Hunter S. Thompson is dead.
What kind of crap is that? Killed himself? What an asshole.
We imagine he left his work unfinished, and we won't guess
at his reasons for shooting himself. He was fond of guns,
after all. But we will mourn him. In journalism, fame is nothing,
though plenty of writers seek it, and we younger ones end
up with tired old talking heads or liars for heroes. Judith
Miller? Jayson Blair? Stephen Glass? Thompson is an irreplaceable
bright point in a media haze populated by stiffs tripping
arrogantly over their tethers.
He was not necessarily a journalistic idol, however. He was
not someone to look up to or emulate. He was someone to watch
out for, his writing like fireworks, bright and temporary
and fleeting. With his "Gonzo journalism" he chopped
out the kind niche into which no one dared follow; he was
too original to be followed, and any attempts to do so would
have shattered under the weight of their great failure. When
we worked in newspapers, we kept a copy of his book, The
Great Shark Hunt, in our office, beside the unopened
dictionary. Shark Hunt was important: regularly we
mined it for inspiration or amusement.
For fun, we took savagely underused words from Thompson's
text and inserted them into our daily grind stories, trying
to slide them past the beady eyes of copy editors. Why not?
It was a small rebellion. But the real life characters--detectives,
politicians, criminals, hicks, teachers, parents--that we
wrote about everyday were often no less fucked up on alcohol,
prescription drugs or ignorance than Thompson claimed to be
on gin, whiskey and acid, so why not sling the two together
in a drab story for bored readers? All politics is local,
and all people are the same: if they read, it's because they
want organized gossip, or they want to know who to blame.
Thompson was not above creating his own gossip and laying
blame where it was deserved, particularly on his nemesis,
Richard Nixon. We are too young to remember much of Nixon,
but we can appreciate undistilled hatred for hypocritical
authority. And for the liberal application of Mace. Never
has a writer incorporated so well the desire of young writers
to do stupid things, to live a stereotypically literary life,
and be revered for it. He succeeded, often elegantly, where
others would have been arrested and tossed in the drunk tank.
There is nothing wrong with this, the shameless accumulation
of ridiculous experiences and stories. Experience is the blood
of writing, and Thompson at least motivates a more interesting
class of journalists than Judith Miller or most other writers
ever will.
His work wasn't necessarily factual. But it was true. Once,
an elder colleague observed one of us flipping through Thompson's
work. "That'll rot your brain," he said. We can't
argue. Journalism professors rightly warn up-and-comers “to
read but not to copy” his style, his mold-breaking approach.
Much of it is horseshit and completely untenable. But Thompson
laid the kind of waste that fertilizes future generations.
We will miss his voice.
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