Hunter S Thompson, RIP

In May of 1964, HST went to Ketchum Idaho on assignment for the National Observer. He was there to do a piece on his personal hero, Ernest Hemingway. Three years before, Hemingway had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. HST went to try and answer the question that always comes of suicides: why? In the process, he may well have written the answer to that question for his own suicide.

He spoke to the people who knew "Papa" Hemingway, and had lived his last years around him. This was years before Hunter came up with Gonzo. HST didn't write the first Gonzo piece "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" until 1970, when he and Ralph Steadman got completely twisted and covered the Derby together. That same combo would produce Hunter's masterwork- "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Here, Hunter is not amok, but rather pensive.

Hunter quoted Hemingway, from a part of "Green Hills of Africa" when Papa was explaining the business of writing through one of his characters: "We do not have great writers. Something happens to our good writers at a certain age . . .You see, we make our writers in to something very strange . . . We destroy them in many ways." As it happened to Hemingway, it happened to Hunter, try as he might to avoid it. He hated the portrayal of himself in the movie "Where the Buffalo Roam." It took a full 30 years for him to like a movie adaptation on Fear and Loathing enough to be involved and even put in a cameo appearance. Hunter was Gonzo, but Gonzo was not all of Hunter, and he was often quoted in his annoyance over the lack of that distinction.

Hemingway wrote how he wanted to see the world clearly, as a whole, and Hunter wrote about how this led to a crisis of conviction. In the end, if HST had seen the world clearly, and as a whole, he would have seen a world distinctly unfriendly to him. This day and age, this thing we live in that is what America has become, is not the sort of place for a Hunter S Thompson. Deep in his heart, Hunter loved America, for all its savageness. He loved politics, which he proclaimed were better than sex. He loved being part of the process. But now, those things have turned on us all, and this country is a vicious, heartless shadow of it's former self. This is not a country that would suffer a Hunter S Thompson gladly any more. And it will do little to mark his passing. Nixon would have been enough of a sport to at least say something about Hunter, had he outlived him. At best George Bush will not know who Hunter was, or will sneer and say "good riddance."

Hunter did as Hemingway did late in his life. He pulled away from society and stayed in the wilds. His article about Ketchum ends: "He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment as not enough for him . . . So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."

It's often said when a person of greatness passes, we are all lessened. And so it is true. I mourn the passing of a great writer, and I sincerely regret the circumstances that brought his death about.

Selah