From Issue 585
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Kirk Owens examines the legacy
Buy the ticket, take the ride. Translation: take big risks and deal with the consequences. For Thompson, that frequently meant gobbling enormous amounts of drugs – cocaine, LSD, whiskey, weed and speed were his staples – and riding out the subsequent psychosis. He’d compact the nerve-tearing results by roaring down a dark highway on a motorcycle with the headlights off, lighting up the sky with explosives or attending police conventions while hallucinating.
Detractors chide that Thompson glamourised drug taking, but I would suggest only in the way Evel Knievel glamourised jumping over Snake River Canyon. Besides, there was a lot more going on in his magnificent cranium, as journalist, Timothy Denevi, explores in his biography Freak Kingdom. Denevi focuses on Thompson the political journalist whose embrace of progressive politics was shaped by the murderous insanity of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the growing civil rights movement.
His first non-fiction book was a brilliant piece of observational journalism that saw him riding with the Hells Angels for the better part of a year. Eventually, they beat the shit out of him but not before Thompson got their measure. He saw the Angels not as freedom loving individualists but white trash thugs who followed, “The same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.” This century’s escalation in far right violence is something Thompson first saw coming for America on the back of a chopped hog. The angels, he warned, were, “The first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with.”
The death of the American dream became Thompson’s journalistic beat but he rarely approached it square on. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, reads like exhilarating satire – a drug-fueled romp across the Nevada desert told in the author’s signature gonzo style. But the real story is much more interesting. Thompson wasn’t travelling with a Samoan attorney (Dr Gonzo in the book); he was with Mexican civil rights activist, Oscar Acosta, discussing the death of Latino journalist, Ruben Salazar, who was cop-killed while protesting the Vietnam War. The road trip was a way to get Acosta talking freely without fear of being overheard or bugged.
And while they smoked weed and took speed, there was no LSD consumed. The true inspiration for gonzo journalism wasn’t an acid freak out, it was a nervous breakdown. Thompson’s personal life was a hot mess by the late sixties. Massively in debt and hounded for back taxes, his marriage was strained, he was hooked on Dexedrine and behind on deadlines. Physically he was falling apart – the drugs, the booze, the insomnia, the mounting stress. And he saw America falling apart, divided against itself, and veering towards violence and fascism. In his state of unhinged panic he had a revelation: in the blank-eyed stares and fat asses of Vegas gamblers he saw the embodiment of America’s dark, unexamined shadow-soul.
Or as Denevi puts it: “Vegas embodied the victor’s nihilism. If the only limits on American society are greed and power, you’ll inevitably arrive at exactly this sort of desert city: a place where the very few take everything they can from people who keep coming back – all the while providing endlessly diabolical entertainment to numb and distract from the repeated pain of loss.”
The Vegas book was a success and became a cult classic. Thompson started writing for Rolling Stone magazine as its national affairs editor. With the seventies beginning in turmoil and America’s future precariously balanced, he covered the 1972 election that would eventually be won by his nemesis, Richard Nixon. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was his most overtly political and best reviewed book. Afterwards, Thompson was acclaimed as America’s least accurate but most truthful reporter.
He nailed Nixon as a habitual liar well before Watergate brought him down and channelled his rage into brutal slap downs. “He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president… if there were any such thing as true justice in this world, Nixon’s rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.” The fire to hold America accountable burned brightly until the end but the ability to produce long-form works of brilliance deserted Hunter S Thompson in the mid-70s.
Tragically, Thompson didn’t just have a super-human tolerance for recreational drugs he had a very pedestrian addiction to them. Biographer, Denevi, suggests that Thompson knew of the damage he was inflicting on himself and accepted it as the cost of producing such original and important work. “Instead of heeding his body’s natural limitations and allowing it to recover, he simply kept going – burning up, in the process, material that from that point forward would no longer be available.”
The final ride ended for Hunter Thompson when he blew his brains out at his Owl Farm property in Colorado on February 20, 2005. He was 67. “I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that’s OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that’s even better,” long-term collaborator Ralph Steadman summarised his legacy.
As for America, pundits have been predicting its collapse for decades. They’ve always been wrong. But after Trump’s reality-defying presidency, the unite-the-crazies Capitol Hill riot and the stolen election ego-fantasy, American democracy has been buried under a dump truck of conspiracies and horse shit. It’s not just veteran journalists echoing Thompson’s warning of chaos and collapse – some 70 per cent of Americans believe the land of the brave is ‘in crisis and at risk of failing’. Russia and China’s emboldened land-grabbing, and an ancient US president with memory and speech issues is hardly helping. And then there are the millions of gun-toting conservatives who feel the only way to make America great again is through violence.
“I think there is a terrible angst on the land, a sense that something ugly is about to happen, an hour-to-hour feeling of nervous anticipation,” Thompson wrote of America in 1965. Words that seem just as unsettling and relevant today.
