February 24, 2005
Hunter S. Thompson, why?
Stories that begin, "One time I got so wasted, that I ...," followed by a tedious litany of vomiting, passing out, having dry heaves, being pulled over by the cops, fondled by an ex-boyfriend, or loaded limply into a wheelchair by airport security, make me cringe.
Uck. How not hilarious, or remotely interesting, for those past the age of 18. Around the dinner table or the bar railing, one feels the pressure to chortle or at least smile indulgently. For myself, I begin to understand why Carrie Nation carried a hatchet and smashed up saloons. Carrie wanted to put an end to the imbibing of liquor, or what may be worse, banal stories beginning, "I was so drunk that ... ."
Hunter S. Thompson, who took his own life and whose body was found Sunday, unintentionally milked this vein in 
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Look, he suggested to us, look at suburban America in their tacky clothes gambling at the slots in Lost Wages, oh how monstrous it appears ...
Suburbanites, monstrous ... to a journalist and a 300-lb. Samoan lawyer whacked out on designer drugs, obscure psychotropics and liquor? As Aretha Franklin would say, who's zoomin' who?
I had looked forward to Fear and Loathing when it first came out (in 1972), having religiously read Thompson's political reporting for Rolling Stone, as well as 
Hell's Angels (1967). Later I enjoyed 
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973).
Yet ... back in the late 1960 and early 1970s, I was already long sick of the stoners in my high school animalistically grubbing around on the floor at psychedelic concerts, grabbing a stepped-on gum wrapper and staring fiercely at it, nose touching the paper, for the answers to the questions of the universe. Though relatively high functioning compared to the stoners, Thompson still operated in the grip of faux insight.
Fearing that Thompson's writing would fare badly in current daylight, I reluctantly (what I force myself to do for my blog ...) cracked open an excerpt of Hell's Angels in my yellowing, crumbling copy of 
The New Journalism.
This exercise confirmed my suspicion that the good Kentucky doctor would not wear the years well. His first-person reporting and participatory style were cutting edge at the time ("oooh! a reporter buys beer with the greasy-haired Frisco chapter, and Sonny Barger threatens to rape Thompson's wife if they don't like his article").
But Thompson never pulled even with contemporary Tom Wolfe, who simply possessed better reporting skills, insight and a discipline that masked his inner devils. Even the great Wolfe's Thompson reminiscence (here) inadvertently portrays Thompson as a supremely uninteresting attention whore.
One might be tempted to say the Emperor of gonzo journalism wears no clothes. Thompson certainly was an awful lecturer, as I can attest after seeing him at the University of Maryland in 1987, when he rambled incoherently but drew big laughs from we dazzled faithful for ... sticking his wobbly microphone in a roll of toilet paper.
And by 1995, his talent seemed to have fully departed. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory, whose office was near my desk, gave me her comp copy of 
Better than Sex, handing it over as if it were a used prophylatic. The title and the cover displeased her. It was the actual content of the interior pages, just a grab bag of what seemed to be memos, scraps, lists and drafts, that was my problem. Off Thompson's last book went to eBay, where I thought it would attract no interest, but a bidder duly appeared.
Peggy Noonan does a good job on why Thompson's reputation is a tad overblown, and concludes:
In time Thompson's swashbuckling came to seem joyless, aggressive and half dead. What he thought fed his gift (drugs, alcohol) killed it. He must have been very scared to get tanked like that to write. The empty page, the blank screen, is scary. But so is a mortgage. So is the stillness of a courtroom before you make the closing argument. And so is a broken leg that needs fixing fast. We all have jobs. You take a bad turn when you start to think your next work must be marked by genius because you are a genius. Thompson's death is an occasion not for inspiration or celebration but compassion. Not pity, but a sense of universal idiocy, and sympathy.
Austin Ruse, writing for National Review, pulls no punches:
Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about.
Ruse accurately notes Thompson's appeal to "a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55", who "recall his comic-outlaw persona, which many of us found quite appealing in those days." And that is why the Emperor indeed had at least some clothes, for we really loved reading his political coverage back in the day, and he was (at the time, but not now) the perfect ferocious observer of, say, a year such as 1968.
Over at Fark.com, many found Thompson's decision to shoot himself inexplicable. One poster wrote:
As much as I enjoyed his work, I can't imagine why anyone would smoke a .45 over a hip replacement.But then again, no one really knows if the guys was depressed or otherwise mentally tweaked, especially after 6 decades of heavy bourbon intake.
I've worked with several folks that visited him at Woody Creek (Owl Farm) and while they were merely casual friends, they did say he had huge mood crashes on occassion that lasted days at a clip. My bet's on clinical depression, but what do I know.
From haldrogen bomb:
It's amusing to see you guys fight amongst yourself to see who can best defend a drug-addled, past-his-prime author from some comments on an internet message board. Get over yourselves. HST was a talented writer, but he was also a major jackass. It's too bad he died, but I'm not going to waste time and emotional capital mourning a rich bastard who took his own life. And as far as gonzo goes, you could do a lot better reading the New Journalism of Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe ... .
I deliberately titled this blog "Hunter S. Thompson, why?" because it seems inexplicable that the doctor would commit suicide and also to hint that his writing may become close to irrelevant in the future. He was a writer that I enjoyed during a turbulent time in our history, a time that in retrospect seems more of a disaster than a renaissance.
Thompson did his part to glorify the outlaws and the druggies. Tom Wolfe, who sought to explain and never seemed in awe of the same renegades, holds up much better.
