The Death of Journalism, Goodbye HST

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,"
- Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

With the death of the American Dream lay Hunter S.

I got the phonecall from an acquaintance-in-the-know who’d rather I heard it from him than on the radio or some such shit. The news? One of the few left worthy of admiration, certainly the only journalist, Hunter S Thompson, the father of ‘Gonzo Journalism’ and perhaps the last bastion of Truth in American politics offed himself over that weekend, with one of his own shotguns that he always loved so much.

Thompson on election 2004: “The question this year is not whether President Bush is acting more and more like the head of a fascist government but if the American people want it that way. That is what this election is all about. It’s down to nut-cutting time..."

Often when someone you care about dies, everybody always says something like ‘Dick left this world a better place than he found it.’ You can’t say that about Hunter, he’d be the first to tell you you’re full of shit, and believe me, you don’t want to risk a haunting from this man, fan or not.

Because he didn’t leave this world a better place and he’d be the first to say it. He left it more twisted, more bizarre, more depraved, more perverted. Why? Because that was the duty he’d chosen or the duty that had chosen him; to document the Fall of the American Dream, an Odyssey he’d begun a long time ago and violently punctuated with his shocking suicide.

It was the first suicide that I didn’t see as a cowardly act. He had no interest in being a weak old man so he died as he lived, with a shocking bang that freaked the hell out of all that knew him. That’s Hunter S for you.

In its own way a strangely fitting end. Savage. Shocking. There is no doubt in my mind that Hunter knew his place in American culture and history, and as such, to those in-the-know, his suicide means something, perhaps his final angry and crazed letter, perhaps the only suitable ending for a man ever pursuing and exploring an American Dream turned to Nightmare.

His funeral was attended by his good friends, including Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp who had played him so impeccably in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.