A Letter to the Establishment:
The Cautionary Tale of Hunter S. Thompson
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2010 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Ebook Edition, License Notes
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Also by this Author:
Urban Fantasy
Rook: Allie's War, Book One
Shield: Allie's War, Book Two
Sword: Allie's War, Book Three
Shadow: Allie's War, Book Four
New York: Allie's War, Early Years
The Alien Club
The Slave Girl Chronicles
Middle Grade (Children's)
Jack Dervish, Super Spy
Maya Papaya
Monkey: An Indian Tale
Elephant
Table of Contents
A Letter to the Establishment: The Cautionary Tale of Hunter S. Thompson
Bonus Pages! Rook: Allie's War, Book One
A Letter to the Establishment:
The Cautionary Tale of Hunter S. Thompson
If they’d just left the poor bastard alone. If he’d just been allowed to shoot off guns, take mescaline while lounging naked in public areas, blow up the occasional jeep with gasoline and dynamite...everything would have been fine. To all of those crew-cut wearing cops and their higher ups in Chicago and New York and Washington D.C....you blew it, man.
Never piss off a writer. At least...not the wrong writer.
A lot has been written, said, filmed and hypothesized about Hunter S. Thompson. Affectionate, semi-reverential, overblown, angry, offended and derisive tomes run the gamut in describing the man’s antics and humor, usually equipped with at least one first or second-person witnessed event that resulted in one or more felonies. Either outraged anger or eye-tearing laughter (or both) usually ensued from those in close proximity, and the legend grew by another brick, even after his death. Watching the movies and reading the essays, articles, introductions and books he published that caused all of the ruckus in the first place, one gets a picture of a man entombed inside his own legend.
Where I really got a glimpse of the man himself was in his letters. All kinds of letters--letters complaining to the local television station owner that he was guilty of contributing to the dumbing down of America. Letters to the editor of the Aspen Times where he referenced his and his friend [Hitler’s chief personal assistant] Martin Bormann’s approval of the purchase of riot gear for the small, rural community of Pitkin County where he lived.
He wrote letters to his friends and colleagues, including Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe, Pat Buchanan, Walter Mondale, Ralph Steadman, William Kennedy, Oscar Acosta. He wrote letters to his mother, Virginia Thompson, his brothers, and later his son, Juan. He wrote to politicians and activists he admired or with whom he wanted to collaborate, to his employers, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone and Jim Silberman at Random House, and his agent. Throughout the collection of letters, musings, outlines for books, invoices and diatribes was alternately scathing, hilarious, serious, melancholy, lonely, angry, happy and poignant as hell.
Watching documentaries gives you the man himself, in grinning, mumbling technicolor, with that half-sardonic smile broken by a cigarette filter and fitted around witticisms that careen unexpectedly into a surprisingly vulnerable sincerity. It’s the sincerity that often bites even deeper, like when he describes his experiences at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, or later, his inability to avoid his own invention of himself well enough to go back to being a Journalist.
At times, in hearing others speak about him, you feel more like you’re witnessing the vague attempts of friends and enemies to use the tools of the subject himself--pale shadows of Raoul Duke’s scribbles, in the same way that Thompson himself retyped the words of his favorite authors, over and over, trying to catch the flavor of their inner brilliance.
As well written and sincere as many of these biographical blurbs are, they all start to bleed together after awhile, to contain an overarching similarity. One could say that similarity is the truth of Hunter S. Thompson, the real truth...and maybe that’s exactly what it is. After reading and watching all of this, however, laughing out loud again as I reread the books that influenced my writing and my life more than I can express, in the earlier part of my forays into writing nonfiction at least, I found that what impacted me most was the voice of hope. Thompson seems to me to have been trying to bring that voice back, again and again, well past when he himself witnessed the demise of that particular cultural consciousness.
