Suicide and the memetic legacy of Hunter S. Thompson, Part Two

Hunter S. Thompson saw the real deal. He saw Jackie and Bobby Kennedy shot down for going up against organized power; he saw that the lone gunman always fell -- alone. He knew that the Mohammed Alis of the world would always be crushed by newer, better models; and also knew that professional sports were as corrupt as they needed to be to remain entertaining. He knew that no matter how many rants he wrote or how many drugs he did to dull the pain, the Nixon and Reagan zombies would not go away; they just came back around again, sneakier and (this time) dressed like Jesus. He knew that he was becoming a fossil, a burnt-out mumbler, an incoherent jive-talker of an age gone by. In his last few public appearances he appeared to be an old hunting dog gone lazy and blind, occasionally lifting his head from the porch to bark at a passing goon, but no serious chase ever ensued. In the end the fight had gone out of him, a warrior gone feeble, a star past his prime and growing dimmer with each and every day.

Now I am not an advocate of suicide. I do not think suicide is cool nor do I think that people who commit suicide are in someway defective. To me suicide is the ultimate coping strategy for a reality you can't deal with. It is built into the human social system. It is hostility turned inward; an end to endless pain; the end to... everything. In the history of human culture we can find many examples of both noble and ignoble suicide. For the samurai who had failed to defend his master, suicide was the only honorable way to exit the room, but that is an extreme; just as the zombies of Jonestown, Kamikazes of Nippon, and martyrs for Allah all happily drank the Kool-aide and gave it all away for entirely different reasons, also extreme.

But in the pantheon of suicides by aging artistic drug abusers via gunshot wound to the head, Hunter Thompson is more of a Hemmingway (Oh good Christ, fuck it all!) than a Cobain, (Oh good Christ, I can't live with myself anymore!), but perhaps I am splitting hairs here. Like Hemmingway, Hunter knew his best work was behind him, he was just speeding up the inevitable because he didn't like to write long sloppy endings. He may have considered how suicide would affect his legacy, but in the end he didn't let it bother him enough to make a difference. In this sense, Hunter's suicide is not necessarily as "tragic" as that of Kurt Cobain, who presumably had many more years of genius pop arrangements in his skinny, drug-addled arms when he pulled the trigger. But my point is this: Hunter pulled the trigger of his own free will because he decided it was time. It was not so much a cry for help as it was punctuation. It was over; he was done.

It is said that in his final days Hunter was working on a 9/11 expose, trying to piece together a scathing snapshot of the dirty political underbelly that culminated in the now infamous twin-tower hit and the ensuing rush to war. But this was not a doping scandal; this was not even Watergate. This was something beyond Hunter's era, beyond the scope of Vietnam, Iran/Contra, and even beyond the still-unsolved conundrum that are the Biggie and 2-Pac murders. Having Hunter Thompson go up against the 9/11 conspiracy is like having Captain America go up against NeoCons and Al Queda and a whole gang of international bankers and espionage agents and conspiracy nuts all working against him. Lost in a sea of dissenting noise, flashy Michael Moore types, and the neo-fascist fog of war that hung over everything the media touched, Hunter's ranting at the swine who line their corporate pockets with political death money would no longer even stand out as unique. And worse, he had no credibility left; he had no chance of ever being taken seriously for his efforts.

Hunter's mask and cape had long ago been removed, his mind dulled from age, drug abuse, and years of Zen-like practice at not giving a crap. Within his lifetime "Fear and Loathing" had silently morphed into "Stand still while we take away your rights", and no one in the media had seemed to notice or care. Even Rolling Stone, his pulpit of hipper-than-thou pop authority, was long-ago twisted into submission by the market pressures of the corporate media Borg. Pepper spray, pill-popping, and harshly pointed words would not cut it in this new jungle of media consolidation, Halliburtons and Patriot Acts; and recklessly blowing stuff up in his backyard just didn't feel as dangerous or cathartic anymore. He had become a parody of himself. When he woke up every morning he ached, and the headlines only got worse. How could tapping at keys make any difference? How could he fool himself any longer?

While guns and drugs are often intertwined in the tales of modern adventure, they mingled like no other pleasures or powers in the mind of Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter was a realist. He knew that what drugs couldn't cure, guns surely could -- and vice versa -- and so it played out to the end. Hunter's suicide, by most accounts, was a fairly impulsive act, but in the curiously nihilistic mind of Dr. Thompson the formula added up perfectly: My gun, my bullet, my skull. Some people take an aspirin, Hunter took an antidote. Frank Sinatra may have sung "My Way", but Thompson gets the credit for taking the term and running with it. The ultimate gonzo faker goes out with a bang and, as always, has the last laugh. Try to pin the decay of modern culture on him and you're the sucker: He's only the messenger.

[This is the second part of a three part series on the legacy of Hunter S. Thompson. Part three will be published later this week.]