"When the going gets weird..."
I resisted the urge to post immediately on the day that the news broke that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide for a number of reasons, number one being that it seemed like a poor decision that wouldn't allow the necessary act of reflection. He's someone whose work I enjoy, some of it tremendously so, but I'm of the opinion that the majority of his work has little or no relevance to certain people my age, especially his reporting on politics. Most of the lamentations on Thompson have made a point of saying that his best work was behind him, and there's definitely a case to be made for such an accusation. However, it seems to me that he's been in a funk for quite some time, possibly starting as early as the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's downfall.

I find that a lot of his work, especially those collections of political writings from the eighties, is nearly unreadable for someone my age that at the time was so far removed from the political process as to make it irrelevant. Most of the characters he's commenting on are faceless to me, even with a profound interest in politics. Nixon was his target, and there seemed to be something, for lack of a better word, magical in the way in which all the events of the sixties and seventies (Nixon, Vietnam, Civil Rights) all coalesced at one time to create a country on the verge of something both sinister and strange. Thompson's best work reflected this uncertainty perfectly, and he was the perfect spokesperson for the counterculture. He seemed like the real deal, not a poseur like Tom Wolfe. With Nixon gone, it seemed as if he lacked a real target for his rage. Even during the eighties with Reagan in power, there seemed to be a real lack of moral corruptness for Thompson to vent on. Bush Sr. just doesn’t seem to warrant much comment at all, positive or negative, and Clinton, obviously, wasn't a target in the least. With the election of our current administration headed by another Bush and fraught with moral corruptness, abuses of power, and tighter than ever restrictions on free speech and civil rights, this seemed like the perfect time for Thompson to return to form firing shotgun blasts at enemies big and small. All the same adjectives that Thompson coined in labeling Nixon a monster could easily apply to Bush and Co.

I don’t actually think that Thompson suffered from a lack of ideas or viable targets. I do believe that his writing was affected, as so many others obviously were, by the events of September 11. Even though he thrived during the period where many, many more lives were lost in another unnecessary war, the events of that day seem much more personal, and the response by our leaders seemed to be greeted both as warranted and overreaching. The type of writing that Thompson uses to skewer his targets may not have been the best way to criticize the government. I’m not advocating the notion that he shouldn’t have written in his trademark style about Bush; in fact, I wished that he would have written more. What I do think is that, and this should come as no surprise, we live in a different time than the seventies. The types of events and the disgust generated at them and the government are definitely similar in vein and intensity, but they’re different somehow. Somehow this isn’t the same as the seventies. Vietnam isn’t equivalent to September 11, and Nixon isn’t equivalent to Bush. In the end, I don’t think Thompson lacked anything relevant to write about or lost his nerve in aiming squarely at the forces that enraged him the most. His death will remain a mystery and the no amount of speculation or criticism will change that fact. Let it be said, that his voice, regardless of intensity and affect, will be missed by many.