Of course, Thompson himself puts it best:
“There was a fantastical universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle--that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” (HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other Stories. pg 68)
He wrote well past that time, of course, and up until when he died, but his voice remained the voice of that generation, of that optimism and need for things to be better, for us to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Whether you agree with that standard and historical voice or not is almost besides the point. Even though I wasn’t alive for most of the years before “the wave broke” as he put it, I was born towards the end of that time, on the day he wrote the letter that would become the outline for his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.
I remember well what was left washed up on the shore from that wave, and the gradual decline of that optimism in the triumph of history.
Even today, reading Thompson steeps me in a kind of perverse nostalgia for a time when the direction of culture seemed filled with hope, eyes raised upward. Drugged out and half-crazed as he often was, he carried with him the conscience of a generation--a sense of responsibility to a community of people who most in power would rather have ignored. He continued in that voice up until the day he died, warning people about the Kingdom of Fear and the ongoing erosion of the way of life for which America had once been known. When he first entered the scene that voice was new, and yet it resonated with a whole mass of people who lived in the same political and social influences.
The older voices of establishment media and government didn’t yet know what to do with someone like Thompson. In addition, Thompson’s culture in general didn’t seem to have the same level of scorn for optimism. People were angry, sure--but they also believed, really believed, that they could make the world a better place.
Perhaps because of our own historical amnesia, or his rock star status in the freak culture he wholeheartedly embraced, it often seems to be missed that, first and foremost, Hunter was a journalist. As such, he dissected the present. He acted as philosopher and living commentary to help his readers understand the events of the current period within a particular context. In reading his letters, you really get a sense of the deliberateness of some of his stylistic choices within this context. He invented “gonzo journalism” not with an eye to merge fiction and nonfiction, which seems to be the current drumbeat, but to use subjective experience as a means of ascertaining deeper truths on the events and people about which he wrote.
There’s a big difference. In the mystique around who he was and what he consumed, people seem to miss the thread of journalistic integrity woven through everything he wrote, even the most seemingly drug-crazed tomes and wild exaggerations and outright lies. Oddly, in their own way, they all served the truth. The truth wasn’t a universal one, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t a mainstream truth, or a partisan truth, or even an ideological truth...but it was his, and that in a way gave it more integrity than any of these agendas. What he sought wasn’t a mere recounting of the facts, but an actual understanding of the heart of the world in which he found himself, and the events unfolding herein. The truth that lay behind the bald facts wove a story with personal experience and emotional impact into narrative. Thus gonzo journalism created something very different than Western media had ever seen, at least when voiced for a generation of freaks.
In that sense, Thompson shared more similarities with the Alan Moore quote that “Artists use lies to tell the truth”--unlike the majority of modern day journalists, who Thompson argued were in pursuit of the exact opposite. Yet Thompson also felt he was helping to fill a widening information gap made by changes in journalism that were occurring in his lifetime. In letters to friends and fellow writers, Thompson laments the decline of magazines such as LOOK and Harpers, who previously had used writers of the caliber of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe. Thompson states:
“The real horror, to me, lies in the fact that there is absolutely no vehicle in American journalism for the kind of “sensitive” and “intellectual” and essentially moral/merciless reporting that we all understand is necessary--not only for the survival of good journalism in this country, but for the dying idea that you can walk up to a newsstand (or a mag-rack in Missoula) and find something that will tell you what is really happening...” (p412, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist - The Gonzo Letters, Vol II, 1968-1976)
He laments what he terms a kind of philosophical journalism, where journalism didn’t simply arrange facts either to inform or to persuade, but actually dissected the news of the world, in an attempt to understand it, to contextualize the events historically for the reader. These journalists weren’t simply parrots of information fed to them by external sources; they attempted to bring a deeper meaning in the retelling of these events, to bring education, experience, knowledge, research and insight to bear on what occurred in the wider world. They were experts in the world, the on-the-ground and in-the-minute historians. They gave people something deeper to ponder, a philosophical grounding of the events of the world that would allow them to make connections from one event to the other, to see the larger picture that is history...in the very moment it is occurring. Thompson lamented the passing of this old guard, and witnessed its occurrence, just as we are now witnessing the demise of print media and the Woodward and Bernstein type journalism in which I grew up believing.
