"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
With the death of the American Dream lay Hunter S.
I got the phonecall from an acquaintance-in-the-know who’d rather I heard it from him than on the radio or some such shit. The news? One of the few left worthy of admiration, certainly the only journalist, Hunter S Thompson, the father of ‘Gonzo Journalism’ and perhaps the last bastion of Truth in American politics offed himself over that weekend, with one of his own shotguns that he always loved so much.
Thompson on election 2004: “The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. It’s down to nut-cutting time..."
Often when someone you care about dies, everybody always says something like ‘Dick left this world a better place than he found it.’ You can’t say that about Hunter, he’d be the first to tell you you’re full of shit, and believe me, you don’t want to risk a haunting from this man, fan or not.
Because he didn’t leave this world a better place and he’d be the first to say it. He left it more twisted, more bizarre, more depraved, more perverted. Why? Because that was the duty he’d chosen or the duty that had chosen him; to document the Fall of the American Dream, an Odyssey he’d begun a long time ago and violently punctuated with his shocking suicide.
It was the first suicide that I didn’t see as a cowardly act. He had no interest in being a weak old man so he died as he lived, with a shocking bang that freaked the hell out of all that knew him. That’s Hunter S for you.
In its own way a strangely fitting end. Savage. Shocking. There is no doubt in my mind that Hunter knew his place in American culture and history, and as such, to those in-the-know, his suicide means something, perhaps his final angry and crazed letter, perhaps the only suitable ending for a man ever pursuing and exploring an American Dream turned to Nightmare.
His funeral was attended by his good friends, including Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp who had played him so impeccably in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” His remains were blown from a cannon in the hills of Aspen, as per his request, a final bang being Hunter’s apropos goodbye.
To say I am influenced by this man’s works is an understatement. He was my hero - an angry voice howling at the insanity of it all, who would add his own particular brand of crazy and somehow through this, arrive at the heart of Truth as he perceived it to be. How much of my political writings can be chased back to my love for his books? How much of my style can be distilled down to the influence of this wooly, crazy man’s writings?
He was so out there, so crazy that he could say whatever he wanted. He was unbribeable, unrepentant, a rascal, a madman. And a champion of real justice and human rights. A proponent of freedom, real freedom.
And he saw America as it really is: a bizarre orgy balanced precariously before a fall, and most likely into tyranny. His disgust and horror at what America has become is matchless to nothing but his respect, love and honor for the basic linchpins of how things are supposed to be, which was why he was so vicious and savage in his attacks.
Hunter S on George W. Bush: “a treacherous little freak...a golem...the syphilis president...a dangerous loser...”
He carved himself a niche so entirely his own with a typewriter, a blowtorch, mescaline and attitude, a perch from which he could cover the greatest and lowest stories in American political history of the last forty years.
I guess I’d thought he’d live forever. Maybe we all did.
67 and pickled in the good booze and drug all his life as he was, he remained sharp as a tack right up until he died.
Hunter S Thompson On Bush’s 2000 election result: “the most brutal seizure of power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the new Boss of Germany.”
The first good article on the death of HST came from Rolling Stone magazine, the publication that was home to a lot of his finest work, a publication the foundation of which he’d help to lay in the early sixties. The writer of this article said that one of the last thing Hunter was working on before his death was something on 9-11, seemingly incontrovertible evidence that there were explosives placed in the building as well. Not long after, he would take his own life in a strange parallel.
The temptation here is to feel a fleeting sense of anger and paralyzing impotence: you’re leaving us now?!? This is when we need you more than ever before! Then a realization dawns, he fought for a long time, for decades. That fight belongs to others now. It's my Odyssey now. And yours. So talk hard if you're talking, write hard if you're writing and blog hard if your blogging. If you were a fan of HST you can do nothing less in his honor.
To so many he was a clown, an oddity, a druggie and to be certain, he was all those things.
However, if we accept what George Orwell once said, that “in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” we must also accept that Thompsen was a revolutionary.
He will be missed. Maybe I’ll be eulogizing him forever. Who knows?
We are, after all, professionals.
-SenseChange
NonRandomMP3age: "White Rabbit" Jefferson Airplane
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