Good Lord! Goodbye, good doctor
The death by suicide of Hunter S. Thompson is the death of a country's conscience; a goodly bit of this web site died as well
-- John Patten, revised 02/22/05
-- jpatten@veniceflorida.com

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In memorium to H.S. Thompson by The Guardian U.K.

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Bad craziness at Owl Farm
The one writer in life that I've wanted to meet is now gone. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. By now you've already learned of the details, however sketchy, surrounding his death, so I'll spare recounting them. It's a bad thing that has happened at Thompson's Owl Farm compound in Woody Creek, Colorado.

Sitting on top of my monitor is a posable action figure of Uncle Duke from Doonesbury, an acknowledged caricature of Thompson (and one for which Thompson reportedly promised to set Garry Trudeau on fire). The twins from Rug Rats are fighting over a toy across his knees as he regales them with a drunken tale of victory over the bats in the desert. I'm not quite sure what it is supposed to mean, but it looks surreal, dangerous and anti-social as hell, which is about the best you can expect from a representation of the good doctor. Duke has been on my monitor for as long as I've owned a monitor, the Rug Rats came later from a Burger King giveaway.

Thompson hated the Doonesbury caricature, so he'd probably have shot out my monitor if given the chance, but he never issued his own line of action figures so this was as close as I could get. The action figure originally came with a vodka bottle, a martini glass, a semi-automatic pistol and a chainsaw. Duke's t-shirt reads "death before unconsciousness." I had long ago lost the pistol and chainsaw, and that's ok. The pistol in Duke's hand now would be undeniably creepy.

Cheap imitation
Some of the most biting pieces that I've written for this site were cheap imitations of Thompson's political writings. On quite a few occasions, locals have compared me to Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report as though I am a small town version of Drudge. I smile politely at such words but inwardly boil a bit -- Drudge is no writer, he's a scavenger-collector of salacious and occasionally accurate tidbits of news. His attention span to stories rivals that of a twelve-year-old with ADD and his web site looks like it was designed as a third-grade class project -- it is a colossal pile of crap. I've yet to read anything by Matt Drudge that I could remember 15 minutes later unless it involved Janet Jackson's nipple -- that was Drudge's biggest story last year. Being compared to Matt Drudge is an insult disguised as a compliment uttered by semi-literate cretins who wouldn't know the difference between Norman Mailer and Norman Vincent Peale.

But I'm not bitter or anything like that, so that's OK.

So, while many readers of this site were unaware of how deeply Thompson's writing influenced the content and style of this web site, I was never under any such illusions. I can't claim to be anywhere near as good a writer as Thompson, only an admirer and a very bad imitator.

In fact, Thompson's journalistic style has pervaded the writing in this site nearly from the start, mostly on a very unconscious level. I never really set out to imitate Thompson, it's just that he truly is the only role model around for this kind of writing. The style of writing on this site is called participatory journalism or "New Journalism," a style of news reporting where the writer is not merely an observer but also a participant in the events, an incredibly biased participant at that. It's a style that many city officials still haven't become used to.

Now, if you take participatory journalism, which Thompson almost single handedly invented (along with Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese), add in drugs, alcohol and deliberate exaggeration for the sake of its entertainment value, then you have gonzo journalism, which Thompson did single handedly invent and exclusively excelled at.

Along with Woodward and Bernstein, Thompson is one of the most influential writers of the 20th and early 21st century in the sphere of journalism -- no self-respecting reporter of some years should be able to claim ownership of anything less than four of his books. OK maybe three. Because I just counted mine and I must have loaned some out as I'm down to three.

Thompson had the ability to cut through bullshit and get right to the heart of an issue with no apologies for speaking the truth. Thompson's truths were often not very pretty, for he showed us an underbelly of American politics that most other writers would rather look away from. In doing so, he forced mainstream news to reexamine a number of stories and issues over the years if only for the purpose of catching up on a number of issues and stories that he had uncovered and written about.

Rolling Stone was once an influential player in the news game. Under the threat of conscription into the Viet Nam war machine, youthful readers in the late 60s and early 70s read it religiously and weekly as though it was their personal New York Times. I started reading it at around the age of 13, at first stealing ragged copies from my older sister and then later getting my own subscription after weeks of begging my mother for a check payable to a bunch of counter-cultural hippies. By the time John Lennon arrived in the mailbox naked on the cover several years later, she was numbed and glazed, having surrendered to a new ethos that she knew she would never understand fully.

Howard Kohn introduced the world to Karen Silkwood as he told the story of her murder and exhaustively documented the details leading up to her death in a series of articles in 1975. By the time Meryl Streep portrayed Silkwood on the big screen in 1983, regular readers of Rolling Stone already knew most of the story by heart. An incredibly young Cameron Crowe had reinvented rock journalism, approaching it in much the same manner that Nat Hentoff had been writing about jazz for years. Crowe's young antics would later be chronicled in a fictionalized version in the movie Almost Famous. And then there was Hunter Thompson, sandwiched in between interviews with Linda Ronstadt and Rick Wakeman, who would crash national political and professional sports events in spectacular fashion to carefully chronicle the surreal and savage damage left in his own wake. Sometimes he even remembered to include the final scores, but that was usually unimportant. Thompson himself -- his reactions to the events around him and others' reactions to him -- that was the story, and in the process of of reading those reactions and the motives behind them, we learned more about real politics and politicians then we ever would have from filmed sound bites intro'd by Walter Cronkite.

