Hunter S Thompson – 7/18/37 – 2/20/05 Father Of Gonzo Journalist, Free-Thinker, Incisive Cultural Critic
Journalist Hunter S. Thompson passed away on the 20th of February, 2005 at his compound in Woody Creek, Co. He was 67 years old. Reports indicate that he perished from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was an abrupt but strangely fitting end to the life and career of a man who created Gonzo Journalism, where the writer becomes deeply intertwined with the subject and reports from that very unique perspective. His most famous work, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas,” began with the line “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”To most of the straight-laced world, he was the embodiment of the seven deadly sins. Thompson was an incoherent, babbling lunatic with a penchant for firearms, firewater, and narcotics. He represented all that was wrong with the 60’s and he served as a reminder that the collision of dangerous excess and wanton self-indulgence is seldom a pretty sight to behold. To parents who happened to read that first sentence of their children’s copy of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” he was a cloven-hooved corrupter of youth; a modern-day Socrates in shooting glasses carrying a typewriter with the everpresent Dunhill hanging from a cigarette holder in the right corner of his mouth.
He was no choirboy; he was known to start his days with a bloody mary or a shot of chivas regal and a joint or a line of cocaine. He was active and an outdoorsman but he was not a picture of health or a model sextagenarian.
However, he was a writer of incisive wit who had a deep grasp for the finer points of politics, sport, and culture. His command of language, both the formal and the vernacular, gave his work a level of depth that is seldom found in journalism or cultural criticism and his political writing was always informative and entertaining. He laced is articles with quotes from diverse sources such as Tennyson, Bob Dylan, and the Book of Revelation. He always had a sense of the bigger picture and had a knack for bizarrely concise and fitting analogies that gave hive work a rare intellectual weight.
Thompson lived like a Viking. He was a marauder who lived like there was no tomorrow. This strange “Viking” pathology is something that I have seen before in other friends who took their own lives. The act of suicide, although it is a powerful final statement, often raises more questions that it can ever possibly answer. One can glean from his appearance in recent photographs that his life was beginning to take its toll on him. Whatever the case, he felt inclined to write his own ending to his life and took the liberty to do so. Thus, it was his final act of excess and self-indulgence and a strangely fitting end to his career.
I will remember Hunter S. Thompson as the articulate defender of truth, justice, and the American way. It was Thompson’s voice more than any other that stirred my spirit and made me want to be a writer. His unique viewpoint was as singular as his literary influences and he made me realize that even something as banal as the superbowl or a sheriff’s election can possess apocalyptic elements that can stir others to action.
"San Francisco in the middle '60s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run ...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that comer of time and the world. Whatever it meant."
"And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 12:03 AM
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