<\/p>\n
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.
\nAs 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.\u00a0 I expected this backwater page on the increasingly endangered and pathetic internet to become all Thompson all the time.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 We were busy then.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We were hoppin’.\u00a0 There was no one more evil than Bush as Kerry became alarmingly difficult to defend.\u00a0 Hell, stray too far off the road and Kerry might mistake you for a duck and take you out.<\/p>\n
Madness ruled.<\/p>\n
It feels like a lifetime ago, not a few months.\u00a0 That fever must have died, though.\u00a0 The same people are here, reading this, but I’m not hearing them.\u00a0 Maybe we’re all just so tired.\u00a0 I know I am.<\/p>\n
It was in 1995 when I was introduced to Hunter Thompson.\u00a0 I had returned to school after a year off, dumping Geology in favor of European History.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Some pygmy bastards who charged a line of cannons, armed with nothing but fruit and reeds.\u00a0 Oh, it’s all about the balance of power.<\/p>\n
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.”\u00a0 We had about 800 kids at our school and the paper wasn’t much to match.<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
My awakening came at 1:11AM that night.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
“Listen to this,”\u00a0 And, so, I read her chapters of this great work which, of course, were far over her head.<\/p>\n
In later years, as I re-forged a relationship with my estranged uncle, I was party to a large collection of stories about Thompson.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Let’s call him Joe.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He’d follow joggers and walkers and cars for most of the day, lining innocent people up in his sights.<\/p>\n
Finally, driven to insanity by this, Joe would have to physically wrestle Thompson to the door and get him to a bar.\u00a0 Drinks would follow and, once out of the hotel, Joe and Thompson would spend a few days riding some sort of violently drunk <i>After Hours<\/i> adventure through the city.<\/p>\n
Thompson eventually left his agent.\u00a0 You can read all about her in “Kingdom of Fear,” as well as the hard task of writing “Songs of the Doomed.”<\/p>\n
In a way, “Kingdom of Fear” is his suicide note.\u00a0 In its pages, between the lines, there’s the tale of\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
In <i>Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision<\/i>, the 1978 BBC documentary that joins Thompson for a ride from Aspen to LA for the premiere of <i>Where the Buffalo Roam<\/i>, we see a bit of reality.\u00a0 Playfully sampling drugs throughout, bold and crazy, Thompson breaks down outside the theater.\u00a0 As they approach, he has a panic attack, a drug-fueled paranoid breakdown.\u00a0 He wedges himself between the bumper of his car and a brick wall, refusing to come out.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It did.\u00a0 It got weird and it got depressing.<\/p>\n
He wrote an article about two years ago that caught my eye.\u00a0 It was written briefly after his first round of spinal troubles.\u00a0 He discussed the aspects of pain and how he dealt with it.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Despite the bravado, it was clear that the pain was driving him mad.\u00a0 The spinal work he was talking about in the article would, ultimately, kill him.\u00a0 Eerily, he promises that, after everything was fixed, he’d “take a break.”<\/p>\n
From a brief window in a pain cycle that lasted three years, Thompson condemned us.\u00a0 “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.”<\/p>\n
But he doesn’t give the modern generation all of the guilt.\u00a0 He looks inward:\u00a0 “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.”<\/p>\n
It was one phrase that grabbed me:\u00a0 “Big Darkness, soon come.”<\/p>\n
That was 2003.\u00a0 As we screamed towards the 2004 election, I believed it.\u00a0 But, now, we’ve all fallen back to sleep.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Well, you could say the same about 2004 and 2003.\u00a0 You could say that, for quite a while now, we have lost the very basic threads of community, education, literacy and humanity.<\/p>\n
My grandfather fought Japan.\u00a0 My uncle fought Vietnam.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Where do we point the finger?\u00a0 My generation?\u00a0 Generation X?\u00a0 Is the blood on our hands?\u00a0 Maybe it’s my uncle, the baby boomer?\u00a0 Have they betrayed us?\u00a0 My grandfather?\u00a0 The greatest generation.\u00a0 Did they homogenize us and distance us from the world?\u00a0 My great grandfather, the booze runner and thief, did his generation allow a war that brought down the wrath of god upon us all?\u00a0 Or can we go back further?\u00a0 Further and further still.\u00a0 Has it always been with us?\u00a0 Have we <i>ever<\/i> possessed humanity?\u00a0 Have we ever been awake?\u00a0 Was there ever an American dream?\u00a0 Thompson and the counter-culture bemoaned its death, but I say it was stillborn.\u00a0 The people like me, at that desk, eating Girl Scout cookies, ruling from white privilege… We are legion.\u00a0 We are immortal.<\/p>\n
Thompson said something.\u00a0 He spoke to us.\u00a0 Some of us from the ranks of the terrible and bloodthirsty were shaken, woken, transformed.\u00a0 A lifetime after the counterculture and the alleged American Dream died, I, and millions like me, kept reading, and thinking.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,140],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-hst"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2820,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481\/revisions\/2820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}