When I was but a college student and an editorial editor of a conservative student newspaper, The UWM Times, our rivals at The UWM Post and various lefties we knew would go on and on about Hunter S. Thompson. This was the time of “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s.” Looking back today, reading the review on Amazon.com about sums up what many conservatives were running into on a daily basis on campus.
These columns from the San Francisco Examiner prove only that journalism can become dated quickly. The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas calls Colonel Khadafy smarter than Ronald Reagan and takes potshots at television news, Gary Hart, Ed Meese, evangelists, Michael Dukakis, Pat Robertson and the Iran-contra hearings. He predicts that the Democrats will self-destruct in the 1988 presidential campaign. People he dislikes are described as "money-sucking animals," "brainless freaks," "geeks," "greed-crazed lunatics" and so on. Thompson's flaccid diatribes seem designed to instill a sense of smug superiority in the reader.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Why in hell would we want to read that? Still, it was quoted to us long and often, as if it were received tablets from the mountain. “Fear and Loathing” at UW-Milwaukee came to mean to us, “Are you going to quote something else you read by that hippy drug addict with a typewriter?” So, many of us took a pass on Thompson, preferring P.J. O’Rourke who, unlike Thompson, grew out of his hippy druggie days and began mocking what he left behind.
But Thompson would never grow up and the great written word expected from him would never come. The drinking, the drugs, the antics, the continued adolescence, may have made for memorable personal anecdotes. Tom Wolfe has one in his praise of Thompson. Austin Ruse in National Review has one in his less than positive appraisal of Thompson. Even Christopher Hitchens has his. Others on the left will have theirs, and the common themes of the druggie, angry adolescent are in every one. Perhaps this was why the Left was so willing to leave the child his toys, the guns and ammo of an NRA member.
His wife was half his age, yet she made the unfortunate mistake of leaving a depressed child home alone with the guns. While talking to him on her cell phone (that sounds so out of place when talking about 1970s Thompson) he threw one last tantrum. An immaturity about the consequences of life and death led to his suicide via one of his toys in mid conversation.
Abbie Hoffmann hung himself, unable to move into the next era. Thompson shot himself, unable to move into the next era. Stephen Schwartz wrote in The Weekly Standard “The End of the Counter Culture.” We’re not quite at that end because there are still a few others that refuse to grow up. But the anecdotes will be banal compared to the good doctor.
Perhaps it’s fitting Thompson may end up best remembered as the inspiration for “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips. He was, after all, a self-caricature, and a poor one at that. But then, even Trudeau’s version went on to bigger and better things.
