A Beast Who Became an Illustrious Fossil
Note: This is a revised version of the Hunter S. Thompson obituary that I first posted on 2/21/05.
He's dead, dead, dead, and gone and there's not a thing in the world that anyone could have done to stop it. The horrible truth of the Death of Hunter S. Thompson is that Thompson was pretty much dead to the world a long time before the good Doctor finally finished the job on Sunday. Most of Thompson's stoner-class fans think he's the ultimate symbol of chemically fueled splendor: they admire the drug-induced frenzy with which he approached his most famous works. Some people still insist that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a factual account. But anyone who's read the things he wrote over the last ten or fifteen years of his life already knows that Thompson, like many of his era’s lesser leading lights, left this world as a victim of drug abuse; if he was ever a leader of that subculture, the pressures of office had long since destroyed him. His brain was rotting from the inside out; the last shot ever fired by the world’s most charming gun nut just made it official.
The last great thing Thompson ever wrote came 11 years ago: an obituary of Richard Nixon, the only public figure left whose name retained any ability to incite the Doctor's dwindling but still potent reserve of creative vitriol. "Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it ... I have had my own blood relationship with Nixon, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it." It seems terribly appropriate that the last thing of value HST contributed to the literary world before the rest of his brain succumbed to the effects of the drug abuse was that vicious evisceration of his old enemy. As far as we, his public, were concerned, there were two Thompsons: the writer, whose works we bought, and the icon, whose works we wanted to read. The icon died with Nixon's resignation, because the writer's fixation with that evil old Nazi-heart never subsided. Thompson never found a new subject after Nixon and the death of the dream. Nixon represented the dark side of the American character, and Thompson could never stop trying to kill him. In his final years, Thompson was still writing occasionally about Nixon in his Page2 column on ESPN.com, though all of his last missive concerned a new form of golf he'd just invented.
And so, the icon became a historical figure, and all historical figures are doomed to be misunderstood. The obituary pages will read, "Thus Dies Thompson, the high priest of drugs, excess, and literate insanity. He might have been relevant for a while back there. Some say he was a journalist. No one in the op-ed department knows enough about him to say for sure."
Even in his decrepit state, Thompson remained a champion of sorts - the aging Muhammad Ali of the counterculture intelligentsia. The folks who knew how to trot him out without provoking a wolverine-fit were putting Thompson's image anywhere they could put it, and anytime he needed more money, all he had to do was write a few short paragraphs full of strangely-worded, mundane observations, punctuated by phrases like, "Ah... but that's how it works, Bubba. All energy flows according to the whims of Dick Cheney," and someone would publish it, package it with reviews from second-rate papers (I once saw a quote from the Tulsa World, my hometown’s bush-league daily, on a newer HST book jacket), and scream “The Grand Duke of Gonzo’s latest masterpiece!” All anyone ever had to do to drum up interest in a book with a title like, "Handles of Whisky on the Bus to D.C." was get the old man to sign off on it. Yes, he was an aging champion - but more like Jake LaMotta doing his nightclub act than Ali getting to light the Olympic torch. All Thompson had left, in the end, was his name.
Just thinking about it now makes me wonder why anyone who wants to do anything good with his life wouldn't plan on dying young, before...
Before a snot-nosed Ivy Leaguer like me gets the chance to smear you in a public forum, that's for sure. None of that can make me forget what a brilliant mind we lost thirty years ago. It wasn't all about Nixon and the 60's for Thompson: by the time that all went down, he'd already had the kind of life that would make anyone green with envy. And since Thompson's life was his work until the end of Nixon, you could easily say the same thing about Thompson's journalism. He was a force to be reckoned with, even when he wasn't in print. He wrote an official press release announcing his discharge from the Air Force in which he proudly fantasized about throwing a wine bottle into the guard booth as he sped his way out of Eglin Air Force Base. He brought the Hell's Angels into the widespread consciousness of the intellectual drug counterculture when he introduced them at Ken Kesey's La Honda retreat; in doing so, he helped bridge the gap between the burgeoning subcultures of the country’s working and middle classes, forging a short lived anti-establishment alliance with true street cred, which might have changed the course of American History – if it had only lasted. Its breakup at the Altamont festival sent him into the ultimately terminal Nixon spiral of the later years of his brilliance. He ran a protest campaign for Sherriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, whose satirical rhetoric was so sharp that he almost ended up winning the race. He chronicled the death of both his great passions – the 60's protest culture and the American Dream – and remorselessly nailed the coffin lids shut on both of them when he realized that it had all been what he called "a lame fuckaround." He capped off that era by writing the greatest book on American politics that I've ever read, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he noted:
"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves, finally just lay back and say it: that we are a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anyone in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
Sic Semper Gonzo. I will miss him during every horrible minute in which that passage still rings true of the decaying dream of America at whose side he fought and died.
