"These are bad times for people who like to sit outside the library at dawn on a rainy morning and get ripped to the tits on crank and powerful music..."

On the occasion of Richard Nixon's death:

"Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.'"
from Better Than Sex- Confessions of A Political Junkie by Hunter S. Thompson (1994)

The good Doctor decided to take his own life last night, in Aspen, Colorado, while his wife was out to the store. His son Juan is reported to have had found him- and I guess it must have been a gruesome sight. I feel deeply for his family for their loss.

I always hoped his end would involve the firearms he was so enthusiastic about. He loved "high-powered weapons" more than he did the drugs. I'm glad he didn't overdose in some strange opium den- that would have been a shame. I wouldn't have liked that media storm- was it a suicide or an inadvertent overdose? His enemies (and he still had quite a few- memories in the Doctor's business are long and the kind of stakes he was playing with were huge...) might have twisted his death into some sort of morality play.

Too bad the film version of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas was so popular- it really is clouding the media focus on his death. His most important work began with his next book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972. This tome follows Hunter through the mind, body and soul wrenching experience of covering the '72 election all the way from the first Democratic primary right to Nixon's Coronation Inauguration. He threatened petty officials on crowded Cessna's with physical harm for asking him to extinguish his Dunhills, he called respected politicians Rats, madmen, and perverts. He snorted drugs in the back of the press bus.

And in it all he made dramatic exposure of what lies beneath the veneer of respectability displayed as the US electoral process. It is a mad power grab for the highest stakes- and it is not for the weak of heart.

From then on, Hunter was called on repeatedly by Rolling Stone to cover, explain, and make palatable the electoral process for their tuned in and dropped out readers. How successful he was in bringing American youth to some comprehension about "How It All Works" in American politics is too difficult for me to judge- but I know that the choir he did convert will be singing his praises for decades to come.

As writers, and specifically as bloggers, I think we owe a huge debt to this man for escaping the confines of "objective journalism" some forty years ago and playing fast and loose with decorum, drug and firearm laws, community standards and libel laws. The written word can paint a much more diverse picture thanks to him, and he will be sorely missed.

Mtlanglo, February 21, 2005
Montreal