I posted this two weeks ago, but felt a duty to remind everyone that today is the 4th anniversary of HST's passing. Break out the Chivas and grapefruit.
I attempted in this article to write a tribute to a great political writer -- not a weirdo. Too many tributes to Hunter seem to make hipster inferences to the tributer's coolness by emphasizing the oddities. Such tributes really irritate me. So I wrote a reasonable, human one.
On this fourth anniversary of the death of Hunter S. Thompson, it feels cosmically unjust that he never lived to see the end of Bush. He never got to see that we replaced Bush, not with a less-despised conservative aristocrat, but with a liberal, bookish African American. Thompson’s ugly Welsh collaborator, Ralph Steadman, wrote in his book "Joke’s Over" that Bush’s second election victory broke Hunter’s spirit. He struggled to resign himself to a reality he had previously refused to believe. His sharp anger and fierce idealism did not die, but his hope did. He wrote, "Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music, and never forget that you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors" - yet never got to see a day when our president could have an Arabic middle name.
A lifetime spent striving to move the fringe into the mainstream is worthy of our truest empathy. I know Thompson might not have as many fans in the liberal intellectual world as he used to. His recklessness, gunplay, and relentless pursuit of Americanism don’t sit well with the reigning convention of pallid seething temperateness.
"Suddenly I was tired of Lotterman; He was a phony and he didn't even know it. He was forever yapping about freedom of the press and keeping the paper going, but if he'd had a million dollars and all the freedom in the world he'd still put out a worthless newspaper because he wasn't smart enough to put out a good one. He was just another noisy little punk in the great legion of punks who marched between the banners of bigger and better men. Freedom, Truth, Honor- you could rattle off a hundred such words and behind every one of them would gather a thousand punks, pompous little farts, waving the banner with one hand and reaching under the table with the other. I stood up. "Ed," I said using his name for the first time, "I believe I'll quit." (The Rum Diary)
There was a fundamental morality to the character of Hunter Thompson. Freedom wasn’t to be had for freedom’s sake. Freedom should be used, explored – not merely obtained, defended and theorized. It takes energy and it requires the best of us. A duty to be carried out with no trace of fear. Like Roosevelt’s "strenuous life," but without the L.L. Bean jacket. Many middling-to-bad writers sanctimoniously snipe Thompson for the decline in quality of his later works (Sports Illustrated! Seriously? Fear and Loathing in Adult Diapers!). But few writers could say the following with any amount of credibility: "I understand that fear is my friend, but not always. Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed." (Kingdom of Fear, 2004) And that is the magic of Thompson – you believe him.
Much has been made of his eccentric and exaggerated nature. And those who make much of it are a bunch of dimwitted, easily amused jackoffs. For the lazy, it is easy to mistake strangeness for substance. For some of the lazy folks, this mistake draws them to Thompson. For other lazy folks, this mistake allows them to dismiss him.
I used to be one of the lazy folks, and a punk. I lived within 30 miles of Dr. Thompson from 2000 until 2005. He was part of the local color, much like elk horns above the mantle. Disembodied, but there. Indistinct and controversial. A point of local pride and a crumbling lightning rod.
Many times, I worked on the lands of Owl Farm, his "heavily fortified compound in the Rocky Mountains." It was a modest, low house on a quiet back road. One day, he mistook my co-worker and me for trespassers, and fired his gun to frighten us away. That experience took the punk out of me, and I finally bothered to read his books.
His sentences are often beautiful and sleek, in contrast to his famous haphazard gait. His drive toward his ideas is efficient, clean, and full of deep emotion dressed in modest self-awareness. They stirred in me passions that I had long set aside. Once again, I found the seed of belief that America is dynamic and pliable, and change – beautiful exhilarating change – is only limited by our willingness to exert indefinitely.
The American political writing community owes its most singular genius a tremendous debt.
There are moments when the gravity of the decade we are living in becomes very clear to me, and imbued with a finality I can't find words for. The first sign of popular unrest is panting public attention to every minute gesture of government; and at the moment, America is stalking her government. This is both unsettling and gratifying to me, because I know that the social unrest of a leisure society is hardly worthy of a needle-tremor on history's cardiogram. My protest is colored with a preemptive self-loathing.
But when I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, I become aware that this is not the first time. This is not new. My shame, and the recognition of its own privileged hollowness, rings back at me from every page. I can almost taste the disappointed saccharine naiveté that fuels the urgent let-down of the heartbroken activist. One's hopes had better be high as fuck if he aspires to be as brokenhearted as Hunter S. Thompson. With every paragraph, I know more surely that the majority has never been interested in a new world until the old one explodes; and to be aware of this is to be progressive – to be forever on the defense, forever ahead of the curve, forever removed from the trending pluralities. Forever jittering away the last seconds before the inevitable.
Better than any other author, Thompson was able to portray accepted reality as foul depravity, hunchbacked, misshapen and lurking in all sorts of mongery.
"What was I doing here? What was the meaning of this trip? Was I just roaming around in a drug frenzy of some kind? Or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story? Who are these people, these faces? Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas, and sweet Jesus, there were a hell of a lot of them at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, still humping the American dream, that vision of the big winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino." (FALIV)
The sadness is palpable and pinpointed, with the vaguest hint of visceral sympathy.
"Now, years later, I still have trouble when I think about Chicago ('68). That week at the Convention changed everything I'd ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it... Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying , and it took me years to understand why... Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me." (Kingdom of Fear, 2004)
In my eyes, the gift Hunter S. Thompson gave us is the gift of human sympathy. Be intelligent – Godspeed. Be a reactionary – Bravo! Join the opposition – God bless you! Blow the whistle – Amen! But if you ever need to peer into your heart to find whatever kernel of sympathy you can find for those AS FORTUNATE AS YOU, turn to Thompson. If you aren’t a little ashamed of yourself when he reaches you, maybe your heart has shriveled a little.
But perhaps the greatest unproven theory of all of Hunter S. Thompson’s work is this: Those who push society forward never sojourn long in the mainstream. The pushing is done from the outside in. Sometimes the public might embrace an idea whose time has come. But, generally, the mainstream seems to be the chief enemy of progress. It’s never good to become cozy with majority acceptance. It’s better to keep one’s dukes up so that the next punch doesn’t land on your ear.
"The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull's time-and the only real difference now, with Election Day '72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself." Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail-1972 (1973)
Let’s not forget the dream. Let’s keep our dukes up.