ESPN.com: Page 2 : Death in the afternoon
Hunter Thompson is dead. I bet you weren’t expecting that. But I found this column from his tenure at ESPN.com, it appears to be his last for them, and it got me to thinking.
HS Thompson wrote his best stuff for Rolling Stone in the early 70s. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail rise above everything else he did because he was still energetically figuring out the form. He did some fine writing after that (and before it, too. Hells Angels is an excellent book.), but far too often post-F&L the schtick won out over the content. You always had to wonder what was real, what was not.
In those great books it didn’t matter. Ever after, it did.
I think I’ve known more people who knew Hunter Thompson (ate with him, argued with him, had sex with him, shot guns with him) than any other person I never met. One of those was John Walsh, who was Thompson’s editor at Rolling Stone in the glory days, who ran Inside Sports when it published Dan Okrent’s first story about the Rotisserie League, who introduced me to Bill James, and who invited me into my first fantasy baseball league back in 1982. John is also the guy who created SportsCenter.
I’ve been reading plenty cockeyed encomiums about Thompson the past two days and there’s no way I can comment on HS the man, but as a writer he should be revered and yet not overestimated. He was a late bloomer, a guy who struggled writing professionally until he had his brilliant idea, and there is no doubt that its very brilliance consumed him. But the generosity of his spirit can even be found in much of the lesser and later works, the energy of his outrage should be an inspiration for anyone forever, and at the end of the day, and this is his, as a man he should be admired for the legions who mourn him. What better tribute is there than that?
[A day after writing the original I made some edits to better clarify what I meant.]
I was reading a piece earlier on Thompson, a typical ‘gushy’ sort of tribute to him when I realized that the person writing it must never have read anything the man wrote and instead was just pulling out these canned commentaries.
The Nation reprinted one of Thompson’s articles, appropriately one on the Hells Angels, and it reminded me again of what he did so well, which wasn’t really the raw quality of his observations and the countercultural elements that later became a sort of shtick, but his keen eye that boiled down a situation and his utter disdain for bullshit commentary.
His work on the Hells Angels was typical of what F & L on the campaign trail would be. He has almost no sympathy for the bikers except for the hypocrisy with which they are dealt, and to some extent the disenfranchisement (both imposed and self-imposed) that leads to the dysfunctional social structure and the faulty decision making that comes thereafter. But, his chief scorn are for the politicians and magazines who take incidents and paint them in their own colors.
Thompson’s glee is palpable that these politicians and magazines gave the Hells Angels more credibility and notice than they could possibly have accomplished on their own (even if they had been out for that). The anonymous biker at the end of the article at the Nation basically saying that since these ‘exposes’ had come out they had more action than they could handle.
He also threw in smart things…in the Nation bit, He Brings up Madam Nhu, the IWW, Joe Hill…a particularly brilliant analogy of saying that The Wild Ones served the same space as the ‘sun also rises’ for young californians – a particularly poignant reference given Papa and Thompson’s exit.
I didn’t read much of his stuff over the past 14 years, largely I think because it all seemed disengaged, there wasn’t the personal sense of satire, outrage that marked his earlier stuff. I wonder if, in the end, HS Thompson became bourgeoise? What a burden it must’ve been that in some ways his work lives on…but as reality TV. His ‘Freaks’ are now character types in bad movies instead of anti-establishment or counter culture symbols…indeed, HS Thompson became establishment, without changing the basic hypocrisies, nor it must have seemed, having people even examine the accepted orthodoxies.