprehensible?

Sometimes it seems like discussions in this country are taking place in two isolated camps. Every now and then, that suspicion seems like a certainty.

As an example, I offer you Benjamin Friedman’s new book, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.

Friedman, a Harvard economics professor, was faced with a seemingly incomprehensible phenomenon: “the puzzling behavior of many of our fellow citizens whose attitudes toward questions of economic policy seem sharply at odds with what would seem to be their own economic benefit.” The puzzle is why people oppose things like higher tax rates and inheritance taxes. Even more unsettling is that those with this aberrant voting behavior “disproportionately belong to the nation’s increasingly influential evangelical churches.”

Shocked to discover this link between economic conservatism and religious belief, Friedman sets off to explain. His research led him far and wide. The bibliography in this book runs to thirty-four pages. Yet, somehow Friedman missed George Nash’s book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, which has a detailed explanation of how the unification of these two groups occurred. Nash should not feel slighted, however. There is also no mention of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Russell Kirk is missing. So is Richard John Neuhaus. We could make a game of this, but it gets old pretty fast.

Instead of reading all those books, Friedman spins a historical tale showing how thinking about economics has always been heavily influenced by religious thought. Once again, that is a deeply interesting question. How did the Greek thought emerging from Athens and the religious thought emerging from Jerusalem combine to create Western Civilization? Many books have been written on this subject. Those books are also not in Friedman’s bibliography.

Read the rest at The University Bookman.

The Gravity of Love

“Once Upon a time” is how all good stories start, and The Light Princess by George MacDonald is certainly a good story.

Is it a book? I have a book, illustrated by none other than Maurice Sendak of Wild Things fame, but truth be told, the story was actually a part of a longer book, Adela Cathcart.

As the story beings, you would be excused for thinking it is a rehash of Sleeping Beauty. At long last, the King and Queen finally have a daughter and invite lots of people to a christening party, but, alas, the King forgets to invite his own sister to the party, and double alas, the King’s sister is a witch, who decides to show up uninvited to the party and curse the child. But, (plot twist!) instead of a death curse, the curse is lightness:

Light of spirit, by my charms,
Light of body, every part,
Never weary human arms—
Only crush thy parent’s heart!

Not a very nice sister. Instantly, the child becomes Light. What does it mean to become light? Therein lies the tale.

The first manifestation of lightness is exactly what you expected; the child has no weight. Propel her upward, there is no tendency to fall, so you have to get ladder to pull down the kid from hovering up at the ceiling. Set her down and a gust of wind will blow the child off into the bushes over yonder. When she gets older and wants to dive into the lake, she can’t do it because diving into a lake requires being susceptible to gravity’s pull. On the plus side, she can float all day on top of the lake, simply by lying down on the water.

Being immune to gravity would be a cute little fairy tale, but MacDonald isn’t done with lightness yet. The child also lacks gravity of demeanor. She laughs. She laughs a lot. Indeed, she only laughs. Growing up, the child never once cries, never once is angry or depressed. Instead, she is perpetually happy, and laughing. No matter what.

Macdonald has a fun time thinking about the full implications of lightness:

“Well, what’s the matter with your child? She’s neither up the chimney nor down the draw-well. Just hear her laughing.”
Yet the king could not help a sigh, which he tried to turn into a cough, saying—
“It is a good thing to be light-hearted, I am sure, whether she be ours or not.”
“It is a bad thing to be light-headed,” answered the queen, looking with prophetic soul far into the future.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen.
“‘Tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king.
“‘Tis a bad thing—” began the queen; but the king interrupted her.
“In fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant—”in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be light-bodied.”
“But it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper.
This last answer quite discomfited his Majesty, who turned on his heel, and betook himself to his counting-house again. But he was not half-way towards it, when the voice of his queen overtook him.
“And it’s a bad thing to be light-haired,” screamed she, determined to have more last words, now that her spirit was roused.
The queen’s hair was black as night; and the king’s had been, and his daughter’s was, golden as morning. But it was not this reflection on his hair that arrested him; it was the double use of the word light. For the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. And besides, he could not tell whether the queen meant light-haired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was exasperated herself?
He turned upon his other heel, and rejoined her. She looked angry still, because she knew that she was guilty, or, what was much the same, knew that HE thought so.
“My dear queen,” said he, “duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning.”

