Just checking in for the last time tonight, I caught the Yahoo newsfeed headline Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself - Police. So it seems, as of this writing.
I can't encapsulate what Thompson's writing has meant to me. I learned everything I know about US electoral politics from reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, and a great deal else I know about writing from that and his other books. There's probably only one author who has meant more to me.
But what the hell - a self-inflicted gunshot? Drunk, stoned, cleaning one of his many dangerous weapons? Or a last realization of how decadent a sellout he has always been? Who the hell cares? Ah, perhaps that's it: who the hell cares?
Then there's this: New Tapes Say Bush May Have Smoked Marijuana. Now I get it. Thompson was definitely a suicide, provoked by this item (whatever else may have been true of Thompson's self-presentation, I believe with all my heart he was at bottom the most irresolute news junkie in the world). If someone like George W. Bush could truly have smoked pot, drank himself stupid, and been, in Thompson's phrase, ripped to the tits on cocaine, yet still turn out to as he did, then at last we have to admit that anything is permissible - not because God is dead, but because screwheads run amok.
And I'm angry, much like I was at Spalding Gray. Goddammit, Thompson.
I can't encapsulate what Thompson's writing has meant to me. I learned everything I know about US electoral politics from reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, and a great deal else I know about writing from that and his other books. There's probably only one author who has meant more to me.
But what the hell - a self-inflicted gunshot? Drunk, stoned, cleaning one of his many dangerous weapons? Or a last realization of how decadent a sellout he has always been? Who the hell cares? Ah, perhaps that's it: who the hell cares?
Then there's this: New Tapes Say Bush May Have Smoked Marijuana. Now I get it. Thompson was definitely a suicide, provoked by this item (whatever else may have been true of Thompson's self-presentation, I believe with all my heart he was at bottom the most irresolute news junkie in the world). If someone like George W. Bush could truly have smoked pot, drank himself stupid, and been, in Thompson's phrase, ripped to the tits on cocaine, yet still turn out to as he did, then at last we have to admit that anything is permissible - not because God is dead, but because screwheads run amok.
And I'm angry, much like I was at Spalding Gray. Goddammit, Thompson.
1 comment:
I used to drink at his favorite bar, in the days of my callow and debauched youth, I lived about a mile down the road from the Woody Creek Tavern, set in its sublime mountain trailer park setting, and his house is perhaps a mile up the hill on Woody Creek Road...Listening to him rant and regale the bar with his oddity, while reading his work repeatedly was a surreal experience...which required the application of massive quantities of beer and Jack Daniel's Old Number 7 along with various tabbed and powdered party favors to become normal...and then nothing was ever normal again. I was kind of sad to hear he had gone out like that, but hardly suprised...peace y'all...
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