Bedtime for Gonzo

In a moment of minor irony last week, while a retro-70's flashback flick called The Assassination Of Richard Nixon still played in America's theatres, the only man who actually once came close to killing Tricky Dick put a bullet in his own head. The death of Hunter S. Thompson came at a moment in time when the hedonistic 60's counterculture he epitomized seemed long ago and very far away. Yet there was an outpouring of heartfelt eulogies from freethinking admirers young and old, plus scorn from conservatives hellbent to treat his suicide as the ultimate just-say-no cautionary tale. The nation's culture wars are alive and well, updated in shades of Red and Blue for the new millennium.

His role as an almost-assassin came in 1968, while he was a freelance writer covering the Republican primary in New Hampshire. The primary over, Thompson was the sole reporter invited to join Nixon on his parting ride to the airport. The candidate wanted to talk about football, and he was the only one in the press corps who seemed to know anything about football.

Indeed, many of Thompson's career highlights were spent covering sporting events. There was his stream-of-consciousness, unedited rant called The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, which appeared in 1971 and launched his one person Gonzo Journalism movement. An all expenses paid trip to Vegas courtesy of Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race turned into a legendary, drug fueled, out-of-control lost weekend that became the inspiration for Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Most recently, Thompson published a column called Hey, Rube! that appeared semi-regularly on ESPN.com, mixing sportswriting and prognosticating with acidly brutal political commentary on the criminal follies of George W. Bush & Co.

So there they were, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Nixon, the future President, standing on the airport tarmac. They shook hands and said goodbye, and as Thompson watched Nixon climb the stairs to his Lear jet, he pulled out his Zippo to light a cigarette.

With his trademark cigarette holder and oversized sunglasses, as caricatured by Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury character Uncle Duke, Thompson's public persona was larger than life. He was the only Rolling Stone writer consistently booked for college speaking tours, during which he'd show up drunk, or stoned. As the evenings wore on he'd become progressively more inebriated by pouring himself tumblers of Wild Turkey on stage. He was asked to leave one such engagement at Duke University in 1974, when asked what he thought of Terry Sanford's chances to run for President in two years. Thompson called Sanford a former leader of the Stop McGovern movement, and therefore a "worthless pig-fucker." At the time, unbeknownst to Thompson, Sanford was serving as the President of Duke U.

By most accounts, Thompson became a prisoner of his own Gonzo image in later years, when he realized his fans expected him to always be "on," habitually outrageous, pushing his real life behavior far beyond socially acceptable limits. And years of hard partying began to take their toll. Although at first news of his death conspiracy-minded internet bloggers speculated about dark scenarios, in reality, human frailty was more to blame.

He shot himself with his family close by, his son and daughter-in-law in another room of his Woody Creek, Colorado farmhouse. He had undergone back surgery and hip replacement, and been recently hobbled by a broken leg. Friends described him in pain and increasingly poor physical condition. He was a lifelong admirer of Ernest Hemingway, who turned a shotgun on himself in deteriorating health at the age of 62, five years younger than Thompson lived to be. One of his earliest pieces, from 1964, was titled "What Lured Hemingway To Ketchum?," about the small Idaho town where the writer spent his final years, a town much like Woody Creek.

Back to the story. Two secret servicemen pounced on him in a flash. Thompson thought his lighter been mistaken for a weapon. The truth was, Nixon's plane had been re-fueling, and he was just a few feet from the gas tank. "I could have blown the fucker up and saved this nation a lot of trouble," was how he later described the incident. He was nothing if not blunt, holding little back in his writings or his life. In the end, Hunter S. Thompson died like he lived - dangerously, but on his own terms. Res ipsa loquitur - the thing speaks for itself.

We Do Not Snore

Literary Night at the Cave, Chapel Hill NC, 11-16-04

People ask me all the time why the world is such a mess. Well, maybe not all the time. When I'm out in public, walking around, I'm usually wearing sunglasses, because of all the ultraviolet rays your eyes can absorb if you let them. And earplugs, because I read somewhere that everyone's hearing starts to fade as we get older. On the other hand, I read somewhere else that most of the damage to your ears is already done by the time you're thirty, and I just turned thirty-three. Either way, I figure I'd better not take any chances. But with earplugs in and dark glasses on, it's hard sometimes for me to hear anything somebody says, or even to know when someone's trying to talk to me. But if they did ask, about the world being a mess, here's what I'd tell them.

The world's a mess because we do not snore. In my household, there's exactly one person. I'm called the head of the household, and I'm a male between the age of 25-44. Sometimes I wish there were two people in my household, preferably me and a female who was also between the age of 25-44. Then we could take casino trips, or sit around and do leisure activities, or set out candy at Halloween for the trick or treaters. But for now, it's just me. Not even a cat, although I had a cat once. He belonged to a girlfriend I used to have, and he used to sleep nestled right on my face. I miss that little cat.

