Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Hunter Thompson, RIP
(This piece has been edited after posting to insert the David Plotz item on Thompson's letter to a 14-year-old-boy.)
Hunter Thompson's politics were not mine. But oh how that man could write in the days before he became a caricature of himself.
The late Hunter Thompson could write sentences in the 1960's and 1970's that sprang from the printed page. His substance abuse, more claimed I suspect than real at least in his early writing days, served as deep cover for a well-read liberal idealist. He could tell stories that drew the reader in and left him having learned something, or understood someone a bit better.
Thompson's lengthy Rolling Stone piece on Jimmy Carter's Law Day speech, or his short piece on Latino gangbangers, "Corky" Gonzalez and Ruben Salazar, both in The Great Shark Hunt were each memorable. To appreciate what was the Thompson style, as opposed to what it became, consider this sample from "The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders", thanks to The Nation:
The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it--and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today's society, the Hell's Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand. ...
It is safe to say that no Hell's Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a Bushmaster, but nevertheless they are somehow related. The I.W.W. had serious plans for running the world, while the Hell's Angels mean only to defy the world's machinery. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. There is nothing particularly romantic or admirable about it; that's just the way it is, strength in unity. ...
The Hell's Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hell's Angels unmanageable for the police and morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they "don't start trouble" is probably true more often than not, but their idea of "provocation" is dangerously broad, and their biggest problem is that nobody else seems to understand it. ...
By the time I parted company with them--at 6:30 the next morning after an all-night drinking bout in my apartment--I had been impressed by a lot of things, but no one thing about them was as consistently obvious as their group loyalty. This is an admirable quality, but it is also one of the things that gets them in trouble: a fellow Angel is always right when dealing with outsiders. And this sort of reasoning makes a group of "offended" Hell's Angels nearly impossible to deal with.
Hunter gave the Angels the gift of attempting to understand them on their own terms -- something he was to go on to do in writing about luminaries of the era like O.J. Simpson and unknowns like a tramp digger he picked up hitchhiking one day. Those pieces of journalism made Hunter Thompson influential in precisely the way that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made him, literally, a cartoon character.
Understanding the bikers of the Hell's Angels did not mean Thompson approved of them. According to Slate's David Plotz.
In 1967, a 14-year-old kid wrote Thompson a fan letter saying that Hell's Angels had inspired him to join a motorcycle gang. An alarmed Thompson replied by telling the boy to do his own thing, not imitate others, and warning him about what was wrong with the Angels: "The best of the Angels--the guys you might want to sit down and talk to--have almost all played that game for a while and then quit for something better. The ones who are left are almost all the kind who can't do anything else, and they're not much fun to talk to. They're not smart, or funny, or brave, or even original. They're just Old Punks, and that's a lot worse than being a Young Punk. They're not even happy; most of them hate the lives they lead, but they can't afford to admit it because they don't know where else to go, or what else to do. That's what makes them mean."
Similarly, acknowleging Hunter's immense talent does not mean approval of his lifestyle. In reading the early Hunter now, I can only wonder what he might have written if he had only put away the substances and chosen to face life head on. He might still be with us today, making us care about people we would never meet but whom he had.
|posted by Jim on 9:26 PM|
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