Hunter S. Thompson Dead
Damn. The weasels are closing in. Yesterday the big news was that George W. Bush used (gasp) marijuana. Today, the news just came in that Hunter S. Thompson is dead, apparently a suicide.
Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.
Thompson said that about Hemingway in May 1964, and it probably fits today. When Thompson’s friend Oscar Zeta Acosta disappeared, Thompson wrote:
It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust… Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull maggots around his neck.
Yeah, that's him, folks—my boy, my brother, my partner in too many crimes. Oscar Zeta Acosta. Stand back. He is gone now, but even his memory stirs up winds that will blow heavy cars off the road. He was a monster, a true child of the century—faster than Bo Jackson and crazier than Neal Cassady… When the Brown Buffalo disappeared, we all lost one of those high notes that we will never hear again. Oscar was one of God’s own prototypes-a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die…
Hemingway died by his own hand; who knows what happened to Acosta? The reports are that Thompson killed himself as well. But while it may sometimes seem like an inevitable result of being an insightful writer, it is not. William S. Burroughs died at the age of 83 of a heart attack: old age.
Thompson was the most insightful author of my generation. His satirical works cut to the heart of politics and the American dream. His first book was Hell’s Angels, originally an article for The Nation. It was a riveting look in the dark mirror that the Angels provided for America. On so many levels, Hell’s Angels provided the foundation for Thompson’s later breakdowns of politics and culture.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came next. Thompson was still acting like a real journalist at the time. He was in Los Angeles covering “The Revolt of the Cockroach People” and activist Hispanic lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta. Hispanics, long under the boot of the Los Angeles police, were trying to force Los Angeles to rein in an out of control police force. But when police used the riots as an excuse to kill a prominent Hispanic radio announcer, and when the justice system absolved the police of any responsibility, Acosta and Thompson decided to get out of town for a few days. They left for Las Vegas and the Mint 400.
Thompson ended up with “The Best Book on the Dope Decade”, according to the New York Times. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” took gonzo journalism to the edge. Thompson would no longer ever be a mainstream journalist, nor ever resemble one.
This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously… No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel
Fear and Loathing was a powerful drug itself. Many tried to copy gonzo journalism without learning to see, first. It was a hit, and for good reason, because it reached inside and pulled all the guts of the American dream out so that we could see them. If you read only one Thompson book, it should be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Its “Savage journey to the heart of the American dream” is one of the few pieces of truth in advertising you can find. It cuts no slack and eats no shit, etc.
After this, Thompson began covering politics, and he never really finished. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 is probably the only truly good book about the 1972 campaigns, or about any campaign. It was made into a bad movie called “Where the Buffalo Roam” that missed the entire point.
Even today, journalists do not report what they see, but what they would like to see and what they feel we, their readers, are ready to see. Thompson’s gonzo went so far beyond that as to mingle fiction with journalism into both a report on what he saw and a statement on what it meant. When Thompson wrote, he made it absolutely clear where he stood. He made it absolutely clear where he thought we were heading. There is nobody today writing as truthfully as Thompson did with fiction and gonzo.
Every era needs an Orwell or a Thompson, and we do not have one today.
Mahalo.
- As Gonzo in Life as in His Work
- “Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised.”
- Hunter S. Thompson at Wikipedia
- “Credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. He is also known for his use of psychedelics, alcohol, firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority.”
- Rest In Peace You Brilliant Goddamned Beast
- “For some of us of a certain age who follow politics, his view of the game informs us in ways that we will never wholly shake off.”
- The Great Thompson Hunt
- “HST is the granddaddy of Tom Wolfe’s new journalism. Before Wolfe came along with his white suits, HST was slowly (and finally) changing the world of journalism, turned it upside down, in fact, with his near-libelous, hilarious and brilliantly prophetic books.”
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- William S. Burroughs at Wikipedia
- “Much of Burroughs’ work is semi-autobiographical drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict. But he often distorts his experiences using surreal or graphic imagery, experimental structures, and a strong satirical voice.”
More Hunter S. Thompson
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- A dark and bloody ground: Hunter S. Thompson
- Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride is new Hunter Thompson documentary that airs December 12. It’ll be coming out on DVD eventually but if you get Starz, I’d watch it.
- Better Than Sex
- “Confessions of a Political Junkie”. The world ain’t what it used to be, and before this thing is over, you’ll wish you weren’t either.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Perhaps the purest of Thompson’s searches for the American Dream because it is untainted by politics; or perhaps the most pointless for the same reason, as politics have tainted the American Dream since the Adams anti-sedition acts almost as soon as the country was born.
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
- This is a powerful look at the 1972 presidential campaigns, well worth reading, and recommended for anyone interested in a turning point in the Democratic Party.
- Generation of Swine
- The “Tales of Shame and Degradation” are mostly the Bush-Dukakis presidential race (from the primaries to the bitter end) of 1988, not a good platform for gonzo journalism.
- Hell’s Angels
- A piercing vision into the why of every group in the motorcycle gang scare of the sixties: outlaws and squares and cops.
- Songs of the Doomed
- “Songs of the Doomed” covers the decline and fall of the Reagan Empire: the eighties. From the strange power politics meeting in Elko, Illinois thru the Pulitzer trial and the Berlin wall.
- The Great Shark Hunt
- From football to Haight-Ashbury, the Ali-Spinks match and the Freak Power uprising in Aspen, Thompson is one of the few people who truly understood what the hell was going on in the sixties and seventies while they were happening.
The word went out on Monday and Tuesday by telephone. This was not going to be any Jay Gatsby funeral; the Angels wanted a full-dress rally. Miles’ status was not the point; the death of any Angel requires a show of strength by the others. It is a form of affirmation—not for the dead, but the living. There are no set penalties for not showing up, because none are necessary. In the cheap loneliness that is the overriding fact of every outlaw’s life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one. The circle is one link shorter, the enemy jacks up the odds just a little bit more, and defenders of the faith need something to take off the chill. A funeral is a time for counting the loyal, for seeing how many are left. There is no question about skipping work, going without sleep or riding for hours in a cold wind to be there on time.—Hell’s Angels