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| | | | Hunter S. Thompson, Outlaw American Giant February 21st, 2005 — New York (apj.us) — I was going through my e-mail last night when I noticed what looked like an innocuous enough item on the R S S feed from Eschaton: "Holy crap." Curiosity got the best of me, and I opened the item:
The words hit like a sack of potatoes to the solar plexus. An almost reflex-action check of Google News showed about a dozen entries for the same AP article, and one with a few more details from the Aspen Times. Hunter S. Thompson lived, wrote, and ultimately died of his own terms. He was the outlaw giant of American letters, a journalist and writer of tremendous gifts and perhaps even larger demons. He was, in many ways, a walking contradiction: an eloquent advocate of social justice, a scathing critic of crony politics, particularly those of his bête noire Richard Nixon — and, more recently, former Texas Gov. George W. Bush. At the same time, he was enamored of guns, which played a part in number of infamous, often harrowing, and sometimes funny anecdotes involving Thompson. Thompson has been greatly credited, along with authors such as Ken Kesey and Gay Talese, with creating the "New Journalism" of the late 1960s. Thompson's highly subjective journalistic style, rich in hyperbole and opinion, and inevitably involving his own intrusion in the story, eventually came to be known as "Gonzo journalism. " While Thompson's profile seemed to wane in the 1980's and 1990's, he reemerged in recent years with the publication of his letters, his early novel "The Rum Diary," his new book "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk," and a regular column for ESPN.com skewering athletes, sports hucksters, and politicians alike. There is no question that Thompson's style has had an enormous influence on the Internet journalists and opinion writers, including our own Jeff Koopersmith, Alan Bisbort, and Dave "Dr." Gonzo. I first became familiar with Thompson's writing at a pivotal moment in my life: the day I moved from Hartford to New York. I had decided to drop out of graduate school to pursue a career in the music business. On the bus ride down to New York — a trip which I shared with a couple of Trinity College undergrads who spent most of the trip making out and an old guy sprawled across two seats intermittently snoring — I read Thompson's most well known book, the hyperkinetic and hysterically funny "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Most Thompson fans (and critics) zero in on famous pull quotes that center on the drug-fueled nature of the escapades of Thompson and his "attorney" Oscar Acosta as they hit Sin City in 1971 in search of the "American Dream," but the image that stuck with me was the moment they found it:
Thompson seemed always haunted by the specter of 1968 — the murder of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the ascent of Nixon to the "imperial presidency." In the wake of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, he wrote an eerily prescient column predicting the "War on Terror," its sputtering failure, and an outright attack on free speech. His columns, books and articles ring true today more than ever, in an era when the greedheads, swine and rubes he so detested seem to have taken control of our nation — and the populace is suffering from a persistent and growing case of electoral buyers' remorse. Hunter S. Thompson will loom large among chroniclers of American history and politics. He was my generation's Mencken. Selah and thank you, Dr. Thompson. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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