behind the news

Party’s Over

February 21, 2005

A famously irresponsible gun owner, The Doctor had plenty of weapons to choose from, and he no doubt put some thought into which one he would use to end his life.

The inspired works of Hunter Stockton Thompson may be forgotten, as legions of hacks fight to claim his memory for their side. (And they will, inevitably. They fight over anyone whose words mattered but isn’t around to speak for himself.)

Whether it was righteous indignation or simply a superhuman metabolism that fueled his adventures, what made Thompson’s writing so powerful was his honesty: about his sometimes-malicious desires, about the self-destructive pandering tendencies of a pseudo-objective press, about the times as he saw them. After the 1972 presidential campaign, which he covered for Rolling Stone as an open advocate for McGovern, Thompson wrote:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

As for the “profession” itself– a word Thompson would have derided — he was equally ruthless. Here’s his capsule description of television news operations (one clipped and saved by more than one rueful talking head):

[A] cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

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Whatever you think of his opinions, Thompson’s honesty is something all writers could stand to emulate — even inverted-pyramid traditionalists who fear the royal “I,” and straight shooters who might look at a man with such a chemical diet and wonder whether he could possibly be human.

But for it all, Thompson was, as his partner Ralph Steadman accurately depicted, a man among reptiles. A loaded and freakish and lonely man, but a man still.

–Corey Pein

Corey Pein was an assistant editor at CJR.