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March 1, 2006

Hunter S. Thompson: One Year On

I was thinking of Hunter again the other day as I re-read the text messages received from friends and family when news of his suicide came through—one-year ago—and I brooded on the strange sentimentality required for this preservation. My brooding yielded nothing other than evidence for a soft and simple heart, but I was forced to reassess Hunter’s legacy, more out of consideration of my completed thesis on the man, than the bogus obligation an anniversary might suggest…
I had begun my Honours on the day Thompson killed himself, and the shock was, surprisingly to me, severe. It was Thompson’s iconoclasm, more than his words, that inspired me; I took a moral consistency, an abhorrence for received wisdom, and a love for literature to be its inspiring hallmarks. Lofty and naïve, perhaps, but we all need standards…
I wrote on this blog a year ago that Thompson’s relevance and quality began fading quickly after Nixon flashed those peace signs and hopped on the ‘copter… I would re-assert that here, but perhaps colour the re-assertion with something like… disappointment? Where Thompson’s writing was at once inflammatory and instructive, it became hijacked by drugs, and the colours became blotchy and dull. It is disappointing because Thompson was once a great traveller and a strong and lucid reporter—on the road with the Hell’s Angels, or roaming South America observing despotism in its rawest forms. And he reported back—pre-gonzo days—with vigour and an intention of righting the wrongs of insular, or uninspired, journalism. Thompson took his journalistic cues from Twain, Crane and, of course, Hemingway, and this reader is grateful.
But Thompson stopped travelling—in the ages of Bush and Clinton and Bush, Thompson took ever-increasing amounts of drugs and barely left his compound out in deepest Colorado. He wasn’t out there, the roaming Mencken/Papa/kinked cartoon super-freak that documented the violent ’70s. No, Hunter fired guns and screamed in isolation, his words losing relevance and coherency, as he lost sense of himself—the myth and the man blurring out in the wilderness…
Not even the national shock of S-11 could inspire a return for the man, and this, for me, was the greatest disappointment. While Thompson’s reportage from the ’60s and ‘70 is both entertaining and stylistically curious to me, it can not possibly be as relevant as it was back then—times when abstracted debates on freedom were taken from the classroom and literally fought in the streets, and written about by Thompson. So where was Thompson in the new millennia? In our age of Bush and theocratic fascism? Seemingly suffering a massive crisis of conviction, brought on by myth and drugs and drink and the varying banal forms of madness that affect us all, sooner or later.

Posted by Marty at March 1, 2006 12:29 PM

Comments

Posted by: reuben at March 1, 2006 6:06 PM

Posted by: marty at March 1, 2006 8:11 PM

Posted by: Natty at March 1, 2006 9:15 PM