(Hunter Thompson) All Gone Now

Fred On Everything ^ | February 26, 2005 | Fred Reed

[BraveMan]

When Thompson blew his brains out, a door closed somewhere and you could hear the latch click. The main man had gone. Most of us can easily be replaced. There was only one Hunter Thompson. I’ll heist one tonight to a fine, fine writer, a voice of his time, the embodiment of an age the like of which there never was and which, for good or bad, will never come again.

The Sixties look drab now—unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There was that. It was not a time for the weak-minded. But for those whose youth passed in the freak years, there was something gaudy and silly and even profound, something delightfully warped, that nobody else would ever have. Thompson caught it.

I didn’t know him. Others have written better than I can of his work. But I knew the world that gave rise to him.

Starting around 1964, a restlessness came over the land, an itch. Kids trickled and later flooded onto the highways as if called by something. I can’t explain it. Few had done it before. Few do it now. They—we--set forth and created the only country in which Thompson could have made sense.

It wasn’t the war, at first. Nor was it only the usual impatience of youth with authority. Nor was it even that we were young and the world was wide. There was a revulsion against suburban emptiness, against the eight-to-five Ozzie and Harriet gig, a rejection of the Establishment, which meant boring jobs and singing commercials.

We discovered drugs, then regarded as worse than virgin sacrifices to Moloch, and looked through a window we could never name. If the times were out of joint, we were seldom out of joints. Chemistry defined the life. You found a freak in some rotting slum and said, “Hey, man, got some shit?” You toked up. You got the munchies, the skitters, the fears. Parents really didn’t understand. Dope, we said, will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope. It did.

Thompson, a savage writer, a grand middle finger raised against the sky, essayed drugs and found them good. And said so, and we loved him. When he wrote of getting wacked out of his mind on seven illicit pharmaceuticals, and wandering in puzzled paranoia through the lobby of existence, we shrieked with laughter. We knew the same drugs. We too had tried desperately to look straight in public when the world had turned into a slow-motion movie. When it was over, everybody went into a law firm.

Our socio-political understanding was limited. After all, we were pretty much kids. I remember having a discussion in Riverside, California, of how Republicans reproduced. We didn’t think it could be by sex. I figured it was by budding.

For a while though, it all worked. Apostles of the long-haul thumb, we hitchhiked in altered mental states. I don’t recommend it without guidance. We stood by the western highways as the big rigs roared by, rocking in the wash and the keening of the tires, desert stretching off to clot-red hills in the distance. At night we might buy bottles of Triple Jack at some isolated gas station and dip into an arroyo, roll a fat one and swill Jack and talk and hallucinate under the stars. An insight of the times was that if you got fifty feet off the beaten track and sat down, you didn’t exist. It still works if you need it.

None of it was reasonable. I’ve never found anything worthwhile that was.

Then there was politics, the war. Thompson was rocket smart and knew you couldn’t work within the system since that meant granting it legitimacy. Peace with Honor, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, all the ashen columnists arguing about timed withdrawal and incremental pressure. He knew it was about profits for McDonnell Douglas and egotistical warts growing like malignant goiters on the neck of the country. He was Johnny Pot Seed, a Windowpane Ghandi, dangerous as Twain.

The times brought their epiphanies. I remember being gezonked on mescaline in a pad in Stafford, Virginia, and realizing that existence was the point of execution in a giant Fortran program. So it’s all done in software, I thought. I was floating in the universe. In the infinite darkness of space the code stretched above and below in IBM blue letters hundreds of feet high that converged to nothingness: N = N * 5, Go To 43, ITEST = 4**IEXP. For an hour I was awash in understanding. The stereo was playing Bolero, which was written by a Do-loop, so it all fitted.

Thompson savaged it all, lampooned it, creating a world of consciousness-sculpting substances and bad-ass motorcycles and absolute cynicism about the government. Today, after thirty years of journalism, I can’t find the flaw in his reasoning.

The other writer of the age was Tom Wolfe, but he wasn’t in Thompson’s league. Wolfe was a talented outsider looking perceptively at someone else’s trip. Thompson lived the life, liked big-bore handguns and big-bore bikes and had a liver analysis that read like a Merck catalog. His paranoia may be style, but you can’t write what you aren’t almost.

I remember standing alone in early afternoon beside some two-lane desert road in New Mexico, or somewhere else, that undulated off through rolling hills and had absolutely no traffic. I don’t know that I was on anything. Of course, I don’t know that I wasn’t. A murky sun hung in an aluminum sky like a fried egg waiting to fall and mesquite bushes pocked the dry sand with blue mortar bursts. The silence was infinite. I lay in the middle of the road for a while just because I could. Then I followed a line of ants into the desert to see where they were going.

