Image courtesy Nathan Walsh
Now that we know that President Bush smoked dope, I guess we can finally admit that we were in the room when some of that went on at our college, too. And, also because we now know the President has finally admitted to what we all knew anyway, I don’t feel bad pointing you to High Times for this interview with Hunter S. Thompson, Mr. Gonzo himself, who is at least a bastard godfather to all journalists of my age. Thompson killed himself yesterday.
From the passage he wrote about looking down into the trunk of his Cadillac which was stuffed full of marijuana, LSD, mushrooms, uppers, downers, and a tank of ether, and figured “with careful rationing, I could make it through the weekend,” to last week’s report of him and Bill Murray driving golf balls then shooting them like skeet, Thompson was bigger than the rest of us who merely wrote about stuff other people did. “Living large” was a phrase invented for him.
He wrote a lot of great stuff, and a lot of crap, too. We certainly remember Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from college…it’s maybe the only thing we remember from college. But, while that was all in good fun, what we really remember was his essay, which amounted to an endorsement, of then Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, after he heard Carter give a speech at the U of Georgia on Law Day 1974.
Thompson was drinking Wild Turkey at the luncheon, while everyone else was sipping that overly sweet Southern ice tea. I can’t find the piece he wrote on the internet, but it’s in his book The Great Shark Hunt. That piece, as much as any, except maybe All The President’s Men, made me pick up the typewriter. I had to do a lot of typing one handed because it took me a while longer to remember to put down the Wild Turkey.
Drug addled though he may have been, Thompson set a standard for truth telling in his journalism that is rarely matched today. (My favorite example: “There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you’ve followed him around for a while.”)
Maybe his epic battles with the likes of Richard Nixon left him with less to fear than journalists have today. As far as I know, he didn’t face jail when he crossed some lines, unlike Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper do today. But then, Nixon was a complete amateur at dealing with the press, when compared to that old dope smoker George W. Bush. If only Nixon had thought of populating the White House press corps with gay prostitutes, maybe things would have gone easier for him.
I wish Thompson could have held off his own demons long enough to write about hot military studs in the White House. I would have paid to read his thoughts on something so weird even he couldn’t have made it up.
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