It's high time that I institute my own genre. This is not a tribute. This is an Adoration. Capital A. Not a verb but a noun. Something that can be given rather than just felt.
I owe Hunter so much, and I just don't mean the snide laughter at someone’s expense. I can still remember reading his account of how he and a few of his buddies had planned one night, as always eruditely intoxicated, to kidnap a Nixon aid, beat him senseless and then drag him behind one of those beastly 70's cars up to the White Houses' front gate and leave him half dead and mad as hell, convinced that the liberal scum had finally taken one step too many and deserved everything they had coming to them.
As always it wasn't the blood and mindless cruelty that made me laugh. It has always been Hunter's idiosyncratic gift of giving the beaten corpse of politics a new vocabulary. He could do it for all things, whether it be sports, crime or practical jokes pulled on good friends that involved a severed pigs head and lipstick (I guess you would have to develop a new vocabulary for THAT one).
Up until Thompson it was seen as impropriety to use the words pigfucker, swine and waterhead as viable descriptions of eminent political personalities. My grasp of English parliamentary history is not expansive enough to exclude such language in the House of Commons, and I do know that the Japanese parliament (or whatever equivalent) has come to physical blows, but I have never extracted the vicarious pleasure that comes from reading Hunter describe Nixon as a "vicious bastard" that doesn't deserve to exist.
When looking back on the most important flashpoints in US history in the last quarter century you cannot help but stumble upon the the intelligent ramblings of the bow-legged one. The one with a Ballentine Ale in one hand and a pint of ether in the other. And I do think that too much has been made of Hunter's narcotic past, but that could be because he too made too much of it... well, actually, made a book of it, a literary monument of it, but that, as he so often puts it, is neither here nor there. What's a blotter sheet between friends, or author and audience for that matter.
If anything he is the one figure that imparted some semblance of respectability to the much maligned drug culture. In some ways he justified the waste of it, made it worthwhile somehow, if only for the comedown that made us aware of the brutishness of idealism. He was right in his summation and judgment of Leary - there was no one tending the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact there was no light at all. Just the dim voltage of the cocaine 80's and the comatose fashion of heroin addiction.
Hunter is most well known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is notorious for it as if he was the first human to infiltrate the life of the square while being so bent that by anyone’s standards he shouldn't have been able to operate at all, let alone get in the front door. But the fact remains - he did and he did it exceedingly well. You have to remember that this is a man that counts Jimmy Carter as a verifiable friend and confidante. It remains one of this life’s main mysterious why it is that neither side has found it possible to hold a grudge against this bizarre, almost omnipresent creature. He has been let into both camps and squealed with such regularity that you would think that the goons on either side of the divide would have broken bones, or at the very least sued for defamation and general moral turpitude. More astoundingly is the fact that he did it all while under the influence. Keep in mind that its an offence and highly lethal practice to drive in the same state. This guy changed many tributaries of a nation, DUI'ing the whole way along.
Unlike the bent bard, drugs never made the mandatory leap into politics. Somehow Leary thought that sooner or later all of us would be turned on and tuned out. Perhaps politics is the fifth dimension. Perhaps it is the end time that Terrence McKenna has always said is coming. Perhaps Iraq will lead us to the age populated with mechanical elves and the hum of enlightenment. I think not and neither did Hunter, but he made me realise that drugs and its role in culture is to teach us how to fuck up rather than how to succeed. He made the same point when writing of politics. Men that have never failed have only accomplished that fact by brutalism and a wily neanderthalism that allows the normal failures of life to slip off their hides like dirt off an earth worm. To fail is the only path to empathy and decent goodness.
And how did Hunter sink. How proud and decent was he in his sinking. He bared all and forgave none of it. He didn't think, and still doesn't, that there was anything to be forgiven. It was, to him, the only way you could remain sane in a period of unabashed barbarism and an age that was nothing less than the bastard offspring of the Third Reich. He considers himself the logical counter-voice of a society that embedded the crazed and demented in the what was made to appear straightlaced and legitimate.
