HST dead at 67

The Rocky Mountain News, among others, is reporting that Hunter S Thompson, gonzo journalist, author and counterculture legend has died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 67.

So stop the presses, lower the flag to half-mast and observe a moment of silence for one of the best writers the Left has ever produced - like the Michael Moore of the 60's except cool, clever and funny.

Thompson was the implacable nemesis of the most famously crooked President in American history, Richard Milhous "He was our Satan" Nixon - so much so that, when Nixon was finally run out of town, Thompson's career waned and never attained the same heights of passion and invective again.

Not that subsequent Republican president's didn't build on Nixon's bloodthirsty corruption, but if - sorry - when they did they stood on Nixon's shoulders. Sure, they may have surpassed Nixon's ability to savage America's poorest for fun but Reagan, G.H.W. & G.W. Bush did it with the full support of the greed-filled, disaffected EX-hippies of the 80's, 90's and 00's. Whereas, Nixon happily conscripted the nation's children into a useless war in complete opposition to a whole generation of hippies and revolutionaries at the height of their idealism and influence and with the constant accompaniment some of the most gruelling war images to haunt the American psyche.

In the midst of all this a reckless and iconoclastic journalist who made his name riding and writing with the Hell's Angels would burst out of the objectivity straight-jacket of journalists of the time to verbally-blugeon Nixon: "a liar, a quitter and a bastard. A cheap crook and a merciless war criminal".

With the benefit of hindsight what's surprising is not Thompson's apparent suicide, but that it didn't come much, much earlier. He wrote at 40 in the introduction to The Great Shark Hunt:

Well...yes, and here we go again.

But before we get to The Work, as it were, I want to make sure I know how to cope with this elegant typewriter-(and, yes, it appears that I do)-so why not make this quick list of my life's work and then get the hell out of town on the 11:05 to Denver? Indeed. Why not?

But for just a moment I'd like to say, for the permeanant record, that it is a very strange feeling to be a 40-year-old American writer in this century and sitting alone in this huge building on Fifth Avenue in New York at one o'clock in the morning on the night before Christmas Eve, two thousand miles from home, and compiling a table of contents for a book of my own Collected Works in an office with a tall glass door that leads out to a big terrace looking down on The Plaza Fountain.

Very strange.

I feel like I might as well be sitting up here carving the words for my own tombstone... and when I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out into the air and across Fifth Avenue.

Nobody could follow that act.

Not even me... and in fact the only way I can deal with this eerie situation at all is to make a conscious decision that I have already lived and finished the life I planned to live-(13 years longer, in fact)-and everything from now on will be A New Life, a different thing, a gig that ends tonight and starts tomorrow morning.

So if I decide to leap for The Fountain when I finish this memo, I want to make one thing perfectly clear - I would genuinely love to make that leap, and if I don't I will always consider it a mistake and a failed opportunity, one of the very few serious mistakes of my First Life that is now ending.

But what the hell? I probably won't do it (for all the wrong reasons), and I'll probably finish this table of contents and go home for Christmas and then have to live for 100 more years with all this damn gibberish I'm lashing together.

But it would be a wonderful way to go out... and if I do it you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is "salute," dammit - and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could)...

But you know I could, if I had just a little more time.

Right?

Yes.

           HST #1, R.I.P.
           12/23/77

-- care of Amazon.com

One insightful commentator on his work, writing prior to his death wrote:

One of the great literary ironies of the century that just ended may be that Thompson has lived long enough to fade away and not met the sort of spectacular end which he imagined for himself. Thompson himself has publicly recognized the awkwardness of his situation in the introduction to his first volume of letters, The Proud Highway, when he writes of pretending to be dead while his old correspondence was brought to light, and again imagines a spectacular end for himself, this time a high speed motorcycle wreck.

The reference is of course to his 'Long Lost Novel', The Rum Diary, published 30 years after Thompson wrote it but not posthumously as Thompson suggests it probably should have been. Though Thompson continued to publish right up until his death the publication of a number of writings from his earlier days including letters, articles and novels weren't lost on him, and his 'strange feeling' on publishing one of his first collections can only have grown.

He was of course an infamous drug user (though the commentator above suggests this image was overplayed and ultimately irritated Thompson), drinker and gun lover (and a member of the NRA). Narrowly missed for Thompson's amusement, on one occasion slightly injured while trying to scare away a bear numerous friends, visitors and interviewers were terrorized by a gun-toting drug-crazed Thompson and they would note that he had many guns "and they were always loaded".

Another writer reports on a recent Thompson appearance:

Thompson tests the crowd's intelligence, grilling them on his recent escapades dubbed "The Battle of Aspen" by Smart magazine [now defunct], which involved Thompson's alleged unlawful discharge of automatic weapons in front of the home of would-be Aspen developer/greed head Floyd Watkins. But the crowd fails miserably.

"I guess you're not into journalism," he chides. "Okay. I'll tell the story myself."

And he does: about how he tried to be friends with this "swine," and how it just didn't work out--especially not at the Jerome Tavern at Woody Creek, where the natives look to their guide as a sort of cultural divining rod. "Okay, so I was playing the fence and I fell off," he shrugs. "I said, `I just can't be friends with you anymore, Floyd. You're a pig and my friends are giving me a hard time.'"

A few nights later, the police report reads, Hunter Thompson lit up the sky over Watkins's property with a sustained burst from his modified AK-47. "The Language of the Full-Auto," he mutters repeatedly. "Different from shotguns or bombs. Some people only understand the Language of the Full-Auto. I kind of enjoy violence," the Doktor admits.

Reflections on HST's passing would not be complete without a mention of Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway was Thompson's precursor in much of his literary style. Both blurred the line between fiction and reality, though Thompson more frequently, and Thompson clearly admired Hemingway. Thompson wrote an article called What Drew Hemingway to Ketchum? reflecting on Hemingway's last days in a sleepy American town after leaving Cuba for fear of political turmoil exploring his depression and feelings of being past it. Not only did both project extremely masculine images with a fondess for alcohol and guns but Hemingway too comitted suicide with a shotgun in his own home in small town America.

The Online Journalism Review writes of Thompson:

Like his precursor Ernest Hemingway, his style is absurdly easy to imitate ... and nearly impossible to pull off.

"We were somewhere north of Barstow in the middle of the desert when the tech really took effect," began a Nov. 16 L.A. Times article about the Comdex trade show, of all things.

And of course careful readers of this blog will know this is true.

However, none of the early reports suggest Thompson had seemed depressed or anything less than his usual self. There's even a slightly bizarre report by Aljazeera that emphasises the unproven nature of the self-inflicted aspect of Thomspon's death along with the fact that Thompson once said that Bush made up the reasons for the war on Iraq. Of course if they looked a little deeper they'd find that Thompson said much MUCH more offensive things about G. W. Bush... and just about every Republican candidate going back to Nixon.

Of course one of the things about the new ham-fisted Bush regime is that you can't quite rule out the possibility that Bush had someone as clearly harmless as Thompson bumped off simply because he didn't like the cut of his jib... on the other hand, you really can't rule out the possibility that Thompson topped himself at the thought of another four years of Bush and Cheney with full control of the Senate - which is ultimately murder by default when you think about it...

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