Hunter S. Thompson, 1937 - 2005

I never met Hunter Thompson. I supposed I should have tried to make an effort to do such. But I could never get my head around it. I was always too far into the moment to put myself back out to sit down with the The King.

I guess I learned well enough though.

From the time I was a third string writer for a backwater Southern daily until this very blogospheric moment, The Good Doctor has perched at the end of the typewriter, eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses, mocking my efforts. During those times when I sit, staring vacantly at the keyboard, I wonder what Hunter would do to cure an insoluble writer's block.

Then, I think that I don't want to get arrested again, and pour myself into the piece.

Hunter Thompson was the quintessential outlaw journalist who wrote with a visceral realness that very few of us ever capture. My sense is that this feeling came from total commitment to do the story and to place himself in it, for good or ill. His work with the Hells Angel's was seminal in that respect and almost got him killed by his subject. The piece that does stand the test of time -- at least for me -- is the 1973 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, '72, where he followed the doomed presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern (D-SD). During the campaign, he was friend and confident to all the party apparachiks in the campaign from Pat Caddell to Sandy Burger on down the line. Why he aligned himself with a man destined to lose the American Presidency by the widest margin to that date is beyond me. Well, maybe it's not.

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The chattering class is today talking about Hunter in ways that seem very alien to me. This piece from Austin Ruse in the National Review Online is reasonable typical though. The power graf:

Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about. Ask someone in a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55, and all sorts of memories come conjuring up. There is the revelation of at least what we thought was his amazing ability with words, though I have not read him for years, so I no longer know if this is true. Even more than his work, however, we recall his comic-outlaw persona which many of us found quite appealing in those days. But the funny thing is that most of our memories come not from his work or even from him but from the seeming dead-on impression of Thompson by Bill Murray in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam, a period piece cobbled together from Thompson's most famous books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

The Thompson schtick was as formally set as any Hope and Crosby road movie; Thompson, the comic yet brilliant journalistic bumbler is sent as the skunk to the garden party where he promptly drinks all the scotch, all the gin, all the tequila, gets the waitresses stoned, frightens the horses, shocks the local burghers and constabulary, and still turns in award-winning copy to his faraway editors in San Francisco or New York.

Harsh? Yes. Deserved? Probably. Necessary? No, not really. Hunter spent the formative parts of his career outside of the established power structures, making a virtual career out of hating Richard Nixon and all he embodied. In almost every article or book that I read by Hunter S. Thompson, I could feel the contempt that he held The Powerful. Indeed, they were all like Nixon to a certain degree -- vaguely reptilian and always characterized as having an "eat or be eaten" mentality. Nixon himself saw Hunter as: "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character". Maybe Hunter saw himself as Nixon's doppleganger.

Not that the talking heads on WABC radio would know. There blather this morning is that Hunter Thompson did a lot drugs and wrote about it. To the conventionally wise, that seems to be his legacy to humankind.

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I don't buy it. Dr. Thompson spent his life railing against the haves screwing the have nots and I can see that a younger generation has taken up the La Cauza, although not the way most would think including the Good Doctor Himself would think.

Hunter was an intellectual outlaw: an establishment 60s anti-establishment radical. He hated Nixon and he tirelessly toiled to bring him down. But it wasn't just Nixon he hated; it was the entire power structure he embodied. That was his formula. So when Mr. Nixon cashed his check, it wasn't enough. His outlaw nature couldn't understand the idea that His Side Won. So he had to keep going. He continued to rail against what he perceived as injustice every where he imagined he saw it.

Then, slowly and almost certainly imperceptibly to him, the paradigm shifted. He and Dan Rather and the rest of the Nixon-hating '60s journalists weren't outlaws any more. They were ascendant, moving heaven and earth and the known world's attention on a caprice. The vehicles that Thompson had ridden as an outlaw alternative to the mainstream had become mainstream. Indeed the underground newspaper for whom Hunter had written his best work -- Rolling Stone -- was predictably mainstream and hooked at the hip to the Democratic Party establishment.

And this is where to the true legacy of Hunter Thompson lives and breathes: the blogs. It came as no surprise to me that the blogosphere caught Dan Rather's phony Bush National Guard documents while the mainstream press did nothing. For a where can an outlaw journalist practice his iconoclasm if not outside the law. One can not be a Thompson and work in corporate journalism.

Here's to you Hunter.