He's dead, dead, dead, and gone and there's not a thing in the world that anyone could have done to stop it. The horrible truth of the Death of Hunter S. Thompson is that Thompson was pretty much dead to the world a long time before the good Doctor finally finished the job on Sunday. Most of Thompson's stoner-class fans think he's the ultimate symbol of chemically fueled splendor: they admire the drug-induced frenzy with which he approached his most famous works. Some people still insist that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a factual account. But anyone who's read the things he wrote over the last ten or fifteen years of his life already knows that Thompson, like many of his era’s lesser leading lights, left this world as a victim of drug abuse; if he was ever a leader of that subculture, the pressures of office had long since destroyed him. His brain was rotting from the inside out; the last shot ever fired by the world’s most charming gun nut just made it official.
The last great thing Thompson ever wrote came 11 years ago: an obituary of Richard Nixon, the only public figure left whose name retained any ability to incite the Doctor's dwindling but still potent reserve of creative vitriol. "Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it ... I have had my own blood relationship with Nixon, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it." It seems terribly appropriate that the last thing of value HST contributed to the literary world before the rest of his brain succumbed to the effects of the drug abuse was that vicious evisceration of his old enemy. As far as we, his public, were concerned, there were two Thompsons: the writer, whose works we bought, and the icon, whose works we wanted to read. The icon died with Nixon's resignation, because the writer's fixation with that evil old Nazi-heart never subsided. Thompson never found a new subject after Nixon and the death of the dream. Nixon represented the dark side of the American character, and Thompson could never stop trying to kill him. In his final years, Thompson was still writing occasionally about Nixon in his Page2 column on ESPN.com, though all of his last missive concerned a new form of golf he'd just invented.
And so, the icon became a historical figure, and all historical figures are doomed to be misunderstood. The obituary pages will read, "Thus Dies Thompson, the high priest of drugs, excess, and literate insanity. He might have been relevant for a while back there. Some say he was a journalist. No one in the op-ed department knows enough about him to say for sure."
Even in his decrepit state, Thompson remained a champion of sorts - the aging Muhammad Ali of the counterculture intelligentsia. The folks who knew how to trot him out without provoking a wolverine-fit were putting Thompson's image anywhere they could put it, and anytime he needed more money, all he had to do was write a few short paragraphs full of strangely-worded, mundane observations, punctuated by phrases like, "Ah... but that's how it works, Bubba. All energy flows according to the whims of Dick Cheney," and someone would publish it, package it with reviews from second-rate papers (I once saw a quote from the Tulsa World, my hometown’s bush-league daily, on a newer HST book jacket), and scream “The Grand Duke of Gonzo’s latest masterpiece!” All anyone ever had to do to drum up interest in a book with a title like, "Handles of Whisky on the Bus to D.C." was get the old man to sign off on it. Yes, he was an aging champion - but more like Jake LaMotta doing his nightclub act than Ali getting to light the Olympic torch. All Thompson had left, in the end, was his name.
Just thinking about it now makes me wonder why anyone who wants to do anything good with his life wouldn't plan on dying young, before...
Before a snot-nosed Ivy Leaguer like me gets the chance to smear you in a public forum, that's for sure. None of that can make me forget what a brilliant mind we lost thirty years ago. It wasn't all about Nixon and the 60's for Thompson: by the time that all went down, he'd already had the kind of life that would make anyone green with envy. And since Thompson's life was his work until the end of Nixon, you could easily say the same thing about Thompson's journalism. He was a force to be reckoned with, even when he wasn't in print. He wrote an official press release announcing his discharge from the Air Force in which he proudly fantasized about throwing a wine bottle into the guard booth as he sped his way out of Eglin Air Force Base. He brought the Hell's Angels into the widespread consciousness of the intellectual drug counterculture when he introduced them at Ken Kesey's La Honda retreat; in doing so, he helped bridge the gap between the burgeoning subcultures of the country’s working and middle classes, forging a short lived anti-establishment alliance with true street cred, which might have changed the course of American History – if it had only lasted. Its breakup at the Altamont festival sent him into the ultimately terminal Nixon spiral of the later years of his brilliance. He ran a protest campaign for Sherriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, whose satirical rhetoric was so sharp that he almost ended up winning the race. He chronicled the death of both his great passions – the 60's protest culture and the American Dream – and remorselessly nailed the coffin lids shut on both of them when he realized that it had all been what he called "a lame fuckaround." He capped off that era by writing the greatest book on American politics that I've ever read, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, in which he noted:
"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves, finally just lay back and say it: that we are a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anyone in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."
Sic Semper Gonzo. I will miss him during every horrible minute in which that passage still rings true of the decaying dream of America at whose side he fought and died.
posted by Dr. Chuck | 1:50 PM
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