In a recent Sunday New York Times, Rich Cohen, contributing editor at Rolling
Stone, threw another elegiac log on the funeral pyre of Hunter
S. Thompson, favorite uncle of the nation’s nattering nabobs of
nostalgia.
What is clear from the piece — which skips, like all the other
Thompson eulogies, from Fear and Loathing straight to his
final years — is Cohen’s bathetic esteem both for the Gonzo legacy
and for his own vicarious glow in its light. When Cohen quotes
Gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman bidding Hunter good-night —
“Thank you, thank you and thank you. You’ve made my life, and
you’ve made my life interesting” — one gets the impression he is
really quoting himself.
But it was Thompson himself who blamed “a whole subculture of
frightened illiterates with no faith in anything” on “the
importance of Liking Yourself,” back when the cult of self-esteem
had yet to eviscerate an entire culture of the sort of behavioral
standards whose A-1 bugaboo appeared to be — Thompson. Today,
Hunter Thompson is dead, and Liking Yourself is more popular than
ever. The question of whether Thompson really liked himself is
gobbled up whole by the grinning mouth of critical praise. And the
question of whether the Left, which has made such a halcyon hero of
Thompson, has really come to terms with his half-reactionary
heritage haunts the resin-clogged halls of the whole ‘68-liberal
establishment.
From 1968 to 1972, Thompson was the central witch-doctor in a
scene that linked Gary Hart to Warren Beatty and Sandy Berger to
Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone. In the hands of
Wenner, and the generation of flunkies which have taken control of
the popular press and are his heirs, the Duke of Gonzo will stay
memorialized in caricature as a radical, wrought-iron Leftist. The
Jann Wenner version of history, bogus here as everywhere else,
threatens to become so ubiquitous as to take on the sentimental
aura of received truth.
In Thompson’s hands, by contrast, the truth was bent but not
broken. When Hunter lapsed into double vision, it was more like Doc
Holliday’s than Foreigner’s: he had two guns — one for each of
you. But the kooky left that looks back upon their lion does so
with lyin’ eyes. In favor of stroking the man so hard that perhaps
some of his truth would come off, the dandies and dilettantes and
BS artists that outlived Thompson also outlived his vision.
THE LIBERAL CULTURAL ESTABLISHMENT of modern television, film, and
music does not belong to Thompson, nor does he belong to it. Within
his best pages, Thompson indicted the very sort of people who would
grow up to eat coke, swap wives, and spoil their bastard children.
And he denigrated the Democratic old guard that they replaced.
Thompson turned upon liberalism’s empty promises with the same
teeth he bared at Nixon.
The Death of the American Dream was a “serious” book
Thompson was never able to finish, or even start, but its bells,
like Poe’s, were alarum bells, and they tolled, first and foremost,
for Lyndon Johnson. Though Thompson heaped a lot of invective upon
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, nothing can beat the
following:
Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody
years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his
proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans
to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army,
and in fact the whole structure of “government.”
As for Johnson’s veep — who Hillary Clinton beatified at the
outset of her recent Humphrey Day Dinner keynote speech — “the
Hube” was a “treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler.” For Thompson,
“the whole era” that led up Nixon’s resignation “peaked on March
31, 1968, when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn’t
run for re-election — that everything he stood for was
f—-ed.”
This is not the stuff of Jefferson-Jackson toastmasters. In the
'70s Thompson was still calling Humphrey “Martin Bormann in drag,”
and, decades before that, was unafraid of labeling one leftist
friend a “cheap book-store Marxist.” When he declared on November
22, 1963 that “politics will become a cockfight and reason will go
by the boards,” Thompson wasn’t choosing sides. He was picking his
own.
The Left joined him — not the other way around. Whereas the
caricature in 2005 is of a GOP that believes in God and a
Democratic Party that worships humanism, Thompson knew as early as
1958 that he had “no god,” and found it “impossible to believe in
man.” Fear and loathing was an equal-opportunity exercise. In
Vegas, the dividing line between Nixon and Humphrey voters
was a distinction without a difference. Given the choice between
Rotarian Republicans and cop/thug Democrats, Thompson chose
ether.
