WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD, THE WEIRD GET GOING
After 32 long years, we now know for sure that the third book of the great trilogy of our Modern Times will not be written. After too few flashes of brilliance in a writing career that, for all practical purposes ended over 20 years ago, Hunter Thompson looked at the prospects of his future in Bush America Inc. and took matters into his own hands. He blew his brains out at age 67.
Though he was often imitated, no one even got close to Hunter. He brought his real and imagined hallucinations to bear on a generation and times that could not be explained in straight narrative. At his best, he was Apocalypse Now to the straight media’s Green Berets. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was not journalism – it was a hilarious indictment of a hypocritical, thoughtless nation. His theatrical, exaggerated hedonism was nothing compared to the Ugly Americans at serious play in old Las Vegas on Super Bowl weekend. He and his Samoan "attorney" were ugly and mad, but they could see the scene clearly from their perspective in the 4th dimension.
In 1972, some poor (now long unemployed) press hacks on several campaigns gave Hunter access to the press bus, the aides and the candidates of a campaign featuring two doomed politicians. Whole workshops are now run at various training facilities for the Permanent Campaigners to keep unstable and – more importantly – unreliable people like Hunter off of future campaign planes, and they have succeeded to a disgusting degree. Not only can there never be another Hunter; there can never be another off-guard, unplanned, off-script moment. Even if something actually happened, there would be no one there capable of reporting it.
But the real genius of "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" was the vision and the joy Hunter had bringing us into the bowels of Nixon’s America. It was a dark, hopeless time, but Hunter reveled in the ugliness, exposing the smug satisfaction of the two-bit advertising men who brought us the New Nixon and the sloppy idealism of the McGovernites. Not that anyone would be allowed, but no one has even tried to recreate Hunter’s dissection of the decrepit state of what passes for U.S. politics since 1972. I can think of no other writer that I would want to go after the Black Knights of Bush and explore the New Darkness we live in. Instead, we have the pathetic likes of Jeff Greenfield exploring the importance of security in the homeland and how Bush resonates and blah, blah, blah. Theodore White, call your office.
As the years went by – Reagan, Clinton and now Junior – the world was much worse off for the lack of Hunter’s voice or anything like it. There had to be something to say to make sense of it all as only he could, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t. No doubt his drug of choice (alcohol), his recreational pursuits (guns) and his Splendid Isolation in the mountains overcame his gift and his insight. Like Michael Jackson, his early promise and stunning accomplishments brought him the wealth and status to withdraw from the world and create one of his own design – and thereby destroyed his art. He became – literally – a cartoon of himself; the Icon of Excess. At the end, this allowed CNN’s Aaron Brown – who should know better – to pay tribute to him Monday night by portraying him as a hopeless lunatic of a thankfully-past time. The best and the worst Brown could say about Hunter is that he was "not Sandra Dee", the former actor known for being a teenager who died the same weekend.
So, when his physical struggle with the heavy, dreaded Mojo wire (always decided with a shotgun blast, the ultimate man-over-machine power statement) gave way to the ease of the point-and-click internet, Hunter found himself overwhelmed by the ease of delivery and distribution and inside the nightmare of nothing left to say. In his last years, his only occasionally amusing ramblings would run on, of all things, the ESPN2 site. But he was done a long time ago with the long, weighty tomes and magic moments.
Now I guess we’ll have to figure out all this bullshit on our own.
6:50:59 AM 
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