Hell's Angels

The late, great, Hunter S. Thompson wrote a novel entitled, “Hell’s Angels”, which explored and captured the insanely vile and wretched antics of the California grown outlaws. The Hell’s Angels were a psychotic, attention-seeking, grubby chopper gang who had a knack, if not a love, for shocking Middle America. This was done by any means necessary, even if that meant contradicting their own sexual orientation just to get jaws to drop to the floor. The Hell’s Angels succeeded in either frightening or intriguing the average American citizen. How the citizen felt about the gang depended on whether or not the citizen decided to listen to the onslaught of diatribes that were brought on against the Angels by the National Press. Thompson clears these over exaggerated delineations by comparing accounts of actual events with the amplified reports of these events; this leads Thompson to look at the Angels as misunderstood beings who were the start of a new generation. The average citizen, when it came to the Hell’s Angels, almost seemed to be choosing from a list of either evacuating the area, bearing arms, or being completely hypnotized by the hog riding outlaws. For as many people that were completely frightened by the Angels, just as many were completely intrigued and enamored with the bad boys of the west coast. Thompson states this about an encounter the Angels had with a group of Californians, “They’d apparently been waiting for hours to see the Angels in action, and now, as the two stepped out of the car, a murmur of gratification went up. These were not locals, but tourists-city people, from the valley and the coast. The store was full of newspapers featuring the Hell’s Angels rape in Los Angeles, but nobody looked frightened” (Thomspon 143). Even though these people knew what the Angels had been accused of doing and what they were capable of, the ineffable attraction that the Angels had still kept people looking at them as if they were tamed lions. On the other