The Light Princess is light indeed, lacking all relationship to gravity, physical, mental, or spiritual. Had the story stopped when the child was young, we’d have an amusing little tale to tell children who could then run around pretending they had no weight, laughing all the time.

But, eventually little princesses grow up and young princes stop by to visit. At this point we realize something startling. Love is a serious thing.

Generally when we think about young love, we imagine depressed angsty teenagers discovering the joy of life and becoming free of the cares of this earth as they dwell upon the divine attributes of the beloved. When we imagine older people falling in love, we talk of how it makes them young again, light-hearted and bubbly. Twitterpated, as one wise owl described this state of being.

But, what if someone had no gravity to begin with? What if it was impossible to become more light-hearted? Can such a person fall in love? The prince falls in love with the princess, but the princess is incapable of love. Love, real love, requires gravity. You can hear this moment of realization in ever rom-com movie ever when at long last the feckless young lad and lass suddenly realize that their comedic romp is actually a quite serious affair and the background music shifts keys. George MacDonald was there first.

Since this is a fairy tale, it has to end with the prince and princess living happily ever after, so how does the change happen? The evil sister (using a serpent, of course) drains the lake in which the princess has whiled away her life, and as the lake drains, the princess begins dying. The solution hinges on a poem found in the bottom of the lake:

Death alone from death can save.
Love is death, and so is brave—
Love can fill the deepest grave.
Love loves on beneath the wave.

The Christological overtones of the first line are obvious; the young prince must voluntarily give up his life to save the princess from death. Love is indeed death, and thus love is indeed brave. (And, can we just admire the pun on grave?)

When the prince gives up his life (or, goes to his grave) for the princess, she suddenly discovers gravity of spirit. Her tears flow and with them comes the rain refilling the lake (the deepest grave of the poem), thereby baptizing the princess and the land and suddenly prince and princess are drawn back up out of the waters into life. The Princess is no longer light.

All too often, we think of love and happiness and laughter as something opposed to seriousness, nd in doing so, we miss the whole point of joy. We love not because we lack gravity; we love because we realize how important other people are. We find joy in things because we realize that those things are grounded and real.

Laughter has the same problem. We think of laughter as something like what the Light Princess is doing before she discovers gravity. But there is another kind of laughter, a better and richer kind of laughter. We laugh not because we do not see the importance of an object; we laugh because we actually think the thing is too important and serious not to be filled with joy about it. I was at a conference last week in which the organizer noted with pleasant surprise that the discussions during the conference were among the best he had ever heard and there was so much more laughter than he had ever heard at a conference. I have heard people say things like that many times as if a serious discussion and much laughter were somehow at odds. But, don’t they do together?

The Light Princess cannot love because she lacks an awareness of the importance of love, the importance of life and death. You can imagine the polar opposite story in which the princess cannot love because she lacks the ability to find joy in life. As MacDonald notes in the concluding paragraph, we need to find something in between:

So the prince and princess lived and were happy; and had crowns of gold, and clothes of cloth, and shoes of leather, and children of boys and girls, not one of whom was ever known, on the most critical occasion, to lose the smallest atom of his or her due proportion of gravity.

The due proportion of gravity. A perfect phrase. In our rush to see life as either comedy or tragedy, we sometimes lose sight of the due proportion of gravity. Too much or too little gravity destroy laughter and love.

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Hell’s Angels are Coming to Town

“On Labor Day 1966, I pushed my luck a little too far and got badly stomped by four or five Angels who seemed to feel I was taking advantage of them. A minor disagreement suddenly became very serious….I got in my car and sped off, spitting blood on the dashboard and weaving erratically across both lanes of the midnight highway until my one good eye finally came into focus….I was tired, swollen, and whipped. My face looked like it had been jammed into the spokes of a speeding Harley, and the only thing keeping me awake was the spastic pain of a broken rib.”

That is from the postscript to Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. It was really the only ending possible to the book. Thompson, a young journalist trying to make his name, wrote a story about the Hell’s Angels and then decided to spend even more time with them to churn out a whole book. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that he would get beat to a pulp in the parking lot of a bar.

But, let’s back up a bit. Seemingly overnight back in the mid-1960s, the Hell’s Angles became a national news sensation. Coast to coast, the newspapers and TV were filled with tales of the terrors of a rampaging army of motorcycle terrorists. It was as if we had the modern media in the age of Genghis Khan providing vivid descriptions of the Mongol Hordes descending upon idyllic villages in bucolic settings.

