The life and death of the American counter-culture has been told ad nauseam in countless sappy documentaries and mindlessly simpering books harking back to a nonexistent time of artistic experimentation and political revolution. It has been breathlessly spoken of by aging baby boomers patting themselves on the back and claiming no music will ever be better, no art will ever be greater and that no cultural movement will ever be as honest and authentic. They create a fantasy land of revolutionary politics and god-like musicians, bearing as much resemblance to reality as Charles Manson’s vision of the upcoming Armageddon.
But nobody documented this movement and its long, strangled aftermath better than Hunter S. Thompson, who blew his brains out this weekend at the age of 67. With prose as bombastic and breathless as his lifestyle, he fashioned himself into the screaming mad genius of journalism, rewriting the boundaries between fact and fiction as he ranted like a street corner prophet quoting from Revelations through nearly four decades of political corruption, hellish warfare and two-faced hypocrisy on nearly every level of authority.
There is no one else like him and there probably never will be. Journalism does not allow for it and never
really did. He covered everything, from horse races to Hell’s Angels, from political campaigns to motorcycle competitions. Every story was touched with his unmistakable style, full of brimstone and amphetamines. He exaggerated, he falsified, yet he always told the truth of an event, often more so than straight journalists. There was nothing objective about him, nothing disconnected or separate.
Thompson was a part of every story he wrote, his personality as intractable from his writing as his apocalyptic hyperbole. He was the antithesis of everything American journalism is supposed to stand for, yet he told the sick, sad truths about our culture at which others were not even willing to look.
His death was the final touch on a life marked by rampant drug use, astronomical expense accounts and wild political activity. His life cannot be told as a straight narrative, only as a series of notable events. He covered a drug enforcement conference while tripping on mescaline. He threatened to set Gary Trudeau on fire. He fired off a gun randomly from the porch of his Colorado home to let off steam. He ran for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket. It was a close race even though he supported drug legalization and the banning of urban development. He and some friends once blew up a jeep.
Such a scattered and manic past hardly hints at Thompson’s considerable literary merit. He published countless articles that now stand as some of the greatest reporting of the past
40 years (any aspiring magazine writer should read “The Kentucky Derby is Sick and Depraved” ) and published at least one literary classic, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” as well as numerous books of incredible social and political worth. For all of its hyperbolic styling, “Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail ’72” is one of the best books about American politics ever written. Even his collected letters are worth perusing for their insights.
Now that he is gone, we mourn his loss and know that nothing was ever the same once he came onto the scene.
Go in peace, with fear and loathing.

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