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Paying Tribute to a Soldier of Freedom: In Memory of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson By Robert E. Martin
The
news struck through me like a molten hot sword that at first sears you with
disbelief only to quickly grow cold with a chill that numbs the central nervous
system with the realization that, as with losing a parent, we suddenly find
ourselves propelled forward into a vast & dangerous sea on a rudderless boat,
left to navigate treacherous waters without the benefit of being able to read
the map. And
the beauty of Hunter was that he memorized the map of our twisted American
culture so well that he never required it for reference. He knew how to navigate
through the abyss by instinct, which gave us a sense of Hope, especially in
these Doomed and irrational times when political & corporate leaders can lose
billions of dollars and not be held to task, unless of course they make the
carnal mistake of coveting their neighbor's wife.
Dr. Hunter Thompson
is one of the 'Big Three' literary figures, along with Norman Mailer and
Tom Wolfe that inspired me to take a crack at becoming a journalist in the
first place. With their innovative development of the 'New Journalism' in the
late 1960s & early 1970s, the stories that shaped our lives were suddenly
transformed from static & nebulous frameworks of facts and figures to intensely
personal tome's that bred an immense depth of understanding not only about our
world, but the significance and obligation of our individual role within it.
Thompson began his distinguished career in the early 1950s as an Air Force
news-writer, but received an honorable discharge for his erratic behavior, which
included giving little consideration to military bearing or dress and writing a
final story for the base newspaper that described a drunken nighttime riot at
Eglin Base that resulted in the rape of female cadets (but allegedly never
happened). In
1965, Dr. Thompson spent nearly the entire year following, studying and
associating with the Hell's Angels. He felt they embodied a disturbing and
violent sub-culture that possessed tendencies that could easily run rampant
throughout America in other forms and the resulting novel, Hell's Angels - A
Strange & Terrible Saga - would give the world its first true glimpse of
Hunter's insightful 'Gonzo' style. At
Scanlan's Monthly, Thompson wrote another landmark piece - The
Kentucky Derby
is Decadent & Depraved -
that brought him to the attention of Jann Wenner, editor & publisher of
Rolling Stone magazine, and led to a relationship & partnership that would
propel Hunter to national acclaim when he was assigned to cover a Police
Convention in Las Vegas. The resulting work, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas,
fused Hunter's own mind-altered sensibilities with that of his subject matter in
a manner that illuminated a class of culture & values unlike any other. Or as
Hunter told an interviewer a few years ago, "Fiction is based on reality unless
you're a fairytale artist. You have to get your knowledge of life from
somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter
it." After
waging an unsuccessful campaign for Sheriff in Aspen in 1970, the pieces
Thompson wrote in the ensuing years with Rolling Stone, especially
Fear & Loathing at the Super Bowl and Fear & Loathing on the Campaign
Trail: 1972 became incisive forays into the political & social dynamic of
Tolerance versus Intolerance in America, while cemented Thompson's cutting edge
insightfulness. Hunter Thompson was as obsessed with the 'American Dream' and all it had to offer as much as he was fearful of the nightmare it could so easily become. Like the great writers of the 'Lost Generation' before him, he believed it was important to lead by example, maintain professional discipline, and never lose sight of the blinking green light at the end of the dock. He would actually write out pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in order to "get a sense of what it feels to write like that"; and, similar to his hero Ernest Hemingway, he was a fierce Libertarian, a believer that the individual controlled his or her destiny.
As
one of Thompson's editors, Douglas Brinkley, writes in the new Rolling
Stone honoring Thompson, "He was parodying the Lost Generation in his early
works. A whiskey-touched Hemingway may have shot lions in the green v alleys of
Africa, but a rum-besotted Thompson blasted away rats on the garbage heaps of
Puerto Rico."
Indeed, Thompson was working on a treatment of The Rum Diary, his only
work of true fiction written in 1959 and only published in 1998 that is slated
to be turned into a movie with his good friend Johnny Depp taking the
lead role. Most
recently, Hunter's political writing took aim at President Bush. Following the
2000 election, he accused the Bush Administration of "the most brutal seizure of
power since Hitler burned the German Reichstag in 1933 and declared himself the
new Boss of Germany."
Later, during the campaign of 2004, he alleged "Nixon looks like a flaming
liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush."
During the late 1980s and early 1990s Hunter wrote a syndicated column that was
taken up in my own publication; and even as I write these words, the last
analysis he wrote of the 2004 election still reverberates up my spine when he
warned: "The issue in the 2004 election is not whether or not America will turn
more fascistic, it's whether or not people actually want it that way." And
Hunter was an avid student of history, as witnessed in Fear & Loathing on the
Campaign Trail, 1972 when he noted this quote from Josef Goebbels at
the height of Nixon's Watergate scandal, that could easily have come from any of
Nixon's henchmen such as Charles Colson or Bob Haldeman, "When
democracy granted democratic methods to us in times of opposition, this was
bound to happen in a democratic system. However, we National Socialists never
asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared
openly that we used the democratic methods only in order to gain power and that,
after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any
consideration the means which were granted to us in times of our opposition."
Obviously, pretty heady stuff.
Thompson's most recent work: Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and
the Downward Spiral of Dumbness is a collection of his most recent columns. In my
opinion, Hunter is often wrongly accused of being a 'raving liberal'. This could
not be further from the truth. As stated earlier, politically he was a fierce
libertarian, a believer that individual freedom was more important than social
control, a believer in Social Darwinism that championed Freaks & Anarchists
because they made a conscious decision to rebel against the stifling death of
conformity. From
all accounts, Hunter was not in good health in recent years. Confined largely
to a wheel chair due to a hip-replacement, riddled with spinal pain, those
closest to him say that Hunter could not live with contentment and compromise,
so he ended up shooting himself when he felt he became merely a shadow of his
former self - exactly like his literary hero Ernest Hemingway did.
Friends also say Hunter was deeply depressed after the 2004 election, unable to
snap out from a pervasive Sense of Doom that he felt about the future direction
of our country. In
honesty, that is perhaps what is most disconcerting about Hunter's death. Few
writers could cut past the spin and get to the kernels of truth embedded within
a story, as he did so clearly on the 9/11 attacks when he wrote the following
day in a column for ESPN: "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemyWe are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at onceVictory is not guaranteed - for anyone, and certainly for someone as baffled as George W. BushHe will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why."
Sadly, the voice that wrote those bone-chilling words is now gone, but his
Spirit will live on in all of us that are willing to summon the courage not to
allow complacency and its ugly hand-maiden compromise to derail us from our own
pursuit of the American Dream. Am I
optimistic? No, a realist never is. And frankly, it discourages me that so few
young people embrace the drive for freedom and non-conformity that Hunter did so
immaculately. The
ill effects of the Hippie Generation may still be running rampant, with drug use
at an all time high as well as premarital sex; but why is it that activism - the
drive to make a difference - is at an all time low?
Hunter S. Thompson
practiced politics with a Vengeance. He isn't alone. Not for a minute. But the
fact that all the colors are starting to look the same should become a wake-up
call for each of us, and a bugle cry for anybody that still believes in freedom
who doesn't want to go the way of the Buffalo. |
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