This horde rose motorcycles, though, and not just any old motorcycles: Souped-up Harley Davidsons; really big motorcycles; really loud motorcycles. Imagine a group of those motorcycles with drivers in leather and nasty snarls tearing down the highway on their way to your town. You can lock up your wife and kids all you want; it won’t matter. That is some seriously gripping news right there. Guaranteed to sell a paper or some commercial air time.

One problem with the narrative: there were never really all that many Hell’s Angels. A couple hundred, maybe, split up over clubs in different cities scattered across California. They weren’t the only motorcycle gang at the time, but the Gypsy Jokers, for example, just didn’t have a name that sounded as threatening. Hell’s Angels. Marketing genius right there.

Hunter Thompson bought a motorcycle and spent some time riding with and hanging out with the Angels. What does he find? Well, if you turn you this book expecting riveting accounts of mayhem, you’ll be pretty disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong. The Hell’s Angels were thugs who reveled in their image and happily engaged in many a bar fight. An attack on one Angel was an attack on all Angels, so if you ever got into a fight with one, the whole gang would pile on. If you were a California bar owner in the mid-1960s, and a group of Hell’s Angles rolled in, it was a race between whether the profits from beer sales or the inevitable damage to your bar would be bigger. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If you were a young female and you decided to spend a couple hours drinking beer with the guys, well, you probably didn’t win that bet. Like I said, these are not the sort of people you want to invite over to your backyard barbecue.

But, were they a national menace? For example: the police in Ketchum, Idaho actually mounted a machine gun on the top of the downtown drugstore just in case the Hell’s Angels ever rolled into town. (That fact was particularly fascinating to me—my grandparents moved to Ketchum when I was a kid, so I went there every summer. Alas, I didn’t know about the machine gun.) A report that the Angles might be coming to town was an event at the local police station.

Curiously however, it was not just the local police who paid attention to reports on where the Angels were heading. Thompson has an extended account of the year the Hell’s Angels descended on Bass Lake for their Fourth of July rampage. When they got there, the roads were filled with…tourists. Yes, tourists hoping to see the Hell’s Angels in action. One convenience store owner hired some thugs of his own to ward off the Angles…so the Angels bought all their beer at a different store. A couple of days of alcohol and drugs down by the lake, and they all headed home. You spend the whole time reading this account, just waiting for the violence to erupt…and it never does.

What was going on? As Thompson’s account makes clear, the individuals in the Hell’s Angles fit a description. They were, in a word, losers. Guys without stable jobs, drifting from one thing to the next. No real family or friends. And suddenly with the Angels, they had a family. The joined Hell’s Angles to get that sense of belonging to something, to having something bigger than themselves of which they could feel like they were part. The reputation of terror was part of the thrill; people were scared of the Hell’s Angels and suddenly a bunch of guys who nobody would have ever noticed were the center of attention. Indeed, one of the things that the Angles loved the best was to roll into a place, see the looks of terror on the faces of everyone there and then proceed to…be really nice.

The most remarkable thing about Thompson’s book is that it was published before the Rolling Stones thought it would be a great idea to hire the Hell’s Angles to provide security at the Altamont concert. Reading this book, you know exactly how that story would end. Bring in the Angels, ply them with lots of beer in a rather crowded environment, and…what could possibly go wrong? Of course the Angels killed a guy. Of course they did.

That the Hell’s Angels were a thuggish gang in the mid-1960s is really obvious. That doesn’t explain, however, why they were national news, why everyone was afraid of them across the land. There simply were not enough of them to pose a large scale threat. Then it hits you. The media were not any different in the mid-1960s than they are today. Imagine a small group of people—a few hundred in a nation of hundreds of millions—whose behavior is beyond civilized norms. It isn’t a big group, so without media coverage, you would probably never know this group even exists. After all, you don’t actually know a million people, so if a group’s size is one per million, you’ve never met anyone in the group. But get a few camera shots and write a story about the most egregious activities and never quite mention how small the group is, and voila, instant story! The small group of disenfranchised losers is suddenly the biggest menace to the nation.

The story of this book is indeed a strange and terrible saga. It is impossible to read this and not lament the lives destroyed by this gang. But the book itself also raises some really interesting questions about media attention to violent fringe groups. Was anyone’s life actually improved when the New York Times and Hunter Thompson himself, made the Hell’s Angels a household name?