While I am positive that all the hack scribes such as myself that are penning out tearful reminisces of a unique and important American as Hunter Thompson would have perhaps done better to have sent him a letter of our thanks and respect while we had the chance, I’m not sure they would have been read. How our efforts may have been best used would have been to continue to run with the torch that he lit in the late sixties while he was still here to be surprised that someone had found out some truth unknown to him. Sadly, he leaves us without having seen any one rise to catch that torch, and perhaps it is extinguished forever.
Hunter S. Thompson was destined to be a celebrity, and an unconventional one. He became a celebrity by circumstance during the sixties, doing what he would have done anyways. His first, and probably best, book “Hell’s Angel’s”, established the fantastical, stream of consciousness style of descriptive prose that was dubbed “ Gonzo Journalism”, and his time at the then small publication “Rolling Stone” established him as a counterculture hero. Hell’s Angels and Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Cool Aid Acid Test” will probably be remembered as the two definitive accounts of the rival factions of the white male criminal elements that existed, Ken Kesey’s pranksters and Sonny Bargers Angels were both organizations that sent reverberations throughout the entire nation, and Thompson was the man who introduced them to each other. To mixed results, to be sure, but one would doubt anyone but he could have accomplished such a darkly amazing feat.
After the turbulence of the sixties, America could not keep up with the radicalism of Thompson and his other cohorts. The majority of Americans want stability and an optimistic future, a future that Thompson would never envision. He dogged Nixon throughout the campaign and presidency, and did the same to Reagan. He wrote more books, and became more of a recluse in his Woody Creek sanctuary. He saw himself marketed over and over in film and made countless, inebriated speaking tours of American Universities. But money and fame were never the true goals of this man, if any his goal was to express the freedom that he had come to love and hold dear in this great country of ours. The freedom to express the ugly, honest truth.
We have had great thinkers and writers along the lines of Thompson in America. Vonnegut, P.H. Dick, and Heinlein all come to mind as men who commented remarkably on our society through literature, but Thompson was the only journalist to capture the counterculture of three decades from far inside it, and from the beginnings of it. It will take a long time for our country to recover from the loss of what Hunter symbolized, an animalistic zest for life and living that was filtered through a cheap typewriter and into our psyches for thirty years. There may never be another like Hunter S. Thompson, the timing was to perfect, and the society so pointed during his formative years that it may never be recreated. Thompson was afraid of nothing and no one. His life should be remembered as that of a true American, a man who lived by his own rules and called others out when they did not play by theirs.
So please, read “ Hells Angels” or watch Bill Murray in “Where the Buffalo Roam”, and remember a man who greatly impacted America by simply being himself and recording what he saw.
Hunter S. Thompson was destined to be a celebrity, and an unconventional one. He became a celebrity by circumstance during the sixties, doing what he would have done anyways. His first, and probably best, book “Hell’s Angel’s”, established the fantastical, stream of consciousness style of descriptive prose that was dubbed “ Gonzo Journalism”, and his time at the then small publication “Rolling Stone” established him as a counterculture hero. Hell’s Angels and Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Cool Aid Acid Test” will probably be remembered as the two definitive accounts of the rival factions of the white male criminal elements that existed, Ken Kesey’s pranksters and Sonny Bargers Angels were both organizations that sent reverberations throughout the entire nation, and Thompson was the man who introduced them to each other. To mixed results, to be sure, but one would doubt anyone but he could have accomplished such a darkly amazing feat.
After the turbulence of the sixties, America could not keep up with the radicalism of Thompson and his other cohorts. The majority of Americans want stability and an optimistic future, a future that Thompson would never envision. He dogged Nixon throughout the campaign and presidency, and did the same to Reagan. He wrote more books, and became more of a recluse in his Woody Creek sanctuary. He saw himself marketed over and over in film and made countless, inebriated speaking tours of American Universities. But money and fame were never the true goals of this man, if any his goal was to express the freedom that he had come to love and hold dear in this great country of ours. The freedom to express the ugly, honest truth.
We have had great thinkers and writers along the lines of Thompson in America. Vonnegut, P.H. Dick, and Heinlein all come to mind as men who commented remarkably on our society through literature, but Thompson was the only journalist to capture the counterculture of three decades from far inside it, and from the beginnings of it. It will take a long time for our country to recover from the loss of what Hunter symbolized, an animalistic zest for life and living that was filtered through a cheap typewriter and into our psyches for thirty years. There may never be another like Hunter S. Thompson, the timing was to perfect, and the society so pointed during his formative years that it may never be recreated. Thompson was afraid of nothing and no one. His life should be remembered as that of a true American, a man who lived by his own rules and called others out when they did not play by theirs.
So please, read “ Hells Angels” or watch Bill Murray in “Where the Buffalo Roam”, and remember a man who greatly impacted America by simply being himself and recording what he saw.
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