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| Fear, Loathing, and Hype | | Date Created: Mar 01, 2005, 10:33 PM |
 When Hunter S. Thompson's suicide was announced last weekend my wife asked who he was and why were they making such a big deal of his death. I had to think a bit before I replied and apparently others had the same reaction.
I was into Rolling Stone and read all Thompson's stuff back in the early 70's. The combination of Thompson's "journalism" and Ralph Steadman's graphics seemed to catch the tenor of the times when revolution was in the air and "anything goes" was considered normal behavior. Of course by the latter 70's it became apparent that this led to excess and unexpected consequences. Thompson continued his excesses but didn't seem to be capable of producing anything further of value. Or maybe it was that what he's famous for was overrated to begin with. Maybe he even knew this. Either way, it reminds me of rock stars of that era that collapsed along with rock music in the 70's and sank into excess and/or never produced anything worthwhile after that. Would Peter Frampton get such publicity today if he died? Perhaps there's something more going on here.
Remember that the radical anti-war and anti-american leftists of the 60's went on to take over our universities and the mainstream media. Could it be that they need to believe that Hunter S. Thompson is an important figure in literature?
The excerpts below are from the online Conservative Review.
Fear and loathing of the gonzo establishment
Diana West (townhall.com)
"If there is one thing that bugs the Left, it's the idea of empire -- and particularly the idea of its own established empire -- the media culture it still dominates by dint of groupthink.
That's why when Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at age 67, the empire of the Left, a.k.a. the mainstream media (MSM), had to pretend that a bona fide "iconoclast" had died, someone at odds with the establishment...
Far from living life on the fringe -- which is not to say he didn't live a fringey life -- Thompson was enshrined as an icon by the so-called establishment. By "establishment" I mean the prevailing powers that be, the media and cultural powers for whom Thompson was never a threat, but always a promise. He has long been appreciated, if not celebrated, for his open and prodigious drug use... And he has been consistently applauded for a concocted reportage that divorced "journalism" from fact... Thompson's "gonzo" career was a template for counter-cultural behaviors and attitudes that had reshaped the American mainstream by the end of the 1960s. Tantrums. Hedonism. Self-absorption...
But there is something else. "For a generation of American students," The New York Times writes, "Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a dangerous, fantastic occupation." This notion is echoed in The Washington Post: "He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson ... had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace."
Fear and loathing. Madness and menace. Danger. Fantasy. These are the moods of adolescent rebellion, the stylistic attitudes of an adversary culture that has long dominated the MSM. Which tells me that when all the ink is dry, Thompson's special place both on the Left and in the MSM is as a sort of adversary mascot, a totem of a mythical time when the empire still lay ahead.
Too bad the emperor has no clothes."
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