The International Writers Magazine: Plus Readers Responses

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HUNTER STOCKTON THOMPSON 1937-2005 • James Campion "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Thompson is to me what Jesus Christ is to Born Again Christians. Period. Whether you go for that kind of thing or not, I think you get what I mean: Before him, darkness, afterwards, everything. Salvation. Enlightenment. Resurrection. If you think the comparison mad or inappropriate, perhaps try on John Lennon’s quote about Elvis Presley - "Before Elvis, there was nothing." Maybe those are not fitting enough analogies, but it’s the best I can come up with minutes after hearing of Thompson’s death, a suicide, like Hemingway, his hero - alone, at home, dead. Thompson once wrote about Hemingway’s fatal gun wound, brutally eloquent and without regret, like everything he would ever write. No compromise. No wavering.

"That power of conviction is a hard thing for a writer to sustain," he wrote of Hemingway’s suicide in the spring of 1964 for the National Observer. "And especially so when he becomes conscious of it." My worship of Thompson’s work, and the man himself, dedicated to living the soul of his craft, wasn’t a gradual awakening for me. It was sudden, like a rubber mallet to the temple. No, it was more like a blow to the solar plexus. Remember when you were clocked so hard as a kid your lungs would cease to function for what seemed like an eternity? They used to call it "losing your wind." Yeah, from the first line of the first piece I read by Hunter S. Thompson, I lost my wind.
Nothing was ever the same for me. Career, books, journalism; I owe a great deal of it to Hunter Thompson.

I have read better books by more accomplished authors, studied the work of finer satirists or social and political commentators, and followed the careers of more influential journalists. But not one of them, none had the concussive impact, the bone jarring, blood-rising, skin-tingling assault of the worst of Thompson’s work for me.

If you do not know of it, then you have missed out. Just know that authors inspire young writers, but scribes like Thompson, Twain or Mencken do not inspire, they abduct. Taken hostage, bound and gagged and beaten mercilessly from the first sentence. It is violent and disturbing, like all of life’s greatest gifts, not unlike an actual birth, with pain and screaming and blood everywhere.
Freedom. Danger. Humor. Anger. Honesty. Spite. Abuse. Fun.

Words as weapons; torrid, irrational, explicit, the literary equivalent of the frantic grappling of a drowning man. When nothing else can capture what kind of bizarre existence we endure, there are always the words. Strangling perception. Furious and unyielding. Funny as hell. Serious as a cardiac.
This kind of emotional sucker-punch will get you moving in the direction of your muse. Yes it will. You will write, motherfucker. You will not shy from the gory details, and you will not let the phony bastards have the last word. Not when the words can flow like a viscous, pounding flood; a storm of words lunging from the page. I didn’t read Hunter Thompson. I felt Hunter Thompson. I did not guess. I knew, intrinsically, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Thrown to the ground from my steed. And when I got up, I could not help but write.

I knew about Twain and Mencken before Hunter Thompson. I knew about Kerouac and Kesey and Vonnegut. I stood in awe. I enjoyed. But when I read Thompson, I wrote. If you have the slightest tinge in your constitution to write, really write, without the net - to stand in the fire and take the ammo, tear out pieces of your id and juggle your ego, take strides on the wild and peer unblinking into the abyss, then you know about Hunter Thompson. You know about the writer, because the real writer does not claim, he testifies, he does not loiter, he arrives, he does not parry, he plunges. Praise the Lord.

Unfortunately or fortunately for Hunter Thompson, he plied his trade in the age of celebrated stupidity. By which I mean the age of non-readers, non-thinkers, voyeurs and reactors. I believe Thompson called it a Generation of Swine. Ironically, these are the same people who worshipped him as an icon of the drug culture, of the violence and despondence that comes from ignorance. They know him best for the beast and the clown that beats in the heart of the maverick. And he wore the cloak of outlaw well. He lived the art, as I mentioned above; the man as the craft. Not a fabricated, distilled version of the artist, and brethren to his poetic and musical partner in crime, Bob Dylan.
Another pretty fair satirist, Oscar Wilde once mused, "I use my talent for my work. I save my genius for my life." How do you explain Thompson’s finest work, his most historically revolutionary art, having been published in a rock n’ roll pop culture magazine? Long after Thompson had begun to invent things like "new journalism" and the word he coined that now appears in Webster’s and the modern encyclopedia, Gonzo, Rolling Stone magazine acted as the launching pad for one of the most prolific periods of journalistic fiction in modern times. Hunter Thompson as his generation’s acrobat. That is where Thompson set his bazookas on politics. He survived Chicago in ’68, Saigon in the last days, hit the road with the McGovern ’72 campaign, ravaged Watergate and Nixon, and beyond. Way beyond; "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" beyond. It was the book that cemented him as the 20th century Dante. "Pay the ticket, take the ride," he wrote. Stare into the face of madness, bad craziness, regret and fury; that is what he came for, and now he goes back from wherever these brilliant creatures come from. And I will miss him and pang at the thought that he will no longer write. Forget the booze and the drugs and the bombs and the sex and the rest. There will be no more missives from Hunter S. Thompson. I will miss his infrequent and badly handled visits to New York. I will miss my stolen chats with him, the contents and subjects of which I will take to the grave. I will miss the way he raised his eyebrows when he was thinking and that mischievous chuckle into his armpit whenever he was sure there would be trouble.

