« Better Eats | Main | Get out of Dodge »
March 27, 2006
The Good Doctor Has Left The Building
While I am stealing his vibe, I'd like to re-surrect an old post, about a year old, that I took down. It eulogizes the Good Doctor, who had just died when I wrote it.
I'm sitting in a hotel room in Dhaka. (There is a backstory there, but never mind that.) It's been several hours since I heard the unbelievable news: the Doctor of Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, is dead. Apparently, he shot himself to death in the kitchen of his ranch in Woody Creek. He went out like his hero, Hemingway, and, like the old man, left the rest of us to ponder why.
To be sure, it has been a year of all manner of weird and foul happenings. But on the suicide front, most of the recent ones were easier to understand. For instance, Iris Chang was clearly a person who lost control of the wild vibes from an increasingly edgy gig: her own emotionally overwrought life. She drank deeply of the tragedy of this world, without seeing any of the comedy of the whole strange spectacle. In the end, there was a terrible sort of determinism to what happened to her.
But the Good Doctor was a different story. Or at least it seemed so. He had been, for decades, a true connoisseur of edge work. Rum and coke in hand, and dime bag and pistol in pocket, he cut a savage but true swath through America, particularly during that strange decade from around 1965 to 1975.
Maybe most of what he wrote was bullshit. Maybe not. Certainly it wasn't coherent, in any conventional sense that the Columbia School of Journalism might understand. But none of that really mattered. What Thompson captured was the emotional core of a moment. What it felt like to be there.
I remember reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shortly after I had completed Tod Gitlin's epic, if slanted, history of the Sixties. I think that Gitlin and Thompson probably followed a somewhat similar arc, at least in terms of their political sympathies. And certainly Gitlin's book filled in alot of important gaps of the who, what and where aspect of my understanding of that crucial time. But Fear and Loathing and Thompson's other stuff from that time made me understand what it was like to live that insane, terrifying and hopeful moment. And, unlike Gitlin and most other "professionals", Thompson was so damned funny.
How much did Thompson influence my young life? Help me find my own edge? Think of the debt the Good Rabbi owes him: in the Rotten Attorney Dr. Gonzo, he found a fellow traveller.
For now, this is all I can have to say. However, as soon as possible, I am going to raise a glass or ten of Wild Turkey to Thompson. Maybe then I'll be in just the right frame of mine to really express myself, and properly eulogize the Good Doctor.
Posted by dag at March 27, 2006 8:50 PM