Big Darkness – Great Society

When the time came to write about Thompson, I gave it away as an assignment to one of the GS contributors who was equally disturbed by this sudden darkness in the literary world.
As with the election, I wanted to try and rein in the sudden blast of articles I saw on the horizon and the bouncing madness in our little Newsday subforum. I expected this backwater page on the increasingly endangered and pathetic internet to become all Thompson all the time.

Some of those reading may remember as we built up to November 2004; tempers flared between the tiny sect of active members who took the time to battle the even smaller group of conservative members. We were busy then. We beat our top hits on the forums, on the articles, even in the sections area where I take pictures of my cock with that little butler’s outfit painted on it. We were hoppin’. There was no one more evil than Bush as Kerry became alarmingly difficult to defend. Hell, stray too far off the road and Kerry might mistake you for a duck and take you out.

Madness ruled.

It feels like a lifetime ago, not a few months. That fever must have died, though. The same people are here, reading this, but I’m not hearing them. Maybe we’re all just so tired. I know I am.

It was in 1995 when I was introduced to Hunter Thompson. I had returned to school after a year off, dumping Geology in favor of European History. More people died in history, so it was a natural draw. Even in the driest political classes, you walk away coated in the blood of some poor savage race. Some pygmy bastards who charged a line of cannons, armed with nothing but fruit and reeds. Oh, it’s all about the balance of power.

My professor had personally contacted Thompson and wooed him to allow the school paper to reprint syndicated articles, which would eventually end up in “Better than Sex,” Thompson’s 1994 political ramblings from the backseat, following the 92 election “in all it’s horror, sacrifice, lust and dubious glory.” We had about 800 kids at our school and the paper wasn’t much to match.

With the depraved look a child killer gives a tow-headed eight year old, my professor slid “Songs of the Doomed” across his desk and said, drooling slightly, “Read this, boy.”

My awakening came at 1:11AM that night. I had finished fucking the deviant, Wiccan lesbian who turned out to be the only woman that tolerated me for longer than six months and, as she lay in bed, snoring gently, I plowed through “Songs of the Doomed” and woke her up with a few rough shakes.

“Listen to this,” And, so, I read her chapters of this great work which, of course, were far over her head.

In later years, as I re-forged a relationship with my estranged uncle, I was party to a large collection of stories about Thompson. He and my uncle shared the same agent, Lynn Nesbitt, and my uncle had remained good friends with the agent’s flunky who blamed his nervous collapse and subsequent homosexual relationship in Santa Barbara on Thompson. For almost two decades, as Thompson negotiated each book, he’d fly out to New York and be treated to the best rooms, the best drinks and the best food… But Nesbitt would lay low and send out her flunky. Let’s call him Joe. Joe would arrive at the hotel, ride up to the top floors that Thompson preferred, and often find the good doctor perched on the balcony with a high powered rifle. He’d follow joggers and walkers and cars for most of the day, lining innocent people up in his sights.

Finally, driven to insanity by this, Joe would have to physically wrestle Thompson to the door and get him to a bar. Drinks would follow and, once out of the hotel, Joe and Thompson would spend a few days riding some sort of violently drunk After Hours adventure through the city.

Thompson eventually left his agent. You can read all about her in “Kingdom of Fear,” as well as the hard task of writing “Songs of the Doomed.”

In a way, “Kingdom of Fear” is his suicide note. In its pages, between the lines, there’s the tale of the hard life of writing, looking back on the impossible pressures of deadlines, getting from A to B, juggling stories and ideas and the craft itself.

In Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, the 1978 BBC documentary that joins Thompson for a ride from Aspen to LA for the premiere of Where the Buffalo Roam, we see a bit of reality. Playfully sampling drugs throughout, bold and crazy, Thompson breaks down outside the theater. As they approach, he has a panic attack, a drug-fueled paranoid breakdown. He wedges himself between the bumper of his car and a brick wall, refusing to come out.

Every misanthrope can identify with the good doctor, who sealed himself away at his “fortified compound” despite his claims that it never got weird enough for him. It did. It got weird and it got depressing.

He wrote an article about two years ago that caught my eye. It was written briefly after his first round of spinal troubles. He discussed the aspects of pain and how he dealt with it. Suffering from chronic pain myself (my case is a nerve injury), I took a rare few moments to ignore the nagging supervisors at work and get some reading done.

Despite the bravado, it was clear that the pain was driving him mad. The spinal work he was talking about in the article would, ultimately, kill him. Eerily, he promises that, after everything was fixed, he’d “take a break.”

From a brief window in a pain cycle that lasted three years, Thompson condemned us. “The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.”

But he doesn’t give the modern generation all of the guilt. He looks inward: “I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.”

It was one phrase that grabbed me: “Big Darkness, soon come.”

That was 2003. As we screamed towards the 2004 election, I believed it. But, now, we’ve all fallen back to sleep. We’ve all kicked away the above the fold news stories, the email forwards, the parroting of uninformed friends and gone back to our overfed, overworked, underpaid lives. Chasing rabbits we’ll never catch, no matter what, and living lies by the hour, by the timeclock, 2005 feels as far away from living as a half-completed titanium spine. Well, you could say the same about 2004 and 2003. You could say that, for quite a while now, we have lost the very basic threads of community, education, literacy and humanity.

My grandfather fought Japan. My uncle fought Vietnam. I have fought no one, those below me have been in the years-long Iraq War, the lesser Americans, the New Pygmies, armed, for a change, with imperial cannons. The niggers and the spics and the white trash battle out there in Green and Red Zones while I live at my desk and eat Girl Scout Cookies.

Where do we point the finger? My generation? Generation X? Is the blood on our hands? Maybe it’s my uncle, the baby boomer? Have they betrayed us? My grandfather? The greatest generation. Did they homogenize us and distance us from the world? My great grandfather, the booze runner and thief, did his generation allow a war that brought down the wrath of god upon us all? Or can we go back further? Further and further still. Has it always been with us? Have we ever possessed humanity? Have we ever been awake? Was there ever an American dream? Thompson and the counter-culture bemoaned its death, but I say it was stillborn. The people like me, at that desk, eating Girl Scout cookies, ruling from white privilege… We are legion. We are immortal.

Thompson said something. He spoke to us. Some of us from the ranks of the terrible and bloodthirsty were shaken, woken, transformed. A lifetime after the counterculture and the alleged American Dream died, I, and millions like me, kept reading, and thinking. Sometimes we tempered the message, laughed at it, sometimes we wrinkled our worried brows and pursed our lips, sometimes we just shook our heads and said, “That’s Hunter.”