While much ink has been spilled since Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, little has been said about what I consider to be his signal characteristic – his skills as a writer. From our current historical vantage point, it is also easy to forget that Rolling Stone, that institutional party organ of baby-boomer exceptionalism, was once a scrappy, contentious, and very independent magazine. And Thompson, with his splenetic and caffeinated style, was the most independent voice in it. As such, it seems only appropriate that we at Clamor tip our hat to him on the occasion of his passing. 

 

But writing something for our blog about Thompson only recently struck me as an important task, thanks to the disservices heaped upon him in his absence. Countless eulogists have reminded us that his work was uneven, he was too promiscuous with his venom, and he wasted words on subjects beneath his talents. We are told that his voice, which had reached its zenith in (surprise!) the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, atrophied and he descended ultimately into cruel self-parody. His work betrayed an arrested adolescence as Thompson failed to see the nuance of a complicated world, we learn. These views are familiar enough to be maddeningly routine, mechanistic even, to the seasoned baby-boom watcher. They also have far, far less to do with the work of Dr. Thompson than they do with the deeply self-absorbed ambivalence that boomers nurture about their own adolescences.

 

Regrettably, Thompson’s death has given ‘a generation of swine’ - as Thompson memorably called them in the title of his 1989 compilation about yuppie greed, contempt, and politics - one more opportunity to ruminate on how cool they were when they were young. This thorniest of stylists and most merciless of social satirists (see ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,’ to name but one example) is condescended to with nostalgia saccharine enough to serve as a Wonder Years voiceover. And, like the Wonder Years, Thompson is treated by his one-time fans as trapped in time like a fly in amber, forever wiping the tear-gas from his eyes in Grant Park or speeding in an implausible red Cadillac toward Las Vegas, Budweiser (‘a red and silver evidence bomb’) in hand.

 

While Thompson was, as he liked to quote Nixon, ‘there when the bombs were dropping’ at significant moments of baby-boomer history, such navel gazing misses the point. He did write a good bit of unreadable dreck as any deadline journalist does, but no one can either argue in good faith with the durable power of Thompson at his gonzo best or deny his ability at the more modest task of straight feature and editorial writing. The guy could write and did, on an eclectic array of subjects, as any professional journalist who wants to eat typically does.

 

The news analysis pieces collected in The Great Shark Hunt make vividly clear the journalistic tools Thompson had at his disposal. Incisive, economical, and brisk, this writing exhibits a quick mind and a sharp eye for telling details. His style moves effortlessly and efficiently with a discipline that might surprise fans of his gonzo work. As a rootless cosmopolitan revisiting the South of his youth to report on mountain music broadcasts from the Renfro Valley for the Chicago Tribune (broadcasts I remember hearing on vacations as a kid), Thompson captures a sense of place and time unselfconsciously and sensitively. Writing from Peru in 1962 about the then-recently failed elections for the now-defunct National Observer, Thompson delivers both news and mood while effectively framing the hemispheric political context around which the election took place – all in about two thousand words. His news and comment writing has gone largely unappreciated in the obits because it pre-dated his celebrity among the hippie cohort, but it proves that he had an enviable working knowledge of news writing that many of those his gonzo work influenced – from Lester Bangs to P.J. O’ Rourke – lack. You don’t just pick up those skills in journalism schools or record reviews or Washington internships, you learn them the hard way; by disciplined work and lots and lots of writing.

 

Hell’s Angels, expanded from a 1965 piece in the Nation, was Thompson’s first significant commercial success and it shows a combination of disciplined writing, fearless investigative reporting, and timely subject matter. Exploring the outlaw mythos and the almost fraternal, service club folkways of the legendary biker gang, Thompson titillated middle-class tastes and turned Bay area Angel leader Sonny Barger into a folk hero. His willingness to go where the story took him and the muscular prose style he used in Hell’s Angels made him a bestselling author and a recognized subculture expert of sorts. And being a subculture expert was soon to prove a road to notoriety. 

 

The method he was to use to cover the crazy-quilt of subcultures exploding into the consciousness of mainstream American news was gonzo journalism. Gonzo journalism, the crazed admixture of fact and fabrication for which Thompson will always be remembered, is a literary response to modernity as surely as James Joyce’s dense word collages or William S. Burrough’s crazed cut-ups and grew out of his frustration with capturing challenging times. Most call the above-mentioned piece in Scanlan’s Monthly on the Kentucky Derby in June of ’70 the first example of this and, as an example of the salient characteristics, it is for my money the purest. Where his work in the National Observer inventories the tools he had on hand for reporting, ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’ shows Thompson to be the architect of a new kind of invective. Pitiless and unrelenting, the very savagery of his fabulist portrayal of southern gentry is hilarious but ultimately humorless. Thompson’s loathing sometimes simply eclipses his judgment.

