2.23.05Reflections on a Ravaged Drinks Trolley: Raising One for Hunter S. Thompson
By Mark Grueter
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"(He is) a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad." - The Good Doctor, Hunter Thompson, on his archenemy Richard Nixon
It has been depressing to witness all the news and commentary ever since Dr. Hunter S. Thompson shot his brains out. First, the overall story hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves; it seems most of our humorless political activists and bloggers are largely indifferent to Thompson’s work. More attention was paid to Howard Dean’s ascension and to the revelation that George W. Bush may have smoked dope.
On network news, terse and cliched summaries of Thompson’s career were accompanied, in equal time, by news of the passing of a pair of two-bit actors. MSNBC’s Hardball, a show that prides itself on hard-hitting political journalism, totally ignored any mention of the author who penned one of the greatest and certainly hardest-hitting works of political journalism of the last century. (I am, of course, referring to Thompson’s masterpiece, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail of ’72.) Yet, when Johnny Carson kicked it, Chris Matthews dedicated his whole show to the memory.
Do not blowhards and bloggers of every stripe owe their existence, at least in part, to Thompson’s deliriously groundbreaking reports from the late 60’s and early 70’s? Has any campaign journalist, mainstream or independent, left or right, ever produced anything as thoroughly engaging, insightful and entertaining as Thompson’s 1972 stuff? Fear and Loathing ’72 is more than mere journalism; it is a work of art, as instructive on politics as it curious to our emotional, creative and intellectual sensibilities. No matter – Bush is doing photo ops in Europe and Dean just became chair of the DNC. (A couple of hacks on the Imus in the Morning program, who had obviously never read Thompson, went so far as to dismiss him as an “overrated liberal,” as if Thompson were an actual liberal and as if it even mattered. How the fuck such idiots get on the air is beyond me.)
The last thing I want to see is a sentimental tribute to Thompson, but I thought it strange for Slate’s David Plotz to reproduce a foolishly shortsighted 1998 piece on Thompson in which he wrote, “Now is the worst possible moment for a Thompson revival. This is a tranquil era and, considered in tranquility, Thompson is indeed a horror. His writing seems archaic and crude, and its self-indulgence seems stunning even in an age of memoirs…(Tom) Wolfe is undoubtedly a better writer than Thompson.” Well, I mean to say, nothing captures the mood better than that!
I’ve long felt that elite demonization of the Thompson school of journalism (the “ad hominem” attack and savagely participatory journalism) has less to do with the triumph of civility and much more to do with cowardice, corruption and a lack of journalistic imagination and ability. The trade has become both too professionalized and too specialized to be of any human interest. If contemporary journalists could write invective and ironic put downs as memorably as generalist throwbacks like Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Hunter S. Thompson or even such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Gore Vidal why, for Chrissakes, would they refrain from showcasing such demonstrations of wit?
While some of us read non-fiction for style as much as substance and believe the two are often impossible to separate, most academics and the pseudo-lofty practitioners of journalism still presume the superiority of “objective” (aka boring, non-objective) reporting. The effect of this mindset is to weed out the radicals and the individualists, while boosting the suck-ups and pretenders. But as Thompson wrote: “The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shoplifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado.” And outside of and in spite of the petty world of elite and mainstream journalism, it is Thompson who commands fascination because he spoke directly to the politically and socially alienated. There are many of us out there who would take one Hunter Thompson over the entire staffs of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon.com, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic and a whole host of other periodicals, thanks just the same.
It is also essential to point out that you cannot separate, as some try to do, Thompson's writing or genius from his debauched 'lifestyle'. The wildman existed before and during the work and the pioneering work never would've existed without the personality.
Like everyone else, I woke up Monday morning to the grim news. Unlike everyone else, I woke up feeling like bloody hell after a weekend away, inundated with nicotine, amphetamines, violence, marijuana, good times, and dangerous amounts of booze. To complete the fear and loathing, there was even some talk of procuring hallucinogenic mushrooms, but our man never showed. Anyway, the rude a.m. news of one of my hero’s long-overdue death served as a fitting conclusion to the depraved affair.
Not that’s it wise to try to imitate Thompson’s lifestyle - there can never be ‘another Hunter’ or anyone else comparable. We can only envy his extraordinary tolerance for the substances along with his riveting literary talent. Thirty years later, Thompson’s political enemies are dead and gone, but his devastating rants and antics are still exhilarating and liberating to witness, and also influential. I’ve certainly had some great times taking on the Gonzo style myself.
In Martin Amis’s novel Money, the self-destructive, alcoholic narrator yearns for the days "when no one minded feeling like death the whole time.” Today, he laments, people "want to feel terrific forever.” While obsessions with pseudo-happiness, moderation and self-improvement in our society prevail overall, I think Thompson’s fundamental appeal stems from his opposition to these fads, and from his uncontrollable appetite for destruction and self-abuse. The tone of his best writing is uniquely and insanely aggressive and nihilistic, but nihilistic in a way that seems almost innocuous and certainly charming and inspirational. Most accounts suggest he really was the ultimate self-abuser or self-sacrificer.
However, for a time, he harnessed his penchant for destruction, along with his intellect and inherent sensitivities, to create, subvert, scare and entertain. His raw, blunt style appeals to the disaffected, the outcast, the romantic, the loner and the apolitical, and it always will.
Thompson despised convention. From his novel The Rum Diary, the narrator comments on American tourists in Puerto Rico:
All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding – shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike. These people should be kept at home; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren’t satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs.
Last year, after I wrote a celebration of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 for my graduate school’s magazine, a professor criticized me for hailing a “drug addict” over other journalists of the time such as Ben Sonnenberg. It was remark I expected from someone like Bill O’Reilly or an aunt, not a left-wing professor who ought to know better. Some of us still believe in the fueling potential of drug and alcohol use and abuse and we have Hunter Thompson to thank for proving the point. I leave you with Thompson’s description of one of his characters in The Rum Diary:
Moberg was a degenerate…I have never seen a man so bent on self-destruction – not only self, but destruction of everything he could get his hands on. He was lewd and corrupt in every way. He hated the taste of rum, yet he would finish a bottle in ten minutes, then vomit and fall down. He ate nothing but sweet rolls and spaghetti, which he would heave the moment he got drunk. He spent all his money on whores and when that got dull he would take on an occasional queer, just for the strangeness of it. He would do anything for money, and this was the man we had on the police beat. Often he disappeared for days at a time. Then someone would have to track him down through the dirtiest bars in La Perla, a slum so foul that on maps of San Juan it appears as a blank space. La Perla was Moberg’s headquarters; he felt at home there, he said, and in the rest of the city – except for a few horrible bars – he was a lost soul…
Disgusting as he usually was, on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard…
One night at Al’s he told me he was writing a book, called The Inevitability of a Strange World. He took it very seriously. “It’s the kind of book a Demogorgon would write,” he said. “Full of shit and terror – I’ve selected the most horrible things I could imagine – the hero is a flesh eater disguised as a priest – cannibalism fascinates me – once down at the jail they beat a drunk until he almost died – I asked one of the cops if I could eat a chunk of his leg before they killed him…” He laughed. “The swine threw me out – hit me with a club.” He laughed again. “I would have eaten it – why shouldn’t I? There’s nothing sacred about human flesh – it’s meat like everything else – would you deny that?”
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Mark Grueter is the Managing Editor of Me Three Literary Journal. Write to him at grueter@methree.net.© 2005 Me Three