Now not only do we not have time to ponder the historical and philosophical meaning of the world events around us...now we don’t even have time to determine if the facts we are hearing are true. Simultaneously, repercussions seem to have evaporated in the professional world of journalism for presenting false information, whether unintentionally or intentionally. In fact, due to the reward system of speed over quality, attempts to uncover the falsehoods that inevitably occur when we move on to the next sound byte without having digested in any meaningful way the first have nearly ceased. In a somewhat prescient letter to Tom Wicker at the NY Times, Thompson’s writes about a similar trend during his time:
“What is happening all around us...is a sort of tandem nightmare in which there are fewer and fewer examples of the kind of journalism [that] is necessary...and meanwhile more and more people are using that scarcity as an excuse or maybe even a good reason to turn their backs (or heads) on journalism entirely. The people I deal with most often--for good or ill--simply don’t relate to newspapers or magazines. They might scan a daily paper for something specific--something they’re looking for--but the idea of reading a paper for “news” or general information...simply doesn’t occur to them. A lot of them read the paper, but it’s more for amusement than wisdom...” (Ibid.)
The major news outlets even then moved more and more to a deluge of information over a qualitative analysis of that information--opinion pages and television talking heads, which provide a truncated version of the same, notwithstanding. In fact, most of the modern day “opinion” shows have become vehicles of pure aggrandizement, scandal and the creation and enactment of political theater...rather than an attempt to contextualize or understand events in history.
That isn’t the same as saying there’s no longer a hunger for that information in a large segment of the population. As in Thompson’s time, the smaller, niche markets tend to take up the torch instead. In the 1960s and 1970s it was magazines like Scanlon’s and Rolling Stone and books...now that information is disseminated increasingly in blogs, online magazines, zines and, well, books. Which comes to the fact of Thompson’s invention, “gonzo journalism” itself, which is a warping of traditional journalism with a particular spin. The key to making gonzo honest was to be in the action, to be a part of the story.
I think somehow that got lost for a lot of people, when they began trying to use his style as a particular style of manic voice and not a method of writing about current events. For example, gonzo journalism won’t work for armchair writers, or what Thompson himself terms “Essayists”. In talking to Jim Silberman about a book project known as only “The American Dream” in 1968, Thompson is explicit about the need to be a part of the action on the ground. He writes:
“I can’t sit out here and ruminate on the Death of the American Dream. That’s what I tried to impress on you...the importance of providing, in the contract, for adequate expense money to let me get involved. Otherwise, I’ll sit out here and serve up a bunch of pompous bullshit...
...[w]hich boils down to the simple, flat and absolute fact that I have no intention of writing an Essay. That’s what critics are for, so let’s give them something to chew on.” (Ibid, p26)
Involvement in the story is what news outlets can no longer afford to pay for, and the importance of which seems to have been lost in the online media to a large degree as well. Nowadays events are reported through the web at lightning speed, sometimes originating in first person accounts, but the commentary and “reporting” that occurs on these events are bereft of even the immediate context much less the historical and cultural world within which the event occurs. It could be argued that the synthesis of information is something “new” but I think that strips the discussion of the realities of the impact of this distancing on he consumers of this media. There seems to be little recognition of the impact this distancing has on our perception of our place in the world and our connection to the other human beings who make up this news. The more cut off our news is, the more cut off we are from it.
In that sense, Thompson is right when he defends the need for contextual subjectivity in journalism in his article after the death of Nixon, his archnemesis:
“Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful...” (“He Was a Crook,” by HST, Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994)
So yes, I miss Hunter S. Thompson. Not just because he was a crazy, drug-addled symbol of bellicose freedom to be a bona fide freak in whatever way that manifested...which he was...but as a journalist. He made what I believe was a sincere attempt to find the truth in the context in which it occurs, and to provide insight from that on the ground perspective.
