Twilight rantings from the Champion of Fun..., November 10, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Tucson, AZ
Like many another of his kind, Hunter S Thompson has outlived his
greatness. When he started out, he was the most dangerous man in his
vocation; now, even the Secret Service considers the guy harmless. Sad, but
true: when he places bizarre calls to the White House switchboard and
hollers "I feel like killing somebody!" in a crowded bar at the Capital
Hotel on election night, it's hard to escape the suspicion that he's no
longer doing this for the hell of it, he's doing it to live up to a
character - doing what's expected of him. A well-behaved, sober Hunter
Thompson would be more genuinely subversive than the caricature that
slouches through the pages of this shoddy collection of faxes, scrawled
memos, pictures, and a less-than-riveting central narrative that fails to
plug us into the momentum of the campaign, so that the pay-off of the
election itself doesn't carry any zing. But that's not to say it's a bad
book. It's simply not an uplifting one - not that Thompson's earlier works
weren't gloriously sordid and deranged, but here there's a lingering sense
of waste, of failure, and it's hard not to see why. HST is a spiritual
anarchist not truly at home in any civilized environment, and the only
decade for him was the Sixties. He chronicled the downward spiral of the
next two decades fiercely, but this final decade of the twentieth century
seemed impossibly dull and discouraging to him. "The standard gets lower
every year, but the scum keeps rising," writes Thompson in the defining
passage of the book. "A whole new class has seized control in the nineties.
They call themselves 'The New Dumb' and they have no sense of humor. They
are smart, but they have no passion. They are cute, but they have no fun
except phone sex and line dancing...." There were no heroes in the '92
election. Thompson backed Clinton, but only because he had a chance to beat
George Bush ("a raving human sacrifice," says HST of Geo. W.'s dad, and "a
criminal fraud worse than Nixon") and considers Perot beneath contempt, a
spotlight-crazed little runt with no good in him. As for Bill Clinton, HST
has a few positive words but no illusions about his "low-rent accidental
fascist-style campaign." It's hard to forget the story of his extremely
weird encounter with the future President in a restaurant in Little Rock;
it's laugh-out-loud funny all right, but also very creepy in a way it's
hard to put your finger on. As with much of the guy's work, it's sometimes
hard to distinguish fact from forgivable hyperbole from outright nonsense,
and maybe it's more fun that way. But HST saves his knockout punch for the
very end, almost as an afterthought: his Rolling Stone obituary for Richard
Nixon. If this weren't also available somewhere on the internet, its
inclusion would justify purchasing Better Than Sex. Much earlier in the
book, he remembers his shock on first reading H. L. Mencken's vicious
obituary of William Jennings Bryan - "I remember thinking...Ye gods, this
is evil. I had learned in school that Bryan was a genuine hero of history,
but after reading Mencken's brutal obit, I knew in my heart that he was, in
truth, a monster." Mencken's piece was the standard HST held himself to
when he prepared to write Nixon's eulogy, and he lived up to it: these few
brutal pages are perhaps the most stunning he's ever written. If our 37th
President is remembered by only one document, let it be this. If the tone
seems strangely personal, it's because this piece, the culmination of HST's
career as a political journalist, is as much a farewell from Thompson
himself as it is to Nixon. As he writes, "I am poorer now...He brought out
the best in me, all the way to the end, and for that I am grateful to him.
Read it and weep, for we have lost our Satan."
