"How Much for the Ape?" Hunter S. Thompson is Dead
Hunter S. Thompson died yesterday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was at least the greatest American journalist ever; a man who chronicled the drug culture without losing focus, his work retains charm, relevance and pinpoint accuracy whilst the legacy of Burroughs and Kerouac has waned. Upon the death of Richard Nixon, he wrote an article in which he accused the dead man of being "a quitter" and a "war criminal". It is one of my favourite works of his:
Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon." I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honourable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."
I think we can forgo all that "don't mourn the death, celebrate the life" bullshit this time. Thompson will be missed, but retrospectively, he is wanted and needed now. Ralph Steadman, his illustrator, said that because of his deteriorating physical condition, that life had become too much of a trap and that he wanted to take back control. With right-wing traditionalist repression back on American menus, and snobbish anti-American left-wingery on this side of the Atlantic, his absence is suddenly very, very noticeable.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin. These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Auberon Waugh is gone and Bill Deedes hovers near the end too, and all we are left with is Peter Paphides wanking on about his daughter sticking a magnum in his I-pod or Julie Burchill running desperately through the fields of Britain mistaking sheep and ducks for sacred cows. Time and time again, The Sun and Mirror turn out 'straight-talking' men of the people who recycle every lower-middle class prejudice under the guise of 'common sense'. Richard Littlejohn, for example, will I'm sure be delighted to hear his name dropped by the BNP and similarly positioned fuck-wit's. Thompson throws all of these people into such stark relief that you feel he passed on insight by osmosis; his view, his perspective, his opinion and his writing were one.
Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship. It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighbourhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbours also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighbourhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
In death of course, the perception of Thompson will change too. As his writings recede into history, we'll be left more and more with the caricature instead of the man: The colossal drug intake, the Terry Gilliam Fear and Loathing... adaptation and he'll be consigned to the hippy pile where the new generations stick Hendrix, Leary, Donald Sutherland and the maiden aunts that our parents don't like talking about. A news-reel world where footage of Woodstock is cut next to Ed Sullivan and Apocalypse Now underneath All Right Now or All Along the Watchtower in the everlasting "100 Greatest..." television nightmare. Thompson deserves more. America has produced few enough writers of genuine note to let one of its finest practitioners perish in this way. The Rum Diaries is, in many ways, the anti-Fear and Loathing, young men sit around wasting their lives away in tired and prosaic legality. For one who admires brevity in the novel, The Rum Diaries is a godsend; an understated exercise in muted humour, mild absurdism and evocative description that is more on a par with J. L. Carr than Hemingway.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard. Some 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.
If one were forced to choose, though, it would certainly be his political writings for Rolling Stone that would be enshrined forever. The Great Shark Hunt series of books that recount (amongst numerous other events) the '72 presidential campaign with Nixon and Thompson's own ridiculous campaign for Sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970 ("I lost by 500 votes. If I had won, I'd still be in jail" he wrote). These represent the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the 20th century, a sustained, supposedly transitory body of worked that has been chronicled and survived due its sheer emotional and political potency over 40 years.
I suppose that dousing work-surfaces with his brains is a fitting exit for such a man and I'm sure that, at any stage of his life, he would have been surprised to learn that he would reach the age of 67. Anyone inclined to doubt his intelligence, should listen to his lecture at Boulder University in 1977, bootlegs of which positively litter the Internet, and, in the mean-time, I'll close with the final words of his Nixon obituary:
It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon comes too close....
By J.L. Cranfield
