William F. Buckley: Death of a comic

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Mar 2 05:33:04 PST 2005


<http://www.townhall.com/columnists/wfbuckley/printwfb20050301.shtml>

Townhall.com

Death of a comic
William F. Buckley (back to web version) | Send

March 1, 2005

If what was before the house was just the formal news bulletin, a famous
person who had left Earth for other bournes, then OK, let him go with
conventional solemnities. I once attended funeral services at which the
rabbi didn't remember the name of the deceased, so that he mourned the
passage of Priscilla, remarking the good she had left behind in her
lifetime -- never mind that the lady who lay in the coffin was called Jane;
never mind, the incantations were generic.

 But Hunter Thompson would never be confused with anyone else, and when his
wife was led through the police cordon to his room, she reported to the
press that "he did it (fired the .45-caliber pistol) in his mouth," leaving
"his face beautiful. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. He lived a
beautiful life."

 He didn't. What he did do was inspire devotional encomiums from people who
included blood relatives (my son), and superstar mentors (Tom Wolfe). Wolfe
spoke first of his stylistic achievements. He wrote "in a style and a voice
no one had ever heard before." And Wolfe found in Hunter's life an
originality perversely appealing. It was "one long barbaric yawp, to use
Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all
conventional proprieties." What he wrote was "'gonzo.' He was sui generis."
"In the l9th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the
20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's
greatest comic writer in the English language."

 Writing in The New York Sun, John Avlon spoke of Thompson's determination
"to puncture the pretenses of the powerful with ruthless humor, a loyalty
to deeper truth, and a hatred of hypocrisy. Beneath what could be called
amoral behavior there was in fact an inflexible moral code. The intensity
of his writing unsentimentally highlighted the real stakes of this life."
What deeper truths?

 Henry Allen of the Washington Post wrote that "People will forgive almost
anything of writers who can astonish them and make them laugh." What was
it, in Thompson, that we were forgiving? Is that question answered in
Allen's sentence that "despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of
journalism, (Thompson) had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the
very edges of madness and menace"? Laughable stuff?

 Thompson had a gift for vitriol. All -- everything -- was subsumed in his
exercise of that art. Consider one entire paragraph on Richard Nixon. "For
years I've regarded (Nixon's) very existence as a monument to all the
rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the
American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no
inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison
toad. I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic
who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the
voting machine."

 We were asked to believe (by the San Francisco Chronicle) that in reading
Thompson we are reading the work of a hero of an entire generation of
American students. Concerning that claim a little skepticism is surely in
order. After all, an exhibitionist can be spectacular, and even lionized,
in the Animal Houses. Hunter Thompson elicited the same kind of admiration
one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria's funeral. Here is a
passage from Thompson, in which he seeks amusement by recounting the end of
a long day with a visiting British friend, identifying himself as "the
journalist":

 The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger (the visiting Brit), who
is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds
out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright
red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he's been using to
rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is
soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild
choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a
spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the
passenger's side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: 'Bug off, you
worthless faggot! You twisted pig-(expletive deleted), all the way to
Bowling Green, you scum-sucking foreign geek.'

One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry,
surely, that he stopped writing.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review.
-- 
-----------------
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'





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