A grey Buick Riviera, a wheeled barge lost in the desert, slid to a stop. The trunk creaked open like a jaw. A squatty little mushroomy woman behind the wheel motioned me to get it. As we drove the cruise alarm buzzed, and she told me it was a Communist radar. They were watching her from the hills.

It was a Thompson moment.

Then it was over. Everybody went into I-banking or something equally odious. We gave up drugs as boring.

You can see why he ate his gun. Everything he hated has returned. Nixon is back in the White House, Rumsnamara risen from the dead, bombs falling on other peoples’ suburbs. The Pentagon is lying again and democracy stalks yet another helpless country. This time the young are already dead and there will be no joyous anarchy. The press, housebroken, pees where it is told. But he gave it a hell of a try.

.

[Caleb1411]

Starting around 1964, a restlessness came over the land, an itch. Kids trickled and later flooded onto the highways as if called by something. I can’t explain it. Few had done it before. Few do it now. They—we--set forth and created the only country in which Thompson could have made sense. It wasn’t the war, at first. Nor was it only the usual impatience of youth with authority. Nor was it even that we were young and the world was wide. There was a revulsion against suburban emptiness, against the eight-to-five Ozzie and Harriet gig, a rejection of the Establishment, which meant boring jobs and singing commercials.
We discovered drugs, then regarded as worse than virgin sacrifices to Moloch, and looked through a window we could never name. If the times were out of joint, we were seldom out of joints. Chemistry defined the life. You found a freak in some rotting slum and said, “Hey, man, got some shit?” You toked up. You got the munchies, the skitters, the fears. Parents really didn’t understand. Dope, we said, will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope. It did.
Thompson, a savage writer, a grand middle finger raised against the sky, essayed drugs and found them good. And said so, and we loved him. When he wrote of getting wacked out of his mind on seven illicit pharmaceuticals, and wandering in puzzled paranoia through the lobby of existence, we shrieked with laughter.

Sure, Fred. Solipsistic, narcissistic, drug-addled self-promotion is a ticket to immortality . . . to everyone whose glands define his existence, anyway.

[The Great RJ]

If you remember the drug laden Haight Ashbury and Woodstock events of the 1960's you probably weren't there.

[cyncooper]

Fred has a unique way of interpreting the view through the looking glass.

Actually Fred sounds banal with a strong desire to be unique but falling short. Well short.

[MrNatural]

.. posting an article does not necessarily constitute agreement/acquiescence of same..

Sure. Sorry if my 'disagreement' with Fred's take on the `60' vs. the `00's radiated out in the wrong directions.

But I was there; I saw it and lived through it, and I don't have a lot of patience with the `60's romanticists. Mr. Reed has lost a ton of credibility with me, with this article.

[doug from upland]

I never heard of this jackass before.

FRED Donate
Or don't. I don't know. But it would sure help. Panhandling is not particularly pleasant, or I'd be sitting outside the subway jiggling a McDonald's cup seeded with bait change. Fact is, though, costs attach to producing these eruptions of outrage and sedition -- not much more than $1K a year in direct costs, but lots more in time which, for a freelance purveyor of lies and distortion, is money lost. Granted, you didn't ask me to do it. You don't owe me anything. On the other hand, these curiosities seem to amuse a lot of people, who of course may have too much time on their hands.
This isn't a strong-arm approach. The column will continue anyway. I'm not actually dying. Why, you might ask, should you pay for my hobby when I don't pay for your hang-gliding? Think about something else. But in a moment of reduced alertness, especially if you are filthy rich from exploiting orphans and oppressing children in iron lungs, a few small bucks would sure help. That funny-looking little button below that says "Donate" works. Or send a massive check to Fred Reed, 10560 Main Street, Suite 211, Fairfax, Virginia, 22030. Your children probably don't need to go to college anyway.

[Ciexyz]

That whole era can be summed up by the song "I went thru the desert on a horse with no name..." You listen to that song and say, what the hell is that all about? Weird shit.

[Luke21]

The world of the late sixties through the election of Reagan was a hideous, frightening place. We had to elect a real grown up to take us back to where our parents had left us.

I couldn't let my wife and child go to the store at night during those days, and the liberal judges were finding every reason under the sky to release the most horrible killers and predators. Patti Hearst was kidnapped by one such bunch. Remember Manson, the Hillside Stranglers, the Freeway Killers, Zodiak, Zebra, Son of Sam? There were more mass murderers than grapes on the trees because of this type of lifestyle.

We were a powerless, listless, out of sorts society. I came from the southern/western bunch of boomers. That's the split you see in elections today, between the SF/Haight Asbury coastal hippies and the good ole boys from the interior who make up the red states. Most of us got drunk and grew our hair over our ears. But we never stopped loving our country, supporting our military, or feeling something wasn't quite right with the way Watergate and Vietnam ended. We listened to Led Zeppelin, but liked Lynyrd Skynyrd a whole lot better.

I ended up in AA and sixteen years later am still working to get people out of the lifestyle and depression and self centered loathesomeness that caused him to end his life as he did.

They can celebrate him any way they want to. All I see is waste, like so much of my generation. The Soviets did their work well.

[Allan]

Continuing with the "All Thompson, All The Time" theme this week on FR

All rather amusing to me.

I suffered through the dreadful sixties
but fortunately never heard of Hunter Thomson
until last week.

I didn't have a clue who he was
and I am rather thankful for that.

[doug from upland]

I grew up in that generation as a non-drug user. I actually thought it was a good idea to study hard and stay out of trouble. Our generation produced some really, really bad ideas and characters.

[GianniV]

Fred - only cowards live in the past. Quit romantizicing a horrible time in American history - drugs, sexual disease, rampant crime (see burning cities), creation of a welfare state, lack of respect for authority, etc.

These kids of the 60s were a bunch of spoiled brats. And now these divorce idiots have given America a generation of wacked out kids, who I can only pray will see the light and distance themselves from their parents' false notion of self-indulgence and self-importance.

[HHFi]

That whole era can be summed up by the song "I went thru the desert on a horse with no name..." You listen to that song and say, what the hell is that all about?

I can't remember which comedian does it, but there's some young comic who has a whole bit about the idiocy of that song. One of the lines is something like, "Dude, you've been riding across the desert for nine days with nothing to do. NAME the damn HORSE!!!"

[zipper]

He could've taken the edge off all this morbid fascination of his life if he'd said:

"Excuse me, while I kiss the sky"

[BANG]

[GRANGER]

It is interesting to observe the FR reaction to the news of Hunter S. Thompson's suicide. The saddest thing is the ignorant hatefulness expressed toward him by those who know very little about him. He was NOT a communist or a hippie. If any label applied, he was a Libertarian. He loved freedom and the rights of the individual. He held the 2d Amendment close to his heart. I grew up with him (reading him) along with many others. Although I am a life-long conservative Republican who won several medals in Viet Nam, I laughed at his pillories of Nixon. I celebrated his wedding with a beautiful woman >30 years younger, because I followed a similar flight path. But his love for this woman was what killed him in the end; he could not draw her any closer than the spirit of freedom he so loved. He was an American Original in the vein of Thomas Paine, Samuel Clemens, and H. L. Mencken. He will be missed.

[GRANGER]

and how vain he was...eating his .45 instead of his .44 magnum to leave a prettier face.

[phoenix0468]

HST was second rate sober and only appealed to drug users and beatniks when he wrote high. He made no great contribution to journalism except that he wrote from a perspective of fantasy rather than fact most of the time. How can anyone truly believe that a person whacked out on 40 hits of LSD could be speaking anything but total bull ____.

[phoenix0468]

"The Sixties look drab now—unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There was that. It was not a time for the weak-minded."

The first sentence describes the young adults of the sixties as weak minded, the last says it was not a time for it. Both are true, and that in and of itself sums up the failure of the sixties. If young adults would have been joining in and working for constructive change instead of "Dropping Acid, and Dropping Out" as the old saying went (I may have misquoted it, but it is close enough), then Vietnam would have either ended with victory or much earlier than it did. The same thing is happening today from the left. Instead of coming up with valid logical arguments against the war in Iraq, they keep attacking events, people, and organizations that don't jive with their thinking. If their is a reason for something being bad, such as the war in Iraq, then come up with a valid reason. Don't just say, "it's bad, people are dying, it costs too much, Mr. Bush this, and Sec. Rumsfeld that." I am sick and tired of beatniks, hippies, and commie sympathizers spouting crap to denigrate authority.

[BraveMan]

Many persons throughout history have demonstrated through their own example how not to live life. With their display over time, they teach us the perils in life we may endure if we choose our paths unwisely. In that regard, Hunter Thompson served us well . . .

[phoenix0468]

That is a great summation.

[gonzo]

I knew this sh!t would happen...............FRegards