Make no mistake -- Thompson almost single-handedly changed the entire landscape of political reporting by the extremist way he covered politics. There is no way mainstream news could shift all the way over to the kind of way in which he was reporting stories, but they didn't dare ignore the stories that he was writing. By shifting so far over to the left, Thompson made the middle a whole lot bigger and it was suddenly sparsely populated. The vacuum didn't last very long as the first mainstream paper to get sucked in was the Washington Post.

A case, a strong one I think, could be made that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would not have been able to make the Watergate story fly with Washington Post editor Ben Bradley if it hadn't have been for Thompson's prior attacks on the Nixon presidency. Thompson had laid the framework of corruption and hypocrisy in the White House, Woodward and Bernstein had to put floors and walls into that framework.

The fact that Rolling Stone would attempt to put someone like Thompson in close proximity with the President during the 1972 election campaigns is an act of genius lunacy, an inspired mental collapse that should have landed prison time for Thompson and the publisher/editor, Jann Wenner. Thompson would eventually get kicked off of the CREEP* show tour plane of Air Force 2 for getting into a drunken fire extinguisher battle with other reporters while on board. If memory serves me, he rejoined the tour several days later and resumed coverage after stealing Peter Jennings' press credentials (? -- I'm doing this from memory, but I'm pretty sure it was Jennings).

Thompson's final article on politics for Rolling Stone (Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004, published Oct. 20, 2004) showed that his teeth were still as sharp as ever even if his legs had given out -- the article was phoned in from his home in Woody Creek, Colorado rather than from a destroyed hotel room somewhere on the campaign trail. The end result is a piece long on bullshit and short on any new facts or insights. Thompson's proclamation that Bush is doomed and that Kerry will win is comically tragic in retrospect, but at least the sneering attitude comes through loud and clear. Not the ideal swan song for a legend, but it's better than any given 10 minutes of Crossfire that has aired over the last 15 years.

*CREEP = Committee to Re-Elect the President -- yes, that's the real acronym that the Republicans used publicly in 1972 for their own campaign, which led to hysterically funny leads on TV news about CREEP funding and CREEP officials during the later senate Watergate investigation

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"
There's Thompson the persona and Thompson the writer. Most folks will be familiar with the swaggering, inebriated and drug-addled popular persona of Thompson. It's that part of Thompson that I have little use for. It's when you get past that and read the words in between the covers of his books that you realize that the man had a tremendous amount to say on a wide variety of topics. At the core of his writing was a disgust and contempt for corruption and dishonesty and an unfailing fearlessness to expose it.

Plus, he was wildly funny, the rib-holding kind where you have to put the book down because you are shaking uncontrollably in laughter.

As such, it is a journalism style that I and thousands of other web writers have embraced and tried to emulate, either consciously or not. Thompson did it first and he did it not on the web but in print. The adjective 'pioneering' would barely do justice here, but it's the only word that comes even remotely close.

Johnny Depp portrayed him in the movie Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, one of three movies about Thompson. While Depp was mesmerizing, the focus on drugs was disconcerting to many, myself included. It's a great and entertaining tale, but it has little to do with the same Hunter Thompson that I have grown to admire. My favorite Thompson film is Bill Murray as Thompson in Where The Buffalo Roam, an account of Thompson covering Nixon's re-election campaign in '72 flying aboard Air Force 2. The scene in an airport bathroom with Thompson standing next to Nixon at a urinal was one that Thompson had written about in Rolling Stone and is so... so... Nixonian. To this day, Nixon's brief words in the scene still define Nixon for me, and no, I'm not going to print them here. A third movie, a documentary entitled Breakfast With Hunter, has been on inter-library loan backorder at the Venice Library for two or three months. I may never see it. Meanwhile, Depp is currently in production on a movie version of Thompson's fictional novel, The Rum Diary.

Thompson was an incredibly tortured and courageous man who, in the end, let me down by taking a coward's exit. His exit from gravity's hold by his own hand is maddeningly inexplicable and, to me anyway, completely out of character. While Thompson was reportedly paranoid and neurotic, he was never one to show his fear publicly or to surrender.

I am stunned. A sickened feeling has not left me since first finding out about his death by suicide. And I am furious with him as though this was a personal betrayal. He'd better have had a terminal illness. That I could accept.

Out of all the stories of his death that I found through Google news, the strangest came from AlJazeera, the Arab news network, who seemed to treat him as the only news writer in the history of western civilization that was ever worth his water.

My favorite piece of his writing that's on the web, though, had nothing to do with politics. Rather, it was an hysterically funny account of a winter evening at his home, Owl Farm, that he wrote as an online columnist for ESPN. It was the night the chickens exploded: Bad Craziness at Owl Farm (now a paid link thanks to the money-grubbing scum at ESPN, but the article is so good it's worth the price of admission). I hope it brings as much laughter to you as it has to me over the four years since it was first published on ESPN's site.

Goodbye Hunter. You bastard.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.