How could Hunter not appear in that time and place? How could he NOT have existed? It is like asking why Nixon or Vietnam or Vegas existed and thrived and change the face of a nation for eternity. two have burned out, but both have burned the retinas of memory, leaving the an afterimage, leaving the photographs of burnt, slant eyed girls and helicopter exits while flashing oxymoronic V's. American culture from the 50's on could be nothing but the strangest thing that this world has ever seen. Powerful and extensive, magnificent and debauched. All these things and so many others. America has cast a long shadow, and it is a shadow that remains even when the sun has set. the Second World War surely cast the light that first spread the darkness, but that world has finally set and there is nothing now but America's self-belief and brute strength that keeps it hanging over all of us. It no longer needs the rest of the world like a puppet needs its strings. In absolute terms, America no longer needs context, only its own gaseous self propulsion. America has made itself long after the world made it king and it is because of this that Hunter exists at all. He is the monsters harshest critic, but he is also its favorite son, he is also its most melodious voice, and it could not be any other way, residing as he does near the centre of a geography, he resides more heavily and with greater presence in the consciousness of the place, you could look up his address but it would do very little unless it came back as a dewy number.
This has turned into the usual ramble, but that is the way that Hunter likes it, loose and weird, freakish and not to the point. He starts with the American dream and ends up in a North Vegas dinner, wondering exactly how traumatised he left the waitress. It has no relevance, but Hunter always has realised that everything is relevant. Whatever your college professor has taught you about literature, discard it or burn it like a draft card. never learn from those that cannot do but only teach. And that is the most important lesson you can take from Hunter, that to write you must do, that life is the only worthy source material and that you can't have life without the person living it, no matter how strange and twisted.
Hunter exhibited this more than anywhere else in his political writing. He always treated the subject with an awesome humanism. Not in the traditional sense of the word mind you, but in the sense that politics is not atmospheric in nature, not a vaporous cloud that exists outside the individual, possessing at will and making the infirm speak in tongues. When dealing with politics you are always dealing with friend or foe, or in other words the mere specter of people. Men usually and usually in suits and usually mean and usually brittle looking, colloquial exteriors hiding the cunning and sheer force of will necessary to survive and excel in a snake pit. He wrote of and treated politics as a world populated by those worth knowing and those worth hating. Those he loved were a rare breed, a breed that could compete with his own rarity, with his own infallible conviction. He respected Pat Buchanan for this very reason. A resident of the far side of the spectrum, he was known as a neighbor because the same force gave him residency, the same tenacity that made single positions almost irrelevant. They would drink together like enemies sharing Christmas during a great war, knowing that when dawn came they would pick up their rifles and shoot each other in the back if necessary.
For Hunter there was hardly ever a time when the middle ground was worth inhabiting, when neutrality was called for or the more noble path to take. "Whose side are you on?" he constantly asks, and we, more often than not, find ourselves incapable of the clarity that he possesses, the clarity that makes us able to choose.
Hunter hardly ever feels the need to qualify his beliefs and almost always feels that he shoulders the banners of the virtuous and righteous. He believes and what would it bother him if others do not. He is paid to shoulder such a burden and we are not. He has understood why the writer gets paid - it has always been Judas' 30 pieces of gold, paid for the incrimination that is always implicit in getting off the fence.
It seems that I can not say enough about this institution that happens to be a man, a man that happens to like shooting guns into the wind, that talks to people like they could be figments of his own imagination, and why not, when in large part he has become nothing but a figment of his literary self, a bit player in a life that embraces so much while going to war with all of it.
This will not be the end it, but I feel a pause coming on. It's far to late in the day and this day started far too early, so the fingers will come to rest on the cool sides of a glass of Southern and my mind can let go of this thing that is too large and too imbued with respect, and yes, adoration, because of course that is where I started, and it is always a good idea to finish where you start, or so I’ve been told.