 

That is the exception, however, rather than the rule, as his two finest works gonzo journalism prove. The first of these, ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,’ printed from his post-Hell’s Angels perch at Rolling Stone in April of ’71, combines a subtle grasp of politics and the courage of a leftist investigative reporter with the freedom to be honest that gonzo journalism gave him. Drinking with his friend Oscar Acosta, a Chicano lawyer, Thompson utilizes Acosta’s connections to cover the murder by police of Ruben Salazar during clashes between demonstrators and police. Salazar, an L.A. Times columnist and news director for the Spanish-language television station KMEX, had been shot in the head in a bar in East L.A. after being told by a friend that the police were outside and preparing to fire. Salazar, a former war correspondent, replied ‘That’s impossible; we’re not doing anything’ moments before his head exploded.

 

A ham-fisted cover-up is cobbled together by L.A.’s city fathers while Thompson introduces us to the tensions between classes and generations in the emerging Chicano civil rights movement and considers such recondite subjects as the habitation practices of junkies and the entertainment possibilities of mace. In ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,’ the newly-minted doctor of gonzo journalism rages against injustice while getting his facts straight and fueling the outrage of the New Left. It was while working on this that Thompson and Acosta blew off a little steam with a trip to Las Vegas, immortalized (with Acosta disguised as a 300-pound Samoan attorney because the California Bar might have looked askance at Mr. Acosta Esq.’s Herculean in-take of illicit drugs) in Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, a deranged foray into decadence still amusing to today’s jaded reader.

 

Besides ‘Strange Rumbling in Aztlan’ sits his other enduring example of gonzo journalism (and probably his finest work), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ’72. In this compilation of a year’s worth of dispatches to Rolling Stone, Hunter Thompson does the damn-near impossible: He captures the claustrophobia - the mania - that characterizes political campaigns. After 10+ plus years as a professional politician and a (nearly-exhaustive) study of the literature about campaigns, I’ve never read anything that comes close. He speaks truth even when he’s totally wrong – for example, his high-octane analysis of the presidential campaign of New York City mayor John Lindsay. Thompson had, after days and nights on end spent thinking about nothing but the presidential campaign, divined a cagy and high-risk strategy behind the Lindsay team’s Florida primary plan. Unfortunately, it was all bullshit – Lindsay’s campaign, broke and without a base of support, was running on fumes - but Thompson had captured perfectly the way that random events take on a profound and sometimes sinister importance in the supercharged atmosphere of a campaign. By seeing a pattern in the Lindsay’s random peregrinations, Thompson had shown all the classic symptoms of campaign psychosis.

 

But Thompson was more right when he wasn’t wrong. His brutal take on the Nixon thugocracy was insightful enough to qualify as prescient. In his alternatively bleary-eyed and precise way, Thompson found, in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the architectonic fault in Nixon’s operation. By diagnosing the revanchist and vicious nature of Nixon’s inner circle, Thompson discovered the brutal truth that no scam so clearly based on cynicism, contempt, and cruelty could long hold together – the centrifugal forces of hatred and dishonesty would inevitably tear it to bits. It took the rest of the country the trial of a sitting vice-president, the exhausting and degrading spectacle of a president driven from office in disgrace, and the rejection at the ballot-box of his hand-picked successor before the debris was cleared away. Among that debris, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 stands tall as a testament to how insightful and ideological campaign coverage can be.

 

In ten years, do a lexis/nexis search for the names of any of the self-important reactionaries or the amiable Georgetown liberals who’ve written dismissive or scalding requiems to Hunter S. Thompson and wonder no more why they feel the need to denigrate his work. The George Wills, Mona Charens, and Paul Gigots of the world will be forgotten while Thompson’s work will continue to be read by students of the politics of the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s and, even, enjoyed. And one need only read observations on subjects like ‘…that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in world has learned to fear and despise…’ to realize that his writing isn’t some quaint museum piece of ‘60’s drug-binge excess. Hunter S. Thompson has crafted a body of work that could stand proudly on a shelf next to Izzy Stone and the John Reed of Insurgent Mexico and 10 Days that Shook the World and, while the ties were wider and the drinks stronger, the milieu of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 is still recognizable anywhere people run for elective office.

 

And so, conventional wisdom be damned. Hunter S. Thompson was a king-hell bastard of a writer. As I sit here in my kitchen office with a triple screwdriver in frosted pint glass, I know that I’m not writer enough to write the epitaph he deserves. So let me turn to Thompson himself for help. In a requiem for Oscar Acosta written in ’77, Thompson said that to Oscar ‘… truth was a tool and even a weapon he was convinced he could not do without – if only because anyone who had more of it than he did would sooner or later try to beat on him with it.’ Few tried to find more of it than Hunter S. Thompson and for that he has my admiration and thanks. Selah, Dr. Thompson, and good-bye.

-Keith McCrea, Reviews Editor

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 9:29 am by Arthur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.