The world's a mess because there's US soldiers getting killed in Iraq so big oil companies can get their hands on more oil and give defense contractors who are cronies of the Bush regime a continued excuse to loot the US treasury. And they're going to be there for awhile, because there's no way Bush is going to pull out of Iraq as a loser with egg on his face. Besides, the military brass is convinced the insurgency's going to end, maybe if they can destroy every Iraqi city like Fallujah in order to save it. Or train enough Iraqis to form a new police and army so the Iraqis can fight the guerrillas themselves. Which probably won't work, because Donald Rumsfeld thinks training the Iraqi police means teaching them how to say, in English, ''Raise your hands!'' and ''Drop your weapon!''.

And what's up with it costing an arm and a leg just to wake up in the morning? The American Dream used to mean having a good job, owning your own house, putting your kids through college, then retiring with Social Security. But the dream got downsized. Now you're lucky if after paying the rent on your apartment and making payments on your $50,000 college debt you've got enough left over to afford the $2 it takes to put a gallon of gas in your car, so you can drive to your so-called job, where you earn $10 an hour training your own replacement workers in India who are taking over from you once outsourcing goes through at the end of the month. And don't count on Social Security being worth much once the Republicans succeed in privatizing it. They'll turn it over to get-rich quick hucksters in financial boiler rooms salivating at the chance to fleece senior citizens out of their hard-earned life savings.

The mass media has long ago thrown the public interest out the window in favor of the bottom line, which means our minds are under constant assault by propaganda cooked up by giant corporations. It's no wonder people are brainwashed into supporting far-right wing candidates for public office, because that's the corporate agenda. Don't bother trying to think too deeply about the mess we're in, because there's a celebrity murder trial or reality TV show just a channel change away. An informed public should be the foundation of our democracy, but it's dangerously AWOL. Instead, every day is Bread and Circus time, and it doesn't even matter if the at-home audience can't afford the bread, because the media circus makes up for it by being ever louder, flashier, and brighter.

Soon enough, we're going to be missing the polar bears, too. No kidding, a report just came out last week. Temperatures are rising up there in the Arctic circle. Something to do with global warming. As the climate changes, and their habitat changes, they can't find enough food, and the bears start losing weight. Over the last thirty years, the females have lost an average of 55 pounds each. By 2012, they estimate, the bears may no longer be able to reproduce. They call it the tipping point, and it's coming a lot faster than anyone thought possible. 2012 is only one more Bush away.

What else is going wrong. Sure, there was an election a little while ago, and it was supposed to fix all this. But it's a little hard to get people hyped up about voting when they're not certain their votes will count in the first place. Electronic votes disappeared into the black box ether as fast as they could be cast on machines manufactured by a shady corporation owned and controlled by rabidly partisan Republicans. And that hanging chad thing, left over from the stolen election in Florida four years ago? The Republicans hijacked reform legislation until the Help America Vote Act was more like the Act to Help Republicans Cheat Better. It mandated provisional ballots be issued to any voter who showed up to vote only to find their names not on the rolls. The result was predictable. Provisional ballots turned into second class votes, and got handed out like candy to mostly non-white and low-income voters all over the country who had any problem whatsoever with the voting process. Don't worry, they're counted just like real votes. Wait and see. Or maybe not counted until November 13th, but really, who's counting?

Not like they actually needed to cheat. The Republicans wanted to win this election on gay marriage, and they did. Sure enough, the prospect of Adam marrying Steve was so threatening to Red State America that more than enough intolerant gay-bashing knuckleheads got scared out of their caves to swing the election in favor of four more years of W. That, and the Democrats nominating somebody with a serious case of Washington speak, sufficiently indecisive to leave himself wide open to charges of flip-flopping, and who never managed to define himself beyond the Anybody But Bush.

Oh yeah, about snoring. Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I wonder. I wonder whether any of this would matter, this stuff about the world being such a mess, if only somebody else was here. Then, if I woke up worried, I could wake somebody else up too, and they would tell me not to worry, that it was just a bad dream, or maybe something I ate. Then maybe I'd be able to go back to sleep. Unless they fell asleep first, and they snored. Then I'd stay up listening to them snore, and maybe it'd be the kind of reassuring thing you listen to when you're all alone at night and you're trying to find something to latch onto, something familiar and comforting to think about. We could even snore together. We wouldn't have to, though, the way it works is only one of us would have to snore for the other to know. But the way things are now, and I'm absolutely sure about this, we do not snore.