Reconsidering Hunter S. Thompson
While this blog is mostly about matters-Harvard for the foreseeable future, I do want to delve into other areas of culture and politics. Like, for example, the death of "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Along with every other aspiring journalist growing up in the '70s, I read
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and ...
on the Campaign Trail. To me, the books were the dark, subversive flip side of
All the President's Men. Both were attacks on the established political order, of course. But whereas Woodward and Bernstein were conventional newspaper reporters—two sources for everything!—Thompson was the outsider, the rebel, the iconoclast, the freak. He pushed the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, and over time he came to embody the '60s-ish ideal that you could fuse your lifestyle and your work. Thompson wrote stoned (et cetera). In some way, the rest of us could also rebel against the idea that you had to check your personality at the office door and become the man in the gray suit.
But over time, I've come to have doubts about Thompson's legacy. Anyone looking at his work seriously has to concede that he hasn't published much of worth for the past 30 years. In fact, he hasn't published much at all. One can only wonder what role his drug and alcohol use played in that diminished output. I can't imagine it wasn't a factor.
And as a former magazine editor, I've seen his influence in lots of ways, most of them bad. Thompson seems to have convinced a generation of young journalists that attitude is everything; that it's more important to be rebellious than to be serious; and that the coolest thing to do in journalism is try to convince someone to pay you to write stream-of-consciousness nonsense while underwriting your drug habit. Thompson was one of a kind, but his legions of young imitators missed that reality. Part of Thompson's sadness, I think, was that he seemed to wallow in that cult of personality, and perhaps even chose to live his life in a way that would promote it. Perhaps he even chose to end his life in a way that would promote it.
The Hunter Thompson of 1972 would have eviscerated these Hunter Thompson-wannabes, urging them to find their own distinctiveness, their own originality. In his later life, he seems to have needed them.
There is another sadness about Thompson's death, and that is that the world of modern magazine journalism really had no place for him. Imagine Thompson in
Rolling Stone now—amid the mindless and substance-free profiles of Britney and Beyonce, his writing would have seemed wildly out of place. Hunter Thompson's suicide isn't literal proof of the death of narrative magazine journalism. But it sure is a sign of an art form on the brink of extinction.
