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Faulking Around - Feb 26, 2005 - Printable Version
- Fear and Loathing in the 21st Century
by Mark Faulk
It's 3 o'clock in the morning, again (why is it always 3 o'clock in the morning?), and I have to be up in less than 4 hours. What better time to begin my self-imposed assignment of writing a tribute to the Guru of Gonzo Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, who had ended his own life with a single shot to the head only five days ago. I won't finish this article tonight, and without the proper mind-altering substances, I may never dig deep enough into my chaotic imagination to find a fitting end to this rambling commentary. I might have to resort to what Thompson himself claimed to have done on more than one hallucinogen-induced rampage....scribble madly on whatever scraps of paper I can get my sweaty hands on, cobble them together in a totally random order, write "The End" at the bottom, and post the damn thing. The news of Thompson's death was followed by the usual "what a great writer", "I don't have any idea why he would do such a thing", or "maybe it was the pain of his leg injury that drove him to kill himself". Bullshit. My God, look at the sorry state our country is in, it's a wonder any of us have the faulking strength to face another day. I'll tell you why I think he did it: In his book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", which is quite simply one of the greatest books ever not quite written, he had this to say about the sixties:
"There was a fantastic universal 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. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, 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 - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Well, the wave did finally break, and it rolled back alright, in fact, it kept rolling back until it covered all of America, and what he described as a "sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil," has been replaced with absolute and total annihilation of the forces of New and Righteousness. The wave kept rolling, and it poisoned everything in it's path with it's venomous vitriol, finally cresting on Capitol Hill, and splashing menacingly against the dome of the White House itself. Old and Evil won, and the rest of us are screwed, once again.
Thompson sensed that we are right back where we were before the sixties, that we have to fight the same goddamn battle one more time, and he just didn't have the stamina....or the right drugs....to enter the fray again. In "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72", when Nixon was on his way to being elected, Thompson asked "Jesus, where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to become president?". I'm afraid that, 32 years later, he came face to face with the god-awful answer to that question, and simply couldn't live with the reality of what he learned. Hallucinatory bats coming at you at a hundred miles an hour are one thing, but witnessing the end of humanity as we know it is quite another. While many of us who grew up the sixties and early seventies understood that along with the mind-twisting acid trips and pill-induced manic roller-coaster rides came random moments of clarity, epiphanys that (almost) made the schizophrenic ride worth the price of admission, we also had to live with the gnawing realization that at some stage we had no choice but to re-enter the Reality Zone. It was a sobering thought for each and every one of us, and almost unbearable for those, like Thompson, who literally resided in the heartbeat of the Movement itself.
Despite the ravages of drugs, the passage of time, and the inevitable demise of our nation's social conscience, the self-proclaimed Guru of Gonzo Journalism continued to cut through the bullshit and say what the rest of us were....well, not thinking, because most of us could barely even get our post-20th Century 30-second-attention-span minds around the implications of his words....but what we WOULD be thinking if the rest of us still possessed the capacity to formulate even tepidly-original thoughts. In his final book, published in 2003, "Kingdom of Fear", he summed up the Bush Reign of Terror in two short paragraphs:
"It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled this country for at the least the last 20 years, and arguably for the past 200. They take orders well, and they don't ask too many questions.
The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War."
Hunter Thompson resided in a world of his own making, an alternate universe inhabited by real lounge lizards, imaginary swarms of flying bats, and every color and shape of illicit drug known to mankind, and those of us who "discovered" him through his writing were just happy to be invited along for the ride. Like every young writer who happened upon Hunter Thompson in our quixotic journey for literary guidance and direction, I was irreversibly transformed from the first lines of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas":
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."
Along with Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson formed the Holy Grail of Writers who spoke for our generation, and while Vonnegut may have been my personal idol, my own writing style has staggered more in the direction of Thompson's Gonzo Journalism - a style where words spill out uncensored, unfettered, and unfiltered, and where naked emotion takes precedence over subject and substance. It is up to us to take up the torch that still burns in his ideas - to carry on with the same fervor and passion that he gave to each of us in every word that seemed to fall haphazardly from his pen - and imbedded itself perfectly into the psyche of a Vietnam-Nixon dominated America spinning wildly out of control.
For a lunatic who had once been embraced as a visionary and a genius by an entire generation, it had undoubtedly become excruciatingly uncomfortable to continue living as an idealistic madman in a world whose insanity had surpassed even his most vivid drug-crazed hallucinations. Like most creative geniuses, he was a brilliant yet troubled soul, whose insights into the very heart of America will be greatly missed. Hunter S. Thompson did not leave us, on the contrary, we abandoned him, and along with him, we have lost one of our most lucid voices - we have lost the most important voice of all - the lone voice of reason crying out in the wilderness.
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." - Hunter S. Thompson
This is a great website to learn more about Hunter S. Thompson and his life and writing:
http://www.gonzo.org/
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