Hunter Stockton Thompson Commits Suicide
In most cases, a suicide is a murder in which the wrong party dies, an introverted justifiable homicide. Precisely which of the demons, real or imaginary, finally got to writer Hunter S. Thompson yesterday doesn’t much matter. Ernest Hemingway went out the same way, and so did Yukio Mishima. Most would have expected Dr. Thompson to emulate Dylan Thomas and drink and drug himself into the next world. Emulation, though, was one thing he did rather badly. The Curse of Lono was merely the curse of being a genuine original.
There are adolescent fans of Dr. Thompson who are forever amused by the debauchery and insanity of chemical abuse. The film version of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” tried to show it with bizarre camera angles and other distortions of reality, as if somehow Law Vegas and the American Dream it represents aren’t bizarre and distorted enough. Although Terry Gilliam’s casting of Johnny Depp and Benecio del Toro in the film comes close to excessively twisted.
Missing from this perspective is the eagle eye of social observer Thompson. When thinking of the potential of San Francisco in 1965 and the wave of rising expectations of new social possibilities, he concludes in that hotel room in Vegas that "with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see where the wave crested and broke." Or in his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, where he wrote , “The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I’ve ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it.”
What most reviewers and fans fail to see, or articulate, is the way the man used the English language as a tool of greatest precision. Indeed, the words “fear and loathing” not only convey the feelings, but they sound, read aloud, like something extra, above and beyond the two words alone. Here is a man who relied on the King James Version of the Bible for inspiration while writing in hotel rooms across America (because the Gideons made it available, and because the language took wings in that version). He once gave his son, Juan, a dictionary as a gift. Only a writer obsessed with words would think that was a good choice – but it was.
Perhaps, Dr. Thompson wrote his own farewell, not in his very last on ESPN.com but in Generation of Swine in 1987, p. 259.
Reagan’s children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibility for these shortchanged children of the ‘80s. In addition to a huge and terminally crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.
Selah.
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