THE GENERATION OF ‘68 itself stayed in the background in
Vegas, but continued to age: and wheras in the '70s
Thompson had brutalized politicians, in the '80s he turned on the
kids who got older but never grew up. This is the part of his
career that doesn’t make it into any of the pious remembrances.
Thompson’s coverage of the Pulitzer divorce trial — Palm Beach,
1983 — defined his anthology of that decade, Generation of
Swine, and damned the thirtysomething adults who’d been rookie
liberals a dozen years prior.
Thompson laid bare the debauched habits of young Roxanne, who
split with old Pulitzer, in no delicate terms. On top of it all, he
wrote, “she was a lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual
trollop. In six-and-a-half years of marriage, she had humped almost
everything she could get her hands on.”
“Where,” Thompson went on, “are the best and brightest children
of Bel Air and Palm Beach?” He looked to the pinnacle of successful
young society, the product of the counterculture’s social freedom,
and found a den of filth. “These are awkward questions in some
circles,” he noted, “and the answers can be disturbing.”
Indeed. Today, the answer Thomspon was looking for is that those
kids are doped up in Aspen jacuzzis or bedding total strangers in
Hollywood mansions, at parties put on by people with names like Mr.
Leisure and Lord Eros. The moral and cultural bottom has fallen out
from under liberal high society, where religion is a joke and
tradition is just another word for prejudice. Of course, some
religious households are frauds and failures, too, and not every
child from a broken home has S&M perverts for parents. But the
“awkward questions” that Thompson never bothered to answer for his
Rolling Stone readership have all come home to roost.
THE LONGER HE SPENT in the company of the post-McGovern Left, the
less like Thompson it behaved. It was overwhelmed by yuppies, and,
despite their irrational Gonzo exuberance, Thompson hated yuppies.
They were fools, well-heeled savages, swine. Greed was always for
Thomspon the capital crime and sin of the Right. But in the 1980s,
America’s lust for money touched off a general hedonism that has
never come down. Like that other unheralded moralist, Bret Easton
Ellis, Thompson wrote in the '80s with a vindictive, vengeful
honesty; now, looking back, his reportage from that period is
arrestingly critical of what today appear as the psychological and
philosophical vices let loose by liberalism’s excess, and his
cankered view of humanity rings a fiercer indictment ‘round the
head of the modern Left than the ugly mug of the Right that he
loathed.
Sex had become democratized long ago, but by the mid-'90s, so
had celebrity. Ten years on, the revolution is as revolting as it
is complete. One needn’t be Rob Lowe or Paris Hilton to trade sex
tapes and get on TV. The rich mimic the lower classes, and the
middle classes ape the rich. The undeniable truth of 2005 is that
in 1985, Paris and Nicky and a lot of other sexy, druggy, wealthy
young people would be Republicans, by choice or default. Today that
demographic is unthinkable, impossible. The Left owns that world.
Republicans in the style of Patrick Bateman or Tony Montana are an
endangered species. George W. Bush swore off those kinds of antics
long ago. Now he runs five miles a day, and his daughters can
barely get away with a beer. Only Arnold remains.
THIS IS A WORLD perhaps beyond the comprehension of a man like
Hunter Thompson, whose righteous fight against a whole society of
ignorant roughnecks has ultimately only brought them into the fold.
How many people can carry on the lie that Thompson has anything in
common with VH1’s “Celebreality” lineup, with 50 Cent, with Andy
Dick? How long could the Good Doctor last at an Oscar
afterparty?
Hunter Thompson died, like he lived, for his own reasons; but
the Left that he left behind has no monopoly on his mantle. The man
who has written All my life my heart has sought a thing I
cannot name is beyond liberalism. He is beyond
fashion, beyond ownership, and now beyond time.