His friend and colleague, British artist, Ralph Steadman once wrote of Thompson, "He raged against the coming of the light, rather than the dying of the light." But I think the Good Doctor of Journalism said it best: "There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency." Amen.

© James Campion Feb 2005
realycheck@jamescampion.com
www.jamescampion.com

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READERS RESPONSES TO Articles Published in 2005

Hey JC,
Listen to these liberal Kerry whiners, waaa, waaa, waaa. Stop sniveling and get over it. Face it, these loony leftists are in the minority in this country and no stupid ass purple map will change that. Since 1994, it has been all downhill for the Democrats and continuing to cry voter foul will do nothing to change that. The only thing that was foul in this years campaign was the odour coming from the strategy room at the Kerry camp. This was truly the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Bush should have been beaten down in short order considering he had the Democrats, George Soros, Bruce Springsteen, The NY Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Hollywood and the recording industry all against him. The fact that he stood tall against this onslaught and came out victorious either speaks to his greatness or the feebleness of his opponents campaign. In either case, Bush won and you can recount Ohio till the cows come home but it won't change the fact! that it is getting amusing to watch Democrats mysteriously find voting "irregularities" only in states where they needed electoral college votes.
JC, America will go on for 4 more years. Taxes will be lowered, we will hunt down terrorists, Social Security will be saved and Roe v. Wade will still be the law of the land. It is funny to watch libs hyperventilating over this loss that should have easily been won had they not rushed their way through the nominating process.
Either way 4 MORE YEARS!
Bill Roberts

Mr. Campion,
We are entering a very dark time. It is only for writers like you that I find any hope or light. I wish you well on the front line. It will not be a pretty place to be in this combative, deceptive, judgmental, paranoid Age of Bush.
Calvin

Dude,
I read a terribly pretentious and negative review of Chris Turner’s, "Planet Simpson" in the Village Voice a few weeks before yours ("Dangerous Art Networked Daily" – Issue 12/22) and was intrigued in reading the book simply because the asshole at The Voice could not, and will never grasp the anti-intellectual jargon and satire of The Simpsons. And he could not understand, as you do, and Chris Turner does so well, that The Simpsons exists for comedy, and whatever fuels that comedy – whatever social commentary that lies within is merely a byproduct of its brilliance.
Thanks for a great piece and culling salient points from the author. I shall go out and get the book and enjoy it, as I do the show, without the shame of pompous intellectual iniquity.
H.H. Foster

JC,
I say what I do from the schizophrenia of my emotions and logic. I belly laugh at The Simpsons and at the same time have intellectual fits of vomiting over some of the clichés and devices common to all art. A sensitivity born of being an animation buff my whole life has shown me to see the unoriginality of The Simpsons. Reportage, made popular in literature by the likes of Zola, who wrote about the common man: whore, baker, wino etc... finds its mirror in all of 20th Century lit and TV media.
I still prefer heroic drama when I can get it in its unadulterated form tongue-in-cheek-free. Let's see, evil right-wing corporate type, Mr. C.M. Burns. Bumbling, average Joe, Homer. Gee, you could trade Mr. Spacely from the Jetsons and George Jetson for Homer, allowing for dated material and characters.
People have been dogmatized in this country into thinking the tallest blade of grass needs to be cut down (Bill Gates, Martha Stewart) because it must be intrinsically evil while at the same time patronizing that which they hate. This goes out to all my Bush-hating, anyone-but-Bush-Kerry-loving NYC friends sipping their Starbucks in the Martha Stewart mug they bought at Kmart in the East Village cum Gap hood who think they're sticking it to the man because they love The Simpsons and profess subversive lives.
The Simpson's rock!
Robert Herman

JC,
THIS ("Manifest Destiny Made Easier Through Modern Chemistry" – Issue 12/29/04) is a really (the appropriate word, or phrase escapes me at the moment) this is the best work I have read from you. You got both elements of revealing yourself in the finest fashion I could imagine. The content was infused with a poetry that made a staid and officious subject a lyrical opera.
If there is any value in what I think, what I feel, this is superb writing. I wasn't moved by the boldness of the piece, being bold is redundant with you. I was moved by the manner in which you expressed yourself. The similarities to past endeavors are present, but there is a little something extra in this one. With this one, you were flying around, twisting sentences together, moving in complex ways, but keeping the intent simple and clear all the while.
Kudos to you j.c. I don't even care if I agree with you or not. My interest is in the work . . . and as wild as this piece is, there is a certain cohesion to it that just jumps out at me, and makes me smile. Rovesciajc, This is very funny, dude. However, your suggestion that "only acid junkies would comment so blindly that there is some kind of insidious US plan for a bloodless coup in that mess" is wrong. Nothing in Iraq is bloodless ... but a puppet regime? Why not? King Rumsfeld has already ruled there will be not be a 'religious' government, even if a Shiite cleric is democratically voted in. I also disagree with your WMD assessment that Hussein "either lie to the UN or risk letting the Iranians know he was a paper tiger and take him out." Not quite good, sir. He still had enough conventional weaponry--way more than enough to deal with Iran. Also, Iran couldn’t very well attack a country under de facto occupation by the US.
What happens next should be interesting.
v.

jc,
I love your column, please keep up the great work you do. I love sharing it with my like-minded friends and torturing my not-so-like minded friends with it. On to my comment: Just a suggestion, really. Perhaps we should shift some of our boys in the military over to help the victims of the natural disaster to try to do some good for a change.
Emily

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