RIP HST

  There’s very little I can add to the amounts of copy that have already been written in honor/disgust/awe of the life and career of Hunter S. Thompson after his recent suicide.

Suffice it to say that, for better or worse, without Hunter S. Thompson I would probably not be in journalism. This could either be a good or bad development depending your point of view, but there it is for what it’s worth.

We all know about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. No comment necessary there. It is so much an original text, a scripture if you will, of journalism that you no more feel the need to convert others to it than a devout Christian would feel the need to stand up in the middle of the congregation and say, “Hey, there’s this book called the Bible — I got a copy if anyone wants to borrow it.”

But his vastly underappreciated recent work, in my opinion, reaches to still-higher levels of profane insight and psychedelically violent outrage. The Bush II administration seemed to kick Thompson into a zone of disgust so profound that in the final analysis that may have been what actually killed him. (That, or the six vodka martini breakfasts and the cocaine.)

(Update: For the too-literally minded or those that just don’t get the whole Hunter S. Thompson-paranoia thing, let me be clear that I’m not saying the Bush II administration actually physically arranged the death of the guy…. mmm-kay, people?)

The voices of an irreverent, radical generation are dying quickly now: Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone, HST, etc. A younger, vastly more comfortable generation takes over, one that never knew firsthand the reality of racial segregation, of live pictures of U.S. military coffins coming home from a far-off land (“against Pentagon policy” today), of a media that took its watchdog role seriously.

Just when we need an informed press the most, it seems, we are fated to be without one. As Thompson himself wrote in 2003 :

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

Journalists today know next to nothing of Watergate, the seminal controversy and Rosetta Stone of Hunter S. Thompson’s career. Instead of burglary, Archibald Cox, the Saturday Night Massacre, the 18-minute gap, Nixon’s challenge to the Supreme Court and the Court’s powerful answer, today’s young journalists have Monica’s semen-stained dress, the Starr Report, and Linda Tripp.

Though I suppose Deep Throat could apply to both situations.

It’s one of the drawbacks, I guess, of the rise of an expanding middle class in this country, a bourgeoisie, in old-school terminology. As is usually the case with any bourgeoisie, even the scandals seem to be more pedestrian and less important. I suppose it could be enough to drive one to suicide if one let it.

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