E-Mail This Article to a Friend Remembering Hunter S. Thompson (continued)

The pundit-pummeling prototype

Like most of my friends, I read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a teenager and appreciated it more for its details on drug use than for its literary value. And I found it endlessly amusing that Thompson had been sent to cover Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972. Gonzo journalism? Yeah, well, that didn’t mean much to me.

But it was in the waning years of the ’80s that I finally came to fully appreciate Thompson’s peculiar genius. After two terms of Reagan and a thoroughly demoralizing race that brought George Sr. to power, my complete estrangement from the American political process was nearing its alarming nadir — until I happened to notice a familiar byline in the San Francisco Examiner. I don’t know when Thompson started writing a weekly column for the Examiner, or when he stopped. But for the two years I spent in San Francisco, my housemates and I looked forward to it. We would even read the damn thing to one another, and complain loudly when the author occasionally missed a week.

Published as a collection in 1989 under the title Generation of Swine, the column itself essentially amounted to a series of insightful rants on the Reagan/Bush era. Thompson might not always have had the facts right, but he invariably saw through the loads of bullshit that mainstream-media pundits bought wholesale, and he told the truth. And if what he said wasn’t always strictly accurate, well, it was unimpeachably correct. More important, he taught us to turn our anger and increasing horror into a cynical, biting sort of bemusement — a very useful strategy to this day.

That kind of reporting — and, really, all Thompson did in those columns was report on policy decisions in a way that exposed the absurdity of it all — was a rare and precious thing at the time, back before you could just flip over to Comedy Central and get a daily dose of Jon Stewart five nights a week. I don’t know if Thompson has ever been credited with creating the blueprint for the kind of reporting The Daily Show does, but if anyone gets the bright idea to publish a new edition of Generation of Swine, Stewart should have first dibs on the preface.

— Matt Ashare

Long live Gonzo

I must have been just about the last person to learn of Hunter S. Thompson’s death by self-inflicted gunshot wound. Like Thompson, I live in rural seclusion. Like Thompson’s Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado, my home is wired with the gadgets that supply me with instantaneously updated information, provided, that is, I choose to pay attention to them. As with Thompson, yesterday (Sunday) was one of those days when I chose to cut myself off from the latest specifics from a savage world others expect me to chronicle with equal parts of insolence, insight, and wit. (Not, of course, at HST’s level, but who can find drugs that good?) Unlike Thompson, I had to tune back in today. Really, really bad news awaited me upon my return. Alas.

The inventor of Gonzo journalism called a swine a swine and, in the process, scratched a national itch that had been torturing us since Joseph McCarthy began mislabeling decent folk decades earlier. Reading Dr. T., we learned that the Hells Angels were freakish, dangerous savages and, as such, quintessentially American. Thompson eviscerated Richard Nixon in a series of pieces that arguably did as much as Woodward and Bernstein to finish off that cheesy little man. He took us to the Kentucky Derby, the Las Vegas strip, and the presidential campaign trail, and showed us places far scarier than anywhere on the alleged wrong side of the tracks. And as a matter of professional pride, he demonstrated that the only way to survive a societal tsunami of shit was to hide in broad daylight, twisted to the gills, with the stereo blaring at supersonic levels.

You couldn’t read Hunter Thompson without asking the following question: how long can this guy survive? The one thing that made me think he might beat the odds was his deft ability to co-exist with a combination of drugs that worked at cross-purposes with one another. He was never a sole-substance-abuse man, and it was the smorgasbord of substances that in all likelihood preserved him. The uppers and hallucinogens played the downers, narcotics, tranquilizers, and booze to a hazy yet remarkably lucid tie.

All his substance abuse led to another, more pared-down question: what will finally kill this guy? Would he be wiped out in a motorcycle accident, blown up while trying to handle high explosives and Wild Turkey simultaneously, or taken out by federales in an encounter at an airport-security checkpoint gone horribly, horribly wrong?

Thompson himself once posited that he expected to be done in by cigarettes. But after yesterday, I wonder if he didn’t always know the answer.

Whether or not he chose to leave any specific final words, he left a professional suicide note several volumes long, spanning nearly half a century. If you think you feel bad now, go back and reread any portion of his copious farewell to an uncivilized planet, and you’ll soon wish you had Hunter’s connection for painkillers. Because we’re on our own now and it fucking hurts.

In a glowing review of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, Kurt Vonnegut fretted over Thompson’s health. Vonnegut decided that HST "inwardly was being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians."

Perhaps it was just the worst drug interaction of all — the one in which they don’t mix well with firearms — that made permanent the "gone" in Gonzo, but my bet is with Vonnegut. I suspect the vile, tinhorn scum currently oozing through the corridors of power devoured the remainder of his heart, kidneys, and intestines, and he simply couldn’t go on. We can only hope they consumed his liver as well, because there had to be enough residual LSD in that heroic organ to open anyone’s eyes. Maybe then they’ll understand why Hunter S. Thompson decided he simply couldn’t face a second generation of swine.

The king is dead. Long live Gonzo.

— Barry Crimmins