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HST:
a champion for social justice cashes his check
–
I heard the news today, oh boy...
By
Sam Smith
(February
22, 2005) – One
of the brightest lights in the American firmament blinked
out Sunday. Word of Hunter Thompson’s death arrived at our
house via the crawl on the network happy news this morning
, and there’s irony enough in that fact alone.
I barely know where to start. Most of us don’t get a lot of
practice eulogizing our heroes, and even if we did, Thompson
wasn’t the sort whose passing fits into any kind of usable
template. So I guess I’m going to have to wing it, huh?
Hunter Stockton Thompson, the Good Doctor, is most remembered
for his over-the-top tours des excès – Fear & Loathing
in Las Vegas being the most famous – pieces where he was
writing under the influence of enough narcotics and Wild Turkey
to buckle the knees of a moderately sized Central American
nation. And why not – Hunter was fun. He was outrageous. He
was the sort of balls-to-the-wall, larger-than-life, fuck-all-authority
rebel a lot of us probably fantasize about being. He lived
life on his own terms, and if he was tortured by demons, they
were by god his own demons. Even as I admit that’s probably
not the life I’d choose for myself if I had a magic wand,
it’s hard not to respect such a fierce refusal to compromise.
It’s not the gonzo high spots I’ll remember him for, though.
What has gotten so lost in the legend that Thompson became
(and the self-parody he sometimes lapsed into later in his
career) is that he was a damned fine reporter. Forget
gonzo for a second. Before HST became an icon of the New Journalism
he was an exceptional practitioner of a more conventional
journalism, something that’s evident to anybody who’s read
the early works collected in The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo
Papers, Volume 1.
Thompson had a gift for the details and one of the best crap
detectors in history. His flawless nose for the truths, dynamics,
and motivations driving the players starring in his stories
lent those narratives a quality that somehow fused unflinching
naturalism with sweeping mythology.
Read “A Southern City with Northern Problems,” for instance,
where Thompson examines the issue of race in his native Louisville:
The white power structure has given way in the public
sector, only to entrench itself more firmly in the private.
And the Negro – especially the educated Negro – feels that
his victories are hollow and his “progress” is something he
reads about in the newspapers. The outlook for Louisville’s
Negroes may have improved from “separate but equal” to “equal
but separate.” But that still leaves a good deal to be desired.
Read Hell’s Angels, Thompson’s landmark study of one
of America’s unique subcultures. This wasn’t just exceptional
journalism, it was some of the best scholarship I’ve ever read.
It was ethnography, the anthropological study of cultures, and
whereas some anthropologists study the rites, rituals and folkways
of natives in exotic faraway jungles, Thompson studied the rites,
rituals and folkways of natives living in exotic faraway Oakland.
As a doctoral student in a mass communication program that was
heavily influenced by both British and American Cultural Studies
traditions, I always wondered why we never read Hell’s Angels
for any of our classes. Well, okay, that’s not true – I know
exactly why we never studied Hell’s Angels. But
we should have. The study would have made perfect sense on so
many levels – especially when it came time to caution the intrepid
field researcher against the perils of “going native.”
Read Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, which remains
perhaps the greatest political book I’ve ever encountered. While
Thompson became famous for harpooning Nixon – "a swine of a
man and a jabbering dupe of a president [who] was so crooked
that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every
morning" – Campaign Trail made clear that you didn’t
have to pick sides. He lashed on the Democrats more violently
than he did Nixon, in fact (“[t]here 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 on
the campaign trail,” and for good measure, “Humphrey campaigned
like a caged rat in heat”). And for good reason. There’s plenty
of ineptitude and corruption in both camps, it turns out – a
lesson America circa 2005 would do well to learn.
As tragic as Thompson’s death is – has there been a time when
we needed his honesty and brutality more than we do now? – I
was somewhat heartened by the explosion of tributes around the
Web yesterday. My e-mail box was buried by individual notes
and list mailings from all directions, with some issuing from
journalists saying they’d never have become reporters in the
first place without his influence. Almost every blog I checked
had, at the very least, a link to an obit, which is more than
appropriate given how important, how absolutely essential the
pioneering work of people like Thompson and Wolfe has been to
the brand of interpretive journalism being practiced in the
more enlightened corners of cyberspace.
Further, his death arrives at a moment when the journalism industry
is finally starting to contemplate issues that Thompson was
railing about four decades ago. A number of very serious figures
in the field have recently begun examining the repeated failings
of objectivity in the press, with one – Geneva Overholser of
the highly respected Missouri School of Journalism – telling
the Hartford Courant that 2004 was “the year when it
finally became unmistakably clear that objectivity has outlived
its usefulness as an ethical touchstone for journalism.” Her
complaint makes perfect sense to those who were actually paying
attention to reporting during the last election cycle: “The
way it is currently construed, ‘objectivity’ makes the media
easily manipulable by an executive branch intent on and adept
at controlling the message.” Her concern is echoed by people
like Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Campaigndesk.org, and
Washington and Lee University journalism professor Ed Wasserman,
who calls what the public gets now “negotiated news.” Daniel
Okrent, the New York Times' public editor explains that
negotiated news is “where the response is dictated by efforts
to keep people off your back” instead of the desire to report
the actual news.
Of course, Thompson called the institution of Objective Journalism
out by name in Campaign Trail, and in the epilogue to
his 1994 book, Better Than Sex (a section he entitled
“Chapter 666: The Death of Richard Nixon”), he laid the blame
for Richard Nixon on the doorstep of the journalism establishment,
writing that:
“[s]ome people will say that words like “scum” and
“rotten” are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true,
but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of
the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither
into the White House in the first place. He looked so good
on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen.
He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that
he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism.
You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock
of recognition was often painful.
Hunter tried to teach us that objectivity is a rule set that
can be gamed, corrupted, and shaped into a weapon for use against
the very principles it was developed to protect. He tried to
teach us that fact and truth aren’t the same thing. Quoting
Faulkner, he noted that “the best fiction is far more true than
any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have
always known this.” He set an uncompromising determination to
get at the truth ahead of what he saw as artificial rules and
conventions, and if the “facts” got in the way of the truth,
well, that told you something about the facts, didn’t it?
Although I never heard him say it in these words, Hunter S.
Thompson I think understood the artificial Red/Blue, Conservative/Liberal
divide that most Americans seem to have bought into for the
cynical construction that it is – a rhetorical fluff job that
turns Americans with common cause against each other and that
serves the power elites in both parties to the detriment of
the public they take turns fleecing.
There was a divide, in Thompson’s world – no doubt about that
– but it wasn’t Left/Right, it was Top/Bottom. He was a working
man born in the borderlands of the rapidly (and sometimes violently)
evolving mid-century South, and his reporting reflects an unfailing
empathy for those who spent most of their lives scrambling for
a foothold on the lower rungs of the political and economic
ladder. The rich and powerful were usually cast as evil, soulless
swine, and his sense of social and moral justice provided countless
column inches to individuals and groups who’d been ignored or
silenced by a society that cared way more about money than justice.
In short, Hunter Thompson was a champion of the common people.
Yes, his reporting was so crazed at times that you couldn’t
be sure if you were reading an eyewitness account or a drug-addled
hallucination. But he remained to the end one of the most unswervingly
ethical reporters of our generation, a man whose commitment
to social justice and the public good trumped everything.
This
version of my Thompson obit originally appeared in my blog
at LiveJournal.
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