The reality of the profusion of information we’re faced with now is, the subjectivity is often so buried that we no longer know who to believe. Compounding this, the information all passes by so fast it serves more to make us feel powerless than to enlighten us on the historical moment in which we live. If we’re not careful, our ongoing narrative or “story” of ourselves will get so divorced from the subject that it will become an exercise in mental cleverness instead of an attempt to gain true knowledge...rather more like solving a Suduku puzzle in boredom than embedding ourselves in a wider history of humanity.
The key is that search for truth. Sadly, subjectivity is alive and well, but as soon as it loses that innocent lens, that willingness to go all the way in and see events from the perspective of all parties, it becomes mere propaganda, not subjectivity in the service of a deeper understanding. The range of Thompson’s friends alone showed him to be willing to discourse with those on all sides of the fence, no matter whether he agreed with them politically or not.
It was also what brought the ring of truth to the description of his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 “the most accurate and least factual account of the campaign," attributed to Gary Hart, then McGovern's campaign manager. Thompson didn’t stand for any particular set of candidates. He lambasted Democrats alongside Republicans, some of his more vitriolic comments reserved for Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, who were Democratic opponents of McGovern in the same election. He openly endorsed the candidate who struck him as the “only honest man in politics” (McGovern) not because he was climbing the ladder of any party hierarchy or even seeking access as a journalist to the corridors of power that would help him do his job. There was nothing in it for him, in fact, other than to uphold his own ideals of truth. The sad fact is, he suffered quite a bit in terms of access as a direct result of his particular brand of “truth-telling,” especially in Washington.
The longer he wrote, in fact, the more he was denied access to speak to anyone in power who might not pass his rigid and (in the eyes of the powers that be) unpredictable standards for integrity. After McGovern and Carter, that included pretty much everyone, of all parties. Mostly this was due to Thompson’s unflinching willingness to take his political enemies head on, even the aforementioned Richard Nixon, about whom he shared the following in the same piece:
“Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
...Nixon laughed when I told him this. ‘Don't worry,’ he said, ‘I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.’” (Ibid)
Yet Thompson did have access for a period of time and during that time, he made a mark. It’s interesting to note this, in that the mark helped to bring Walter Mondale close to the presidency and had a hand in the rise of Jimmy Carter, who so impressed Thompson in a speech he gave in front of a crowd of Georgia lawyers that he immediately offered to endorse his candidacy. Thompson, who had rock-star status in the journalism world at that time, was said to have gotten more requests for autographs at that same speech than Carter did himself, so this endorsement was no small thing...at least in reaching a certain demographic. Love his politics or hate them, it’s impossible to deny he had influence, and that who and what he wrote about impacted not only the reputations of individuals but also their political careers.
Sadly, that loss of access, as much as the drugs, is what I think eventually destroyed him. He ended up being what he swore he never wanted to be...someone who wrote from outside the action, unable to go anywhere without being recognized, unable to blend into the news and become one with it, and therefore able to get the truth, as it were. That search for truth is what set him apart from everyone who’s tried to emulate him since. In the majority, those same writers have focused on the drugs and the crazy and missed the essential core of the man. Flipping through pictures of Thompson, yes, there are a lot of him holding drinks, but if you look closer there are even more of him sitting in front of a typewriter. There are more of him talking seriously to journalists and politicians of influence than there are of him getting blasted or holding a gun. He was an idealist, in the highest sense of the word. Writing was his weapon of choice, and drugs were part of his, and the freak culture’s, subjective reality.
Therefore, as far as I’m concerned, Thompson is still missed. His particular brand of crazy alone was inspiring, but the striving for truth is what still makes him one of history’s great journalists and historical documentarians. He represented a generation, but more than that, he held to his own truth, right up to the end.
~ end ~
See below for sample pages from JC Andrijeski’s novel
Rook: Allie’s War, Book One
For links to purchase the entire book, visit the author’s website at www.jcandrijeski.com or her blog at http://jcandrijeski.blogspot.com
