http://Wysdom.stumbleupon.com/review/792154/

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:35:40 -0800

Death of a Journalist
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4507666 A lot of people only know Thompson from the movie adaptation of his best-known work: Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. There are a great many people who dislike his `glorification' of drugs, hedonism and depravity. There are a great many younger people, or people with younger mindsets, who revere him for the same reason. In my opinion, they're both wrong... They couldn't be /more/ wrong.

By the time Thompson wrote `Fear & Loathing', the 1960s (that era wherein so many were poised to usher in the Age of Aquarius) had passed away: Somehow the powerful sense of right, the shared ideals that drove the peace protests, the sit-ins, the love-ins, the explosive Renaissance of art and music... was just /gone/. How and when it was lost, Thompson doesn't claim to know...

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a main era - -the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

"And that, I think, was the handle - -that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - -on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - -the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Many look back on the 60s with bemused tolerance of the peaceniks and hippies who were so very na�ve. Some claim history has been re-written once more, hopelessly romanticized: the era was nothing more than well-publicized adolescent rebellion; the numbers were primarily due to the lure of illicit drugs and free love. There was no `movement'; there /was/ no crusade.

But, then again, there are lots of people who claim history is wrong--those pesky holocaust revisionists, for example--so who's to say?

"History is hard to know because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that, every now and then, the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time - and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened."

Fear & Loathing is not a glorification of a reckless, self-destructive lifestyle: it's an epitaph for a time when the world /could/ have changed. /Should/ have changed. It is Thompson's inside coverage of the painfully bewildered few who were left behind when the world moved on. Unflinching and unapologetic, he is a journalist even in relating this `semi fictional' and lurid tale: he does not glorify, he does not condemn. He reports his experience and if, in reading his report, we are horrified, it is because what he experienced was horrible. He leaves the value judgments to us--the corporate-owned, politically-cowed talking heads we call reporters today could stand to learn from him.

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is sub-titled "A Savage Journey Into the Heart of the American Dream". Recently, we lost another brave and brilliant voice known for mourning the American Dream--Arthur Miller saw how the American Dream had slipped away from the generation before, poignantly rendered in Death of a Salesman. Hunter S. Thompson and Willie Lowman are unexpected kindred spirits: lost somewhere in between the World That Was and the World That Is. They see the world changing and are unwilling, or unable, to change with it... So they leave it on their own terms, the only way they know how.

Thompson's unique, invaluable candor is widely misunderstood and misrepresented. I hope those of you who've read him, watched the Johnny Depp film adaptation of Fear & Loathing, or simply formed an opinion based on third=party reviews will heed /this/ third-party review and take a look at the legacy of his work with fresh eyes.

~W

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