On Sunday night, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, King of Gonzo and Lord to All Freaks, took a .45 pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. I was heading out the door for a night of revelry when my friend, Corey, called me up and gave me the news, and I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I was in a funk the rest of the night and did the only thing I could think of to celebrate the Doc's life - I filled my body with any and every substance I could lay my hands on. It seemed appropriate.
You most probably know Thompson as the guy Johnny Depp impersonated in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Few know him as one of the most influential journalists of the past fifty years. Fewer still know who the heck he really was, underneath the layers of drugged out madness and personal myths he had built around himself. I sure as hell do not. But now, as preparations are underway to shoot his ashes out of a cannon, I've finally figured out why I cared, and what his death meant to me.
Despite all his cynicism and hate, Thompson's writings were strangely optimistic. There was a belief that despite all the lying and evil in the world, things would get better. In the 1972 election, he was convinced until the final moments that the evil, bloated beast that was Richard Nixon would be brought low by the tide of truth and righteousness that the people would bring about. He believed that America, an idea so pure and perfect, couldn't be killed by the scallywags and putrid interests trying to murder it just to ride its carcass like the maggots they were.
Even after the election, however, he was optimistic that things would work themselves out. And they did, with the Watergate scandal. His essays from that time are some of my favorite works of his. There is hate and anger there but also a sense of victory, that the bastards had been crushed and that we'd taken our country back for what it was supposed to be. We'd won, and the Doc was right there celebrating with us.
The common thread of his work is America. In a 2003 interview, Thompson commented, "I think I'm one of the most patriotic people that I've ever encountered in America." To people with only a casual knowledge of his works, that seems a ridiculous claim. Here he is, a left-winger (and an NRA-registered gun nut until the moment he died) who once spent an afternoon talking football with Nixon before nearly blowing up Air Force One with a cigarette. He called Ed Muskie a "weasel." He referred to today's White House as being full of "racists and hate-mongers." And he claimed to be a patriot - and it was the truth.
Thompson cared about America deeply, and it showed. "Las Vegas" was dirty, but it was all about the American dream - specifically, its death - but still. He became involved in politics, even running for office, because of his intense passion for our country. He was a patriot in the truest sense, and it came across in his works. He hated Nixon so much not because he had policies the Doc disagreed with, but because he was a cheat and a liar and willing to kill everything good about America just to get ahead - and I agreed wholeheartedly with the Doc when he said that the Bushies are worse and we should throw them out on the street.
That's another thing. Hunter was willing to do what the media wasn't - say the truth. It's a no-no to call the President pure unadulterated evil and to express a desire to watch his advisors boil alive in a pitcher of crude oil, but he would do it.
So why does the death of one 67-year-old drug-addled crazy bastard matter so much to me? It's very simple. If he'd died of a drug overdose, or of old age, or getting whacked by Dick Cheney, it would all be fine and good. But the fact that it was suicide - assuming he wasn't just tripping out and thought there was a bat in his skull - struck a chord with me. Because it meant that the optimism was dead. Something was coming that Thompson didn't want to face, that he didn't feel he could overcome.
Some people think he wanted to go out in a blaze of something, instead of wasting away in a nursing home. This makes a certain amount of sense, although the mental image of the Doc running around a nursing home steeling barbiturates from Alzheimer's patients and munching on them like candy while beating off the orderlies with a pimp cane makes me giggle like a little school girl. Whatever it was, he decided going out now was better than sticking around for what came next.
I feel the same way Hunter did about this country. I love it. I love what it stands for and what it can be. And it makes me sick to see it being turned into the hideous mockery it is today, run by a bunch of scumbags like Wolfawitz and Rumsfeld who find sending our peers off to war a cheap replacement for popping several Viagra pills.
To me, his death was giving in. Is that a selfish way of looking at his suicide? Yeah, sure, but one can make a pretty compelling case that suicide is selfish too. But his death hit me because it was the eternal optimist about my country killing himself. It was, in some ways, the final death of the American dream - a death that started in 1968 and finished last Sunday with a single pull of the trigger.
So Mahalo, Doc. Go with your old Attorney and Ginsberg and whichever other freaks rule up in heaven. Pour yourself some Wild Turkey, have a good time, and enjoy yourself. You've earned a break. But come back soon.
Because we need the Truth, and there are precious few people left to say it.
Aaron Mehta is a sophomore majoring in history.
