Maybe you’ve had one of those moments where you’re sitting there minding your business, and your roommate comes over to your room and announces, “Hunter Thompson is dead.” No? It happened to me, last night, and the moment was so surprising, I just had to say it.
“Hunter…S…Thompson?” The same. He was found shot, by his own hand, by his son, a version of Hunter Thompson without the bile and confusion of the latter years, but also without the wit and genius of Thompson’s prime years. Just a regular joe. A joe who happens to still be alive, but still. It’s always surprising to hear news of this nature. As I commented after processing the information, with guys like Thompson, you never expect to see that they’ve died until you see the news that they’ve died. Common sense, I know, but the kind that never gets spoken aloud. The bizarre nature of death, coupled with America’s belief in the eternal soul of celebrity, leads us to befuddlement whenever a Big Name takes the last trip to Rancho Relaxo in the Sky.
Not that it affects me beyond the visceral first shock of hearing the news. I may be more likely to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Hell’s Angels, but on the whole, I will go on, my heart will go on, and after a few days will have stopped thinking about a thin man who had trouble talking without the use of ellipses, whose favourite pasttimes were LSD flashbacks, and whose profile became a model for Uncle Duke in Doonesbury.
At least Thompson’s philosophies regarding reporting weren’t hypocritical. He recognized that the reporter could never be truly separated from the story. From the ashes of faux objectivity rose Gonzo journalism, hyper-subjective reporting that, for Thompson, could only be achieved through the consumption of obscene amounts of drugs. Not perhaps the best way to approach news journalism, but the idea behind it is at least honest.
So he will pass into the ether, as countless have before. The sadness and low-brow infantilism of his latter years, the decline in quality of writing, will likely be overshadowed by his greater works, and that’s a good thing. A man with the qualities and conscience of Thompson was almost damned from the beginning to make big mistakes after having big successes. He was, so to speak, the angel with dirty wings and a dirty face. Given the political atmosphere of the country in his later years, it is not surprising in the least that he became a character in his own farce, becoming subservient to politics of de-humanization and demonization. Yet he will be remembered more as the voice of his generation, a fella who, beyond the Beats and the Hippies, carried the sentiments of everyone and no one; a damned fine writer in his heyday.
There are worse things in life.