Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.03.2005, Page 18

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Hunter S. Thompson, the man who
wrote these lines, died February 21
of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
He was 67. It is this observation,
coupled with the quip “Joe Frazier,
like Nixon, had finally prevailed for
reasons that people like me refused
to understand—at least out loud”
that I wish he might be remembered
for.
Instead, he is more likely to be
remembered for his myriad comic-
strip lines like “I hate to advocate
drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity
to anyone, but they’ve always worked
for me,” as quoted in the obit
from his employer, Rolling Stone
magazine.
Tom Wolfe, the New Journalist
and fellow counter-culture scribe,
who went on to become President
Bush’s favourite novelist, described
Thompson’s accomplishment in
Fear and Loathing: “There are only
two adjectives writers care about
anymore…brilliant and outrageous…
and Hunter Thompson has a
freehold on them both.”
“Brilliant” and “outrageous” are
adjectives Wolfe aspires to, but they
were starting points for Thompson.
What Thompson so remarkably
accomplished in his writings, at its
best, were “humility” and “honesty.”
Read Fear and Loathing, and for
every attack he throws at the police
from Muskego, Oklahoma, there is
the reminder that he understands the
police as people. (His lawyer presents
the more common view on first
encountering middle America law
enforcement “I saw these bastards in
Easy Rider, but I didn’t believe they
were real.”)
From this shock, Thompson, in his
anything goes manner, brings the
reader from repulsion to somewhat
identifying with the officers—note
how many pages are devoted to
apologizing to himself, how many
officers simply want to leave
Thompson alone. For even the most
virulent Nixon-hater, the moment
Thompson’s lawyer is attacking him
with a hunting knife for not properly
dropping a radio into a bathtub, we
understand the charm of the silent
majority. (To guarantee we get
the point, Thompson positioned a
hideous news account about a young
man ripping his own eyes from his
head while on PCP very close to this
passage.)
All this has been overlooked in the
weeks after Thompson’s death. He is
the drug writer that was caricatured,
by cartoonists, by directors, and by
the author himself. And as the public
wakes up to his work, Thompson’s
recent writings are thrown at us.
In reading over works like “Hey
Rube,” or the Rolling Stone
contribution “Fear and Loathing
on the Campaign Trail, 2004,”
Thompson’s tongue is still sharp,
and he has still done his research
on the candidates—mid-invective
he points out that Bush actually did
brand his fellow fraternity members,
and it was reported in the Yale Daily
News. (November, 1967 if you want
to look it up.)
But one key quality was gone in
Thompson’s last works: he couldn’t
humanize GW. Things have truly
gotten so bad that America has
elected someone, twice, that one
of our greatest writers, a man who
could show the guy-next-door
qualities to everybody from Hells
Angels riders to Richard Nixon, can’t
even begin to find a human face for.
As Thompson put it in one of his
last pieces, “Nixon was a professional
politician, and I despised everything
he stood for – but if he were running
for president this year against the evil
Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily
vote for him.”
That Thompson is dead is extremely
sad. That he had to spend the years
before he died contemplating GW is
truly tragic.
“ There was a fantastic 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. […] 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.”
by Bart Cameron
If you can’t stand the idea of a future
without Hunter S. do not despair.
In 1997, Warren Ellis, a British
graphic novelist, came upon the
idea of depicting the great Gonzo
in the ultimate Dystopian future.
What he pulled off with his series
Transmetropolitan was outlandishly
good and prescient.
In the future, household appliances
will be capable of drug-addiction,
vice presidential candidates will
be hapless clones, the public will
be completely and totally without
attention-span or memory, and
investigative journalism will be non-
existent. Also, New Yorkers will
order baby seal eyes at their local hot
dog stand. As I said, prescient.
The kick out of Transmet doesn’t
come from the predictions or the
commentary on society, though
these are amusing and well drawn,
it comes from the riff on the central
character, Spider Jerusalem, a
character Ellis says “was somewhat
influenced by Thompson’s writing,
persona and life”—or close enough
that the author pointed out on his
website that CBS news called him
within two minutes of the story of
Thompson’s suicide hitting the wire.
In a comic, a journalist could
presumably carry a weapon that
causes politicians to soil themselves
uncontrollably, or he could lob
grenades off skyscrapers in protest
over red states. (Yes, Spider has
Thompson’s love for guns and
drugs.) But even in a comic, he
can’t stop the red states from going
red. And what makes the comics so
great is that if Spider—acting out
an educated reader’s fantasies— say,
punches out a fascist at a political
rally, he is immediately applauded
by the other fascists for being strong
and picking on the weak, and thus
going from fantasy to nightmare.
Sadly, Transmet has finished its run.
There is a bright side: you can get
the comics collected into six graphic
novels and rumors abound that a
movie is on its way.
TRANSMETROPOLITAN:
Punching Out Fascists
by Bart Cameron
www.thorparinn.is