Posted on 02/22/2005 1:04:35 PM PST by 45Auto
Austin Ruse is president of the New York-based Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute and the Washington, D.C.-based Culture of Life Foundation. He spent many years in the New York magazine world.
BTW, P.J. O'Rourke is the modern incarnation of Thompson.
Gonzo is life over the edge. Gonzo is taking things too far just to find out what happens. Gonzo journalism is another name for what Tom Wolfe called "new journalism" which is basically personalizing a story by recounting not just the facts the journalist sought but what the journalist went through to get those facts, giving the reader (or viewer, new journalism has rewritten the concept of documentary TV and movies) a view to what happened to the guy giving you the story, letting you know that the best way to get your event covered favorably is to give the press access to an open bar. Gonzo is something you either get or you don't, gonzo is understanding that HST probably actually shot that typewriter... more than once.
Patients suffering from psychiatric illnesses - alcoholism and major depression - contribute the lion's share of the fatal suicides, but the vast majority of depressives and alcoholics do not take their own lives. For each of these diagnoses, different "risk factors" predict who will commit suicide. Persons suffering from major depression, for instance, take their lives for "internal" reasons: feelings of misery, guilt, and hopelessness. Alcoholics, by contrast, kill themselves in reaction to events in their environment: of the alcoholics who commit suicide, one-third experience the loss of a close relationship within the prior six weeks, and one third expect to sustain an equally severe interpersonal loss.
In studying fifty alcoholic suicides, I was struck by how often seven factors again and again were associated with their deaths. Nearly all these suicide victims (96 percent) had continued their substance abuse right up to the end of their lives. More than 70 percent communicated their suicidal thoughts to others, often over a long period of time; or had a comorbid major depression; or had no spouse, family, or friends offering them any social support. Nearly half the suicides were unemployed, or had serious medical problems, or lived alone. These seven factors predict risk of suicide in alcoholics; in another study I participated in, they characterized the 32 alcoholic suicides, but not the depressed, non-alcoholic suicides.
The alcoholics' lack of social support explains why acute interpersonal loss so powerfully drives alcoholics to suicide. Of the 20 cases where the loss occurred within the last 6 weeks, 19 possessed no other social support beyond the minimal camaraderie of their tavern buddies. The relationship they lost was their last relationship; losing that link, coupled with the global deterioration in their lives, proved unbearable.
Our next question was whether this pattern uniquely points to the alcoholic suicides, or whether these stressors occur commonly among all alcoholics. Six of these risk factors were investigated in a large mental health community survey. When we reviewed their data, we found these risk factors were present far more often in alcoholic suicides than in living alcoholics. Every suicide had at least one risk factor; 90 percent had at least three risk factors, and 80 percent of the suicides had four or more risk factors. In contrast, one quarter of the living alcoholics had none of the risk factors, and only one had four risk factors. This suggests that the risk factors cumulate: the more factors an alcoholic has, the greater his suicide risk.
These factors discriminated suicidal alcoholics from alcoholics living in the community, but would they serve to select the suicidal alcoholics out of a hospital population? We compared our suicides with 142 medically-treated alcoholics. Each of the five factors evaluated was found significantly more often among the suicides. Other researchers have also found that similar risk factors characterize the suicides of substance abusers who are not primary alcoholics.
All I know is his name, he may be a legend in leftism circles but I doubt too many people even know what he was about. Rolling Stone is so 1960's, 70's.
It sounds like gonzo is just one type of personalized journalism. I don't object to putting a journalistic piece's narrative into first person. There's a diary style. But it has happened more than once that I find myself reading what kind of wine the writer ordered. A fatal violation, I won't continue reading it beyond that point.
Seems that I read somewhere that women don't use shotguns
to commit suicide, oh well.
HST was a very good writer in the "stream of drugged conciousness" school.
His best was F&L in LV, and Hell's angels, certainly I don't think he gives a rat's ass what any of us may think of his demise.
I can never hear "White Rabbit" with out picturing the scene
of him and his attorney in the bathroom of the LV hotel.
Toss a grapefruit for me Hunter!
Yeah, basically gonzo is a subcategory of personalized (aka "new"... although it's been around long enough that monicre should be dropped) journalism. It's personalized journalism by a nut job who really doesn't fit into the scene he's in, and if he does fit in there's probably something deeply wrong with the scene.
Like all things some folks take it too far. Many that try to use personalized journalism forget what the story really is. The story isn't them, it's the journey, they tell it through themselves to give the reader an anchor, a way to feel like they were there. It wasn't really even new when Thompson started doing it, he was just the first one to take it in the direction of "serious" things like politics.
HST wasn't a Beat, which was straight out of the 50's (not 60's). Hunter was an alcoholic drug eater who could write. He was more libertarian than left, hated Nixon along with virtually everyone else, was a passionate-- albeit cockeyed-- proponent of the 2nd Amendment (shotgun golf, anyone?), and admired virtually no one but Hunter S. Thompson.
He was a cultural black light illuminating a particular acid soaked moment in time.
He wasn't my brand of alembic pot stilled brandy. He was something just a little more volatile, grain alcohol, maybe; 120 proof, at the least, and when the proof had gone out of his writing he blew off the only thing a writer really has.
The tragedy for HST was that his mind had gone long before. It's a wonder he hadn't taken his life years earlier....
I'm one of the few people of my generation who know who Hunter S. Thompson is. While I find his life fascinating, I wish more people knew about it. He was a wildly talented guy who took a flamethrower to his own mind and burned it to a crisp. In the end, he proved himself wrong on everything he ever espoused, and I think 'attention should be paid' to the wages of his particular sins. His life is a case study of the long, downward spiral, but a brilliant one.
It means to use a personal, highly eccentric style in journalism; in the broader sense, it just means bizarre. The word wasn't used much until Hunter Thompson started using it, and Jerry Jeff Walker named his backup band the "Lost Gonzo Band."
After that was the muppet named Gonzo, but I'd almost forgotten the term. It seems very quaint and dated, now.
In Hunter's memory, I think this weekend I'll check into a Las Vegas hotel under a phony name with intent to commit capital fraud and a head full of acid.
Time to find a vice cop convention and spike the punch.
".....I still suspect there was some sort of terminal and/or painful illness involved....."
Depression is painful, and, as shown here, sometimes terminal.
We're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over. Let's rent a very fast car with no top. And we'll need the cocaine . . . tape recorder for special messages . . . Acapulco shirts . . .
A pint of ether, a case of rum, and a high speed burn through Bakersfield and Barstow.
I hope you are kidding and fear that you are not.
He's a fascinating case study. People should read that first volume of his colllected letters. It seems that what happened is that this brilliant writer created an alter ego character, then really became that character until the real man was lost. But while he held the two together--from say 1965 to 75--he was amazing.
"The Edge....there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
I wish I was- I saw a thread there about his death and the second post blamed the Bush Family Evil Empire.
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