The Dark Star

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42719-2005Feb21?language=printer>

The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
The Dark Star
Gloom May Have Stalked Hunter S. Thompson, but His Writing Was a Beacon

 By Henry Allen
 Washington Post Staff Writer
 Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page C01

 From Hunter S. Thompson's "Songs of the Doomed -- More Notes on the Death
of the American Dream":

"It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods .
. . lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about
electricity.

"Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of
control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each
other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There
are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is
rampant and even children are losing their will to live.

"The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into
darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk
around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end, looking like
they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts
humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals
trapped in bags."

 He wrote this in Washington, in 1989.

 As his first wife, Sandy, once said: "Hunter tends to make things worse
than they are sometimes."

Thompson, at 67, was the gonzo journalist who shot himself in the head with
a handgun on Sunday. He was also what you get when you combine Murphy's Law
and some hillbilly Calvinist preaching the doctrine of innate depravity. He
believed every man had it in him to do wrong. He also believed that if
something could go wrong it would. We were all doomed, to use one of his
favorite words.

 Hence the birth of gonzo journalism, a term he picked up from a fan
letter, and one that applied only to him. He was the prose laureate of the
Age of Paranoia, which began, let's say, with the election of Richard Nixon
in the middle of the counterculture's nonstop mental fire drill brought on
by psychedelic drugs. Then he took it further, as he took most things:
"There's no such thing as paranoia," he said. "The truth is, your worst
fears always come true."

This was the fundamental joke that served as the fulcrum and lever of all
his writing, starting with "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved."
He attained "full-bore" torque, or maybe "king-hell" torque, to use his
phrasing, with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- A Savage Journey to the
Heart of the American Dream," followed by "Fear and Loathing on the
Campaign Trail '72," which George McGovern's political director, Frank
Mankiewicz, called "the most accurate and least factual" account of the
election. Other Thompson titles: "Generation of Swine," "Songs of the
Doomed" and a short piece called "Hit Him Again, Jack, He's Crazy."

You get the idea.

He was from Louisville, a former juvenile delinquent and "hard case," as he
liked to say: a big tense guy, 6 feet 3 with tight skin, wary eyes, short
hair and a hectic way of moving, as if he were trying and failing to
approximate the condition of normal. He wore aviator sunglasses and smoked
with a cigarette holder. He looked like a combination of puzzled and
threatening. He liked Dobermans and guns and liked to "get loaded on
mescaline and fire my .44 magnum out into the dark -- that long blue
flame." He spoke in bursts of words that later in his life became so
unintelligible that a documentary about him provided subtitles. He had a
sharp eye for the right people and he hung out with them. He had charisma.
Being around him gave you the charmed but unsettled feeling of having
joined an entourage. He took a lot of drugs and drank a lot of Wild Turkey.
Louisa Davidson, who knew Thompson in Colorado for 30 years, said he was a
Southern gentleman with moments of genius, but "he was a prisoner and slave
to his addictions." He could be polite, when he wasn't picking an
occasional fight, but there was nothing mellow or laid-back about him.

 Thompson on the '72 candidates:

 Being around Edmund Muskie "was something like being locked in a rolling
box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon "speaks for the werewolf
in us." And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: "There is no
way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack
Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."

 Strange that he became a hero to a generation known for its long-haired,
"gettin' it all together," feminist, free-sex pacifists. Thompson wanted to
break it all apart, and he rarely mentioned women or sex in his writing.

In 1971, at the beginning of his big-time fame, he'd already written the
obit for the '60s, a time when "you could strike sparks anywhere. There was
a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we
were winning." But by then, "with the right kind of eyes, you can almost
see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back."

People will forgive almost anything of writers who can astonish them and
make them laugh. None of them can anymore. In his early '70s heyday, which
was the last time that writers could still be heroes -- he was among the
very last of them, along with Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe, all of them
outrageous in style and subject, the final heirs of J.P. Donleavy, Joseph
Heller, J.D. Salinger and Terry Southern, who all taught us the irreverence
that Thompson made even more hilarious by taking it into the craziness that
comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of
"high-powered blotter acid," and "uppers, downers, screamers, laughers."

 He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that
beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks
and voyeurs. Thompson, despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of
journalism, had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges
of madness and menace. He had much rep for walking the walk, which he did,
but mostly he talked the talk. In fact, he'd never done very much in his
life except write about it, which he did with clarity, hilarity and
big-train momentum. He was a master stylist -- he once typed out the entire
"Great Gatsby" as an exercise. He also created a pyrotechnic public persona
called Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How much more can we ask?

 He'd done a little jail time as a kid in Louisville. He joined the Air
Force, which let him out two years early after a prescient commanding
officer said that in Thompson's military newspaper work his "flair for
invention and imagination" and his "disregard for military dress and
authority . . . seem to rub off on the other airmen."

He worked for small papers, wrote from South America for a now-gone Dow
Jones weekly called the National Observer, drove a taxi in San Francisco
while working on a novel, got in fistfights, ran for sheriff of Pitkin
County, Colo., got pulled over for drunk driving, beat a drug bust at his
home in Woody Creek, near Aspen -- small-time stuff. Rolling Stone sent him
to cover the fall of Vietnam -- where he could find no end of real fear and
loathing -- but he split for Laos and failed to file a story worth
mentioning. In 2000, he slightly wounded his assistant while trying to
shoot a bear on his property.

And yet readers worshiped him as a man of profound experience, to the point
of playing what you might call "the Hunter Thompson game." The point of the
game is to create mortal fear out of nothing more than, say, the sun
flashing in a window.

First man: You see that glint?

Second man: Like binoculars?

First man: Try 12-power Unertl glass on a Remington .308.

Second man: Your first wife's boyfriend?

First man: But he's a cop.

Second man: Exactly. Our heads? In four seconds? Vapor, baby.

This is the sort of conversation that boys have in treehouses, to scare
themselves for the fun of it. Thompson's writing had the venerable American
quality of boys' literature, in the manner of Hemingway, Jack London and
Mark Twain. And of: old-fashioned sports writing, with its flamboyance and
moralities, and the good but long-forgotten men's magazines such as True or
Argosy, which honored the courage, luck and jocularity of the lone cowboys
lurking in American men. Lately, with his best writing behind him, the
gonzo just a collection of occasional gestures, he'd been writing a sports
column for ESPN's Web site.

 We're left wondering what happened. He once said: "I hate to advocate
weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've
always worked for me." Until maybe he got wondering about the ultimate high
being a 1,500-feet-per-second implantation in the neurological system.

 Or the paranoia got to him -- in paranoia you are your own worst enemy,
and that's a tightening circle that nobody can escape, except, say, by
suicide. Or it was pain and depression brought on by reported back surgery,
a broken leg and a hip replacement. Or he was playing out the last moves of
the Hemingway game -- the paranoid, shock-treated Hemingway who ended up
with his doctor one day, crying because he said that he couldn't write
anymore, he just couldn't write. Or America has finally become what he said
it was, with lie-awake fears of suitcase nukes, jails full of secret
uncharged prisoners with no legal recourse, and quiet applause for the
recreational torture of Arabs in Iraq. Or people have stopped reading, and
there are no more literary heroes. Or maybe he just killed himself, like a
number of other people on any given day. He lived on his terms, he died on
his own terms.

Except he wasn't like a number of people -- he left us his prose, his
genius persona, and his insights into the dark side of America, insights
that could change your life after the laughing stopped. You would like to
think that beneath the forbidding scowl of post-9/11 America, and despite
the dark side, that a lot of people understand that Hunter S. Thompson was
a great American.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'