"I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth." -- Hunter S. Thompson
I hate when I wake up in the morning, and it's snowing, and it's going to be a major hassle getting to work, and it's supposedly a holiday, but everyone's going to be coming in, and I'd be a real wuss not to -- and then I turn on Morning Sedition to hear Mark Reilly and Marc Maron talking about someone in the past tense, and discover this. It's going to be a great fucking day, folks.
Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.
Thompson was found dead Sunday in his Aspen-area home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff's officials said. He was 67. Thompson's wife, Anita, had gone out before the shooting and was not home at the time.
Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.
In some ways, waiting to hear this news has been like waiting for the other shoe to drop for the past twenty years. You just KNEW Thompson would check out this way. But just as Dorothy Parker is the role model for a particular brand of smart-ass New York area Jewish women writers, in some ways Hunter Thompson, his brand of gonzo journalism often imitated, but never quite duplicated, is the creative father of some of the the smartass bloggers we read now -- the farmer at Corrente. Digby. Attaturk. MG at Norwegianity.
Thompson's incisive observations on the American political and cultural scene may have seemed to be filtered through the colors and haze of hallucinogenics, but no one was able to get past the bullshit of American life like Thompson. And now there's no one, and we're out in the wilderness alone, and there's no drugs to even take hold.
On Antiwar.com this morning, Brandon J. Snider, obviously too young to have read Thompson in his heyday had this to say:
I'm mad at Hunter S. Thompson. I'm mad at the way he lived his life, whacked out of his gord, so to speak, on any chemical you can think of, and how he met his death, apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Either way, it was a waste. After becoming a counterculture icon in the 60s and 70s, Thompson faded into obscurity, where he has remained, locked away in a "compound" in Aspen, Colorado, for most of my lifetime. Reading his "Hey Rube" columns occasionally in the past few years, it was reasonably clear to me that Thompson was insane, and the most obvious culprit was drugs. It is literally impossible for most people to believe the amount of junk Thompson did in his adult life.
[snip]
What I admired was his writing style, which was brilliant and inventive, and his one-time relevance as a counter-culture journalist. His left-libertarian writings could have had a much bigger impact in the last 30 years or so, if he hadn't taken himself out of the game. His biggest admirer was Matt Drudge, and I once saw Drudge say that Thompson should "come down off the mountain and stop acting like a nut". Too true, but Thompson wasn't acting anymore. He had become the sort of character he used to skewer, back in the Rolling Stone days. And that's why I'm mad at him; no, I can't be mad at him. It's just such a waste.
There you have it -- a kid for whom Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas opened a whole new world, but one obviously too young to understand how it's possible to just get sick and tired of fighting the good fight, especially when you see history repeat itself -- only far, far worse than last time. We thought Nixon was as bad as it could get, only to be presented with George W. Bush. I can't blame Thompson for not wanting to go through it again:
"How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same."
"It is a nervous thing to consider: Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics - completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around. If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants...or maybe 'wants' is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered 'political prisoners' and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four A.M."
"The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place."
Sound familiar? Like exactly like what we're going through now? Well, it's from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. That was 33 years ago, friends, and we've learned not a godamn thing.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
In some ways it's a kindness that is done to us when we get older, that death no longer holds the terrors it did when we were eight years old and would sit bolt upright at two in the morning trying to wrap our minds around the concept of not existing anymore. For if we got to be sixty-seven, Thompson's age when he decided to check out of this level of reality in his own distinctive, if appalling, way, and were still waking up with night terrors about death, we'd never get out of bed. On the other hand, there's a weariness that sets in; a sense that we just don't have it in us to fight that battle anymore.
I'm sorry that Brandon J. Snider and his compatriots won't have Hunter Thompson around to guide them through the morass that is Bush II. But then, Thompson never set himself up as some kind of sociopolitical messiah. He was an eccentric, a complete wackjob, who could set fire to a page simply by putting words on it. But you can't spend eternity pulling up rocks only to find maggots underneath them. Sooner or later you burn out, retreat to your compound in Colorado, and spend your days shooting at targets -- and then at yourself.
You kids are going to have to find your own way now. But if you look carefully, you'll see the footprints in the snow that Hunter S. Thompson left for you to follow.
[Updated with Fear and Loathing... quotes from Will Pitt's excellent obituary.]
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