At last a fitting Hunter Thompson Eulogy

DU Contributor and author D.A. Blyler has written an excellent eulogy of Hunter S. Thompson, at last putting Thompson's work in proper perspective:

Hunter's Fear

<clip>

Thompson was a brilliant craftsman, arguably the best prose stylist of his generation, and perhaps (until his untimely passing) America’s greatest living author. To get there took a hell of a lot of hard work. Thompson’s vast knowledge of classic literature and poetry, combined with his thorough understanding of politics and the blood lust of Western civilization, is almost unprecedented in American letters. His literary voice was instantly recognizable (the ultimate goal of every author) and obviously the result of untold hours of self-exploration during his formative years as a writer, as well as reams of ink-stained paper that were destined for his eyes only.

When standing on the shoulders of giants one had better understand the body on which those shoulders rest. Thompson’s respect for literary tradition and scholarship, as well as his work ethic (missed deadlines aside) can be traced to his early admiration of novelist Jack Kerouac....

http://rawstory.com/exclusives/blyler/hunter_thompson_eulogy_22105.htm

http://gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=414&row=0

It was Princess Di's photographer who told me to shave the hair on top of my nose. That was when I was famous, famous for a whole week. I was famous only in England, an island off the coast of Ireland, but it was fame nonetheless. The entire front page of the Mirror, a London tabloid newspaper, was splashed with a ghastly photo of my head (hair on nose, not on head), an attack on my investigation of Tony Blair. My own paper, the Guardian/Observer, wanted to give a different impression of me, so the editors spent an ungodly sum of money to hire Princess Di's photographer to make me pretty for a large photo spread of their own. But there was nothing much the lens man could do. "Get rid of the nose hair," he suggested, working, without success, on the 200th snap.

Things didn't work out as planned; and twenty-five years later I ended up a reporter. Thompson ended up as a cartoon character -- no kidding: "Transformer," the bald-headed comic book journalist hero, drinker, druggie, smart-aleck scourge of bad guys and editors.

That was the comic book; then there's the man. Thompson the writer kept writing in bits and snips, but it was always a parody of Thompson. His later compilations (he couldn't sustain a book) like "Generation of Swine" were brilliant one-joke rants. You'd read them and you didn't know a goddamn thing you didn't know before you read them.

Thompson stopped taking on the big topics … after all, what topic could measure up to him?

It wasn't always that way. What impressed me about "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is that it was written as a coda, a needed break, from Thompson's grueling investigative report on the death of Chicano activist Ruben Salazar. And this I also know: all that cool fear-and-loathing patter was not written on acid in a Ghia doing 140; it was typed alone in a quiet room.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022105Z.shtml

In the same month the planet gets to know the 'journalist' James/Jeff Guckert/Gannon, Hunter S. Thompson decides to make The Big Bit-Spit and eject from the planet. This could be sacrilege, and I hope his family will forgive me, but there is something wretchedly fitting in the confluence.

Hunter was a drunk and a drug-sucker. He would go to cover an event and slather himself with LSD. He went to the '72 GOP convention as a wild-eyed liberal and elbowed his way into the activist bullpen, grabbing a sign reading 'Garbage Men Demand Equal Pay' before charging the floor with the Nixon-shouters to howl “Four More Years!” at John Chancellor. He wanted to write about motorcycle gangs, so he went out and joined the worst of them, and got his ass stomped in. And wrote about it