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A Few Words of
Appreciation for Hunter Thompson
by Joe Auciello /
April 2005 issue of Socialist Action
Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, author of “Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” committed suicide on
Feb. 20 at his home in Aspen, Colorado.
Whether intended or not, Thompson chose a fate similar to a writer
he admired. In 1962 Ernest Hemingway put a shotgun to his head; Thompson
used a rifle. Like Hemingway at the end, Thompson was physically ill and
depressed. Also, like Hemingway, Thompson was a self-mythologizing,
larger-than-life figure who created a unique prose style that expanded the
scope
of American writing. And by the time of their deaths, both writers
had outlived their most creative years.
Thompson, creator and sole practitioner of “gonzo journalism,”
represented the ultra-left of the 1960s-inspired literary innovation known
as the “New Journalism.” As practiced by writers like Tom Wolfe and Norman
Mailer, “New Journalism” defied the commandment of objectivity in reporting
and instead
placed the journalist’s experience and opinions into the center of
the story.
Thompson developed that method with a vengeance first in “Hell’s
Angels,” the story of his personal experiences with that motorcycle gang,
and then “Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a drug-laden account of a “savage
journey to the heart of the American dream.” Long a cult favorite, this
book achieved classic
status when in 1998 it joined the Modern Library series in a
hardcover reprint.
Thompson’s writing style was blunt, scatological, outrageous,
scathing, and sometimes poetic—often in a stream-of-consciousness
adrenaline rush. He showed that a flagrant display of opinion could be
entertaining and informative, even more illuminating than the staid journalistic
standards that seemed no
longer adequate to chronicle the hurly-burly decade of 1965-1975.
Thompson developed a persona who appeared fueled by prodigious
consumption of alcohol and drugs and who spoke proudly of his habits. His
public image may well have—must have!—been exaggerated, but that image did accurately
reflect Thompson’s chemically charged life. Thompson told his audience the
truth as he saw it and as they felt it. Hardly a youth himself, Thompson nonetheless
brought the values of “youth culture” to political reporting as head of the
“National Affairs Desk” at Rolling Stone magazine.
In the 1960s and 1970s, books like Theodore H. White’s reverential
“Making of the President” series dominated political reporting. White, and
most journalists, wrote as if the candidates for president were all candidates
for Mt. Rushmore. Thompson knew better. He instead wondered aloud, “How low
do you have to stoop in this country to be president?” With a brazenly aggressive
voice, Thompson treated the contemptible with contempt.
As a reporter of politics, though, Thompson presented little in the
way of analysis. He was surface, not depth; mood, not idea. He could
acknowledge the flaws of the American political system but he nonetheless naively
hoped that personalities could fix America’s ills.
Here he justifies his support in 1972 for George McGovern over
Richard Nixon: “There may not be much difference between Democrats and
Republicans; I have made that argument myself—with considerable venom, as
I recall—over the past ten months. ... But only a blind geek or a
waterhead could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon.
“Granted, they are both white men; and both are politicians—but the
similarity ends right there, and from that point on the difference is so
vast that anybody who can’t see it deserves whatever happens to them if
Nixon gets re-elected due to apathy, stupidity, and laziness on the part of
potential McGovern voters” (“Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail,” p.
396).
Yes, in personal character, McGovern and Nixon were quite different.
McGovern, for instance, appears not to have been a habitual liar, a crook,
and an anti-Semite. But their difference is the least important of points.
Both men were faithful servants of the same political system, and, in
politics, that is what is decisive. The wounded idealist in Thompson did
not permit him to recognize the distinction.
The fatal flaw of the “but this election is different” argument is
that it is hauled out, dusted off for every election, and each time sold as
new. It’s the perennial, last-ditch plea of desperate Democrats. Who hasn’t heard it all before? At
least, Johnson isn’t Goldwater; at least, McGovern isn’t Nixon; at least,
Carter isn’t Reagan; at least, Kerry isn’t Bush. But if every electoral
match-up is special, then none of them are. The names change, but the
choices are the same: Bad or Worse. Pick one. It’s the politics of the
lesser evil.
For all the radicalism of Hunter Thompson’s style, his political
views were merely run-of-the-mill, left-wing Democrat. Eventually he
drifted with the tide. By
2004, Thompson, like any conventional Democrat, denounced Ralph
Nader and supported “my man John Kerry.”
The limitations of Thompson’s political criteria made him less
significant as his opinions were more widely adopted. No longer was it
original or daring to write that the president “represents that dark,
venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every
other country in the world has learned to fear and despise,” as, in 1972,
Thompson wrote of Nixon. Denouncing George W. Bush as “a treacherous little
freak,” who, in the first 2004 presidential
debate, “talked like a donkey with no brains at all,” merely heated up the
rhetoric of mainstream liberal editorial opinion from mild to medium.
Ultimately, though, Thompson’s ideas were not vital. It was Thompson’s writing style and tone
that won admiration from readers, especially other writers, though most
knew better than to try and imitate him directly.
On the Counterpunch website, the left-wing journalist Alexander
Cockburn wrote appreciatively of Thompson as someone who showed the
liberating possibilities of American prose. This tip of the hat seems unexpected.
It is something like discovering that the uncle whose intelligence
and sensibility you have always respected spent the 1970s in an ashram
chanting “Hare Krishna.”
The effect of Thompson on Cockburn is hard to recognize at first.
Cockburn’s style, a sharpened needle-to-the-jugular kind of wit, rests on a
few hundred years of English literature, including, but not limited to, its
great satirists. Cockburn’s collection of writings, “The Golden Age is
Within Us,” includes chapter headings that derive from Milton in “Paradise
Lost.”
Thompson, whose sarcasm is more like a shotgun blast to the head,
evolved from the Mark Twain of “a pen warmed up in hell.” Though he could
cite the Book of Revelation, Thompson was more likely to quote rock 'n' roll.
Still, Thompson’s overall ethos—“a slap in the face of public taste”—to
cite an earlier group of self-styled literary outlaws, would be
delightfully appealing to any political commentator, Cockburn included.
But what to make of Thompson’s death? Thompson had long entertained
thoughts of suicide. Writing the “Author’s Note” to a collection of his
journalism—which, for most people would be a celebratory occasion—he
said, “I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for
my own
tombstone” and then imagined the jump out from the office building
where he was writing onto Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. He concluded, “I would
genuinely love to make that leap….”
Writers from all points of the political spectrum have criticized
Thompson for resorting to suicide. Certainly
his death caused pain to his family. But it might be better to quote from
his book, “The Great Shark Hunt,” and say of Thompson what Thompson said of
Hemingway: “He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of
peace and contentment was not enough for him. … So, finally, and for what
he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it….”
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