Hunter S. Thompson - dead

For The Clueless Absolutists

For The Clueless Absolutists



For those too addicted to the mainstream standards of absolutist world view(s),

for those too busy "living large" in the - self inflicted - mediocrity of our modern ""media-ocracy"" .

for those too enraptured by their personality cult of the day. that "sells" them Nike sneakers and American Presidents,

they may be too warm and fuzzy with their NPR's and Fox News, to venture in following Malkavian's above link.

So here:


... Writing in The New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt worried Thompson might someday "lapse into good taste."

"That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity," he wrote. "And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."
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Malkavian:
I seriously feel like crying right now.
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Yah, there was a consensus, was ..., that he would out live us all,

just don't decide it's a good day to scrub out a gas oven, sharpen a chain saw, or clean a shot gun.


Many accidents happen when preoccupied with morbidity.

Whether the "literati", and their fellow traveling English Majors, classify his end as marketably dramatic, as (hypocritically) heroic, as Sylvia Plath or Ernest Hemming-way, does not matter.

Consider, maybe, ... it an "extreme", and fevered, vision of 'pain management'.

Recall the mythical 'Old West', 'red' indian fighting, axiom to:

""save the last bullet for yourself"".




4too
 
A bit of an obit here-

0905OB.jpg

Obituary

Hunter S. Thompson

Feb 24th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Hunter S. Thompson, doctor of gonzo journalism, died on February 20th, aged 67

THERE were always way too many guns around at Hunter S. Thompson's farm in Woody Creek: .44 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, black snubnosed Colt Pythons with bevelled cylinders, .22 calibre mounted machineguns. He also kept explosives, to blow the legs off pool tables or to pack in a barrel for target practice. His quiet bourgeois neighbours near Aspen, Colorado, complained that he rocked the foundations of their houses.

Explosions were his speciality. Indeed, writing and shooting were much the same. His very first newspaper story, written when he was ten for a neighbourhood newsletter in Louisville, Kentucky, was headlined “WAR!” (“The Voits declared war on Hunter's gang on Oct. 1, 1947. At 3.00 Hunter's gang attacked the Voits”). Later, as a working journalist, he fired off reckless fusillades of words that were meant to shock and entertain and wreak collateral damage.


He had always been a problem, kicked early out of high school (drinking, vandalism) and rapidly out of the air force, but his casual smashing of the rules of American journalism happened more or less by accident. Assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby in 1970, his mind was too blown with drugs, as usual, to write the story. One by one, with his trembling hands, he ripped the pages of whiskey-fuelled ramblings out of his notebook and sent them to the printer. The piece that resulted, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”, was a runaway success, though he had neither described the race nor mentioned the winner. And he was astonished: it was like “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

A friend called his style “totally gonzo”. The name stuck, though, as he confessed, nobody knew what the hell it meant. For the literary, he could explain that it followed William Faulkner's dictum that “the best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism.” Mr Thompson stalked, rifle in hand, cigarette (in holder) dangling, on the wild borderlands between fact and fiction, leaving readers to decide what was true and what was not.

Editors tried to control him, but failed. Journalistic objectivity was a nonsense to him; he threw it away, and turned his gaze on himself. He and his excursions into depravity became the central and only theme of every story he wrote. Sent to Puerto Rico for the New York Herald Tribune, in 1959, he shot rats at the San Juan city dump until he was arrested. Assigned in 1971 to write a 300-word caption on the Mint 400 motor-cycle race for Sports Illustrated, he wrote the 50,000 words of mayhem that became “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. It began: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Posted to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, he never watched the boxing. Instead he floated naked in the hotel pool, into which he had thrown a pound and a half of marijuana, and let the green slick gather round him.

“Fear and Loathing” made him famous: so famous that the Republicans came courting him, although he was a Democrat. It was not just the guns, but the fact that he wore a twisted sort of patriotism on his sleeve. That journey through the Californian desert to find fame and fortune, stocked up with “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers”, was also, Mr Thompson claimed, “a classic confirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character.” (“Jesus! Did I say that?”)

Nixon's men wondered if this madman could be their bridge to the alienated, war-hating young. But they were playing with fire. Mr Thompson thought Nixon a liar and a bastard. He covered the 1972 election in typically take-no-prisoners style, producing what one campaign aide called “the least accurate and most factual” book about it; and when he toyed with politics it was on the Freak Power ticket, running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, where he could blow things away in the woods.

At Hemingway's grave
He did not give “a flying fuck” what he smoked, or ingested, or did, but there was a thoughtful side. Early in his career, in an obituary of a friend, he wrote of “the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules.” He was often melancholy, and wild conviviality and celebrity made no difference to that. The epigram to “Fear and Loathing” quoted Dr Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” It was not thought surprising that his death was a suicide.

In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world:

It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.
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Thompson's ashes are probably going to be shot out of a canon. He always wanted it that way.

Seems like he planned this, too -


DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Journalist Hunter S. Thompson did not take his life "in a moment of haste or anger or despondency" and probably planned his suicide well in advance because of his declining health, the family's spokesman said Wednesday.

Douglas Brinkley, a historian and author who has edited some of Thompson's work, said the founder of "gonzo" journalism shot himself Sunday night after weeks of pain from a host of physical problems that included a broken leg and a hip replacement.

"I think he made a conscious decision that he had an incredible run of 67 years, lived the way he wanted to, and wasn't going to suffer the indignities of old age," Brinkley said in a telephone interview from Aspen. "He was not going to let anybody dictate how he was going to die."

Thompson, famous for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and other works of New Journalism, spent an intimate weekend with his son, Juan, daughter-in-law, Jennifer, and young grandson, William, the spokesman said.

"He was trying to really bond and be close to the family" before his suicide, Brinkley said. "This was not just an act of irrationality. It was a very pre-planned act."

The family is looking into whether Thompson's cremated remains can be blasted out of a cannon, a wish the gun-loving writer often expressed, Brinkley said.

"The optimal, best-case scenario is the ashes will be shot out of a cannon," he said.

Other arrangements were pending.
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I always kind of figured he'd either go out on his own terms, or outlive everyone else.
 
Fez said:
Bit of a weak end. Shame.
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Eh, I don't really see it as so, anymore.

HST lived life by his own rules, and he went out on his own accord, too.

I think suicide is kind of pathetic, most of the time. But Hunter obviously wanted it this way, and I respect that.
 
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