Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s

Overview

Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s gathers his San Francisco Examiner columns and related pieces from the mid-1980s through the 1988 presidential race. It is the second volume of the Gonzo Papers and functions as a ragged, caffeinated chronicle of the Reagan era’s moral and political entropy. Rather than a continuous narrative, the book is a running barrage of dispatches, telegrams, faxes, and late-night screeds that combine eyewitness reporting with hallucinated menace, jokes, threats, and sudden bursts of prophecy. The “swine” are the power-brokers, media hucksters, holy rollers, and financial predators who, in Thompson’s view, feasted on a country numbed by television and fear.

Form and Voice

The collection is built from short columns written on deadline, often framed as conversations with editors, phone logs, or letters hammered out at 3 a.m. Thompson’s gonzo method, placing himself at the center of the action, foregrounding mood and momentum over decorum, delivers a live-wire record of the decade’s texture. He collapses the boundary between public spectacle and private paranoia: a political rally is a trapdoor to apocalypse; a routine interview becomes a festival of lies and amphetamines. The persona of the hunted reporter, armed, sleepless, accompanied by bad weather and worse news, gives the book a noir pulse.

Politics and Power

Thompson treats late-Reagan Washington as a looted city. The Iran-Contra scandal churns through the pages like a bad fever dream, with Oliver North, Ed Meese, and an obliging Congress playing their parts in a morality play about impunity. The 1988 campaign appears as a carnival of fear tactics and media humiliation: Gary Hart’s implosion over a sex scandal; the rise of George H. W. Bush under the ruthless showmanship of Lee Atwater; a limping Democratic field shadowed by the toxic new grammar of attack ads. Thompson sees the press as both victim and accomplice, awed by access, addicted to spectacle, unable to resist the easy feed of scandal while major crimes go unpunished. He portrays the age as a laboratory for the politics of resentment and television-driven consent.

Culture and Media

Beyond the Beltway, the essays map a culture high on greed and catastrophe. Wall Street’s delirium and the 1987 crash, the crack and cocaine wars, and the AIDS panic form a backdrop to televangelist collapses and celebrity trials. Thompson ricochets from Miami to Vegas to New Hampshire snowstorms, tracking prizefights, Super Bowls, and horse tracks as national mood rings. Tabloid logic rules: the line between news, advertising, and entertainment dissolves, and the camera’s appetite dictates public reality. He is mordantly funny about the way America worships winners and then demands ritual sacrifice when they stumble.

Recurring Motifs

Dread curdles into comedy, and vice versa. Guns, storms, roaring televisions, and prowling cars recur as stage props for a democracy on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Thompson’s moral center, outrage at cowardice and cruelty, anchors the wild prose. He hammers the same notes: the narcotic power of TV, the corruption of language by spin, the quick fix as national religion, the betrayal of the 1960s’ idealism by the cash-drunk 1980s. Outlandish threats and violent fantasies are rhetorical flares meant to light up the rot.

Place in Thompson’s Work

As a sequel to The Great Shark Hunt and a preface to Songs of the Doomed and Better Than Sex, the book captures Thompson’s late-style rhythm: fragmentary, savage, comic, and weirdly lucid. Generation of Swine is less a tidy analysis than a fever chart. Its value is the immediacy of a first-rate American fabulist watching the country careen through a transformative decade, insisting, through laughter and bile, that the stakes are mortal and the swine are real.