[Peace-discuss] Hunter S Thompson

[Matt Reichel]

I know thqt his nqme is controversial in just about any circle: Left, right, 
completely apolitical etc ....
But this is what precisely makes him such an important literary and 
journalistic icon from the last 'à years.
As most sites and news sources have not had the time to prepare lengthy 
obituaries yet, there isn;t a lot available right now: But I did find this 
thoughtful post from someone on the Guardian site:

I found out a couple of hours ago that Hunter S. Thompson had died. Shot 
himself dead with one of his arsenal of weapons.

My sister phoned to tell me the news, but I wasn't home and found out later 
when I stumbled into the place about 6pm Melbourne time, high from doing a 
couple of interviews for my own book. I immediately realised this was IT. He 
had planned this all along, probably years ago, waiting for the right time. 
We can only speculate about what caused him to do the final deed: perhaps he 
had learnt he had cancer or a terminal illness; perhaps he no longer wanted 
to be a washed up caricature of himself; perhaps he realised he was an old 
man with nothing left to offer the world except a parody of the person he 
had once been.

I suspect in days a note will be discovered. It will be beautifully written 
and will explain it all. It might have been written decades ago for this 
moment. I think Thompson always planned to kill himself in the end. There 
are recurring suicide motifs in his writing, and at the end of the second 
volume of letters he reveals that he never expected to live beyond 27.

As soon as I heard the news, I reached for The Great Shark Hunt, and an 
article written in 1964, well before Thompson was famous, for the 
now-defunct National Observer, called 'What lured Hemingway to Ketchum?' In 
it, Thompson retraces Hemingway's last steps (he suicided by shooting 
himself in 1961) in the tiny village of Ketchum, Idaho. For all the 
references to Fitzgerald in his writing, I think it was always Hemingway who 
HST most sought to emulate, in life and in death. The article talks about 
how Hemingway had lost his conviction as a writer, how he had sought but 
failed to move with the times, and instead began rewriting with nostalgia 
about his own younger days. And it finishes with these sentences:

''He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and 
contentment was not enough for him - not even when his friends came up from 
Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he 
must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.''

Alter that line about Cuba and bullfighting and the Tram, to the Woody Creek 
Tavern, and you have Thompson's own epitaph for himself.

I feel enormously burdened with sadness, as you do when your hero dies. But 
in a sense, he died a long time ago. It is three decades since those peaks 
of the speed-crazed early-70s, and frankly, that is the HST I'd like to 
remember rather than the fat, shambolic old fool of the later years.

There are already a few cursory obituaries appearing on the net but most of 
them are written by people with no real feeling or empathy for the man. The 
TV news had five seconds at the end of its bulletin tonight. That's probably 
all you can expect - he wasn't famous in the sense of a household name. But 
how many writers of the 20th century can claim to have coined a much copied 
phrase - Fear and Loathing - or so widely imitated a style, Gonzo 
Journalism?

It's hard saying goodbye to the greatest influence on your life. So I won't. 
HST the person may be dead, but the work will always be immortal.

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