Hunter S. Thompson

I suppose that since everyone else has eulogized Hunter Thompson it is probably my turn as well, as I used to really like his books.

His is a sad case, the case of someone who boxed himself into a corner and simply could not let go of the act. Sickness, old age, and all of that, in Thompson's case miraculously late in coming, were not something that the public persona of Hunter S. Thompson could endure.

At his best, Thompson was one of the finest craftsmen of the written word. Hells Angels is a fantastic piece of California History, and in it are some conclusions that should have saved Thompson from his ultimate decay into laziness, despair and suicide. He realized that the Hells Angels' romanticism was a bit of bluster over the fact that they were an increasingly marginalized people. Their rebellion was more an act of cowardice than an act of bravery. The world changed, and they could not fathom it.

So it was with Thompson. As the sort of antics he portrayed (and probably did not engage in as much as he claimed) became painfully obvious as dead ends, Thompson continued on. And why not? Without a clear philosophy he certainly picked a lucrative way. He would show up intoxicated and belligerent to speaking gigs and the kids ate it up. He went from being the great writer he was in his day to sending cassettes of his mumbling to be transcribed and published as his latest pieces.

What would the kids say if he came out and said, "boy, I have become a decadent slob. Total debauchery really is a waste of my talent and life?" So he kept on, plugging away like a soldier who, somehow missing the communique that the war is over, keeps fighting. As long as he dropped gratuitous mention of drug use and guns, the kids loved it. Never mind that he totally exhausted the drug theme in his excellent comic piece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I do not go for that notion that a character like Hunter S. Thompson was a victim of his audience. He made his audience, he built their expectations, and he kept on filling them. The idea of his readers seeing him an invalid with tubes stuck here and there, more concerned with painkillers qua painkillers rather than a cheap high scared him, so he made sure that he never had to deal with that.

Every day offered him an opportunity for self reflection and a chance to recognize that he was created for something better than what he had become, and every day he ignored that opportunity.

The sad thing is that I can only imagine what powerful stuff Hunter S. Thompson could have written had he had any room for introspection. Instead his writing of the last thirty (well, twenty if you consider that he still did some decent stuff every blue moon in the eighties) was mostly crap: cheap parody of himself when he was able to craft a sentence better than most of us will ever do.

Hunter S. Thompson did not sacrifice himself for his art. He sacrificed himself AND his art for some strange fame and fortune. It is too bad, because he really could write a good piece in his prime.

Lord have mercy on his soul.