Everyone has their favorite Hunter S. Thompson story, one they have heard from a friend, read in his writings or witnessed first hand.
Thompson was a cunning and reckless writer, a journalist of the highest esteem. The man also created his own persona, living outside and above the law, reveling in drugs and sex. He became both the rock star and the tortured, brilliant songwriter. Those two lifestyles clashed too often for the comfort of even his closest friends, and in the end for the good doctor himself.
My favorite Hunter Thompson story is not about Hunter Thompson but instead his impact on other journalists. I first read HST in a journalism class at Ohio State, taught by Prof. Joe McKerns (now deceased). McKerns was one of the finest teachers I had at that school, a man with a thoughtfully, solemn face that failed to hide his love for his students. He shared Thompson’s passion for truth, as well as the understanding that truth is often best uncovered first-hand. Part of our reading requirement was Thompson’s masterpiece, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
During our discussion, McKerns read aloud one of his favorite sections:
“There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
With these last words, I watched a man as hardened as any I’ve known begin to cry. Within a moment, he’d composed himself, but his voice was still strained. McKerns explained to us that this passage transcended the realm of journalism. Thompson was no longer writing about a specific place or time or event. This was the discovery of the hopes and dreams of the 60s youth culture, which had beached itself somewhere in that harsh landscape between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This was a news update about an entire generation, an almost Biblical epic about people who had fled from the oppressive tyranny of an imperial nation, but lost their way in the desert and never made it out. Thompson summed it all up in a single paragraph. How’s that for short and poignant journalism?
It was as intense and emotional as any moment I have experienced in the classrooms of Ohio State. But that was in the glory days, when journalism still clung to the back of the educational bureaucracy. When the university still tentatively regarded journalism as an honorable profession for its students to pursue, instead of something to be … well, feared and loathed.
That has become my own fear since the passing of the Great Gonzo. Thompson may be dead, but fear and loathing live on. It is our fear that other nations harbor weapons of mass destruction. It fuels our willingness to support a war based on the beautiful oxymoron of faulty intelligence. It is the loathing of those who do not accept capitalism as the only political and economical foundation for a society. Or the loathing of homosexuals, who dare ask for equality in our legal system. It is the paranoia of any presidential administration, the fear to tell the American people the truth – a plague that has, in Thompson’s eyes, lasted more than 40 years. It can be found in a society where political correctness has become such an epidemic that journalists are afraid to write a sentence without a quote to back it and are thus reduced to regurgitating the words of untrustworthy politicians. Our sources are Them, and Their sources are Anonymous. And when the Anonymous become the Unreliable, well, nobody is to blame.
Thompson spent his life defying this trend. His source was himself, and he relied on his own observations to tell his story. The final result may have been warped, or exaggerated, or (gasp!) slanted, but we knew where he came from. We knew he had seen and witnessed this first hand, which surpasses most attempts to tell a story in the world of journalism. In fact, he was not afraid to tell the story, with all the humor or irony or sadness or drama that entails. This was the basis for his seemingly omniscient knowledge of politics, or sports, or Hell’s Angels, or any other subject he cared to tackle.
This is what Thompson, and the less significant gonzo journalists, brought to our field. Its presence – a demented safeguard against the failures of both politics and journalism – was a necessity.
Take this example:
When I was in Australia, President Bush came to address their parliament. Amidst a flurry of protests, one particular story struck me as terrifying. A woman showed up, demanding to know the fate of her husband, who had been whisked off by American troops in the dead of the night months before. He was incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, which Thompson refers to as “the largest and most permanent prison colony in the history of the world.” The Bush Administration grappled desperately to spin the story, but relatives and neighbors supported the woman’s claim. They finally coughed up an explanation: he was being held for “suspected terrorist activity.” The woman has yet to hear from her husband.
U.S. soldiers kidnapping foreign citizens and throwing them into “a spacious concentration camp for the U.S.A.” (Thompson again) for no substantial reason was enough to raise alarm in the press the world over. But to my knowledge, not a single news source in the United States carried the story.
This is the state of modern American journalism. This is the paranoia of the citizens of the world. This is the state of our union. This is our kingdom of fear.
Hunter Thompson is dead. And who among us – the journalists, the writers, the American public – will now dare to find and speak the truth?
Trevor Knoblich is a former Lantern staff member and a 2004 OSU graduate, now reporting from The Field. Whiny e-mails can be sent to his fortified compound at [email protected].
