Blog 11 – Word choice

The beginning of “The Scum Also Rises” opens like a film noir in a detective’s office and you can almost hear the male voiceover and the beating down of the torrid rain. The scene suitably sets the reader up for a depressing tale as the story of Washington falling to its knees is embarked. Immediately, Hunter S. Thompson makes use of the “pathetic fallacy,” or the attribution of human emotions to inanimate objects,” as he introduces the “high yellow eye of the National Affairs Suite” under the backdrop of a “howling” radio and hot storm that fell like “balls of sweat.”

Throughout this story, Thompson capitalizes on word choice to convey the following themes: water (representing drowning), rats (representing Nixon and company), sinking ships and death (representing the administration), and being off balance (representing the nation). Thompson continually refers to the decomposing state of the Nixon administration with words such as rotting, rapidly dissolving, “rats are deserting,” while his use of dreary weather and “haunting” music conveys Thompson’s personal emotions at the time and his foul take on the matter at hand. The weather (“shitrain”) also serves as a force of unpredictability in a time of an “eerie spectacle” and general “madness.” Thompson also constantly refers to the notion of Nixon’s fate using words such as “dungeon” and “bunker.” Water, in addition to a form of pressure (no pun intended), serves as an element of hopelessness as the “rush of sucking water around his ankles must have almost pulled him [Nixon] out to sea,” the “rats are deserting the ship at high speed,” and the “storms of destiny” are brewing. Even when he’s written into the story as writing the story, Thompson’s surrounding is always either rainy or revolving around water (the pool).

In his ending, Thompson purposefully describes the spectators as being blown off-balance from the rotors of Nixon’s helicopter, a larger symbol for a national feeling of shock and betrayal. As “On Writing Well” states, the ending should ideally “encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness.” Thompson follows through on this as he has Nixon’s helicopter swoop toward the Washington Monument (a source of pride, loyalty and staunch leadership) before angling up into the fog (where he is lost in the storm of fate and his own undoing). “Richard Nixon [in every way that the nation thought it knew its president] was gone.” (My brackets.)

Discussion question:

What is the point of Thompson’s off-task rant about his long ago, rainy drive to the furniture factory and his reference to locking himself up with a “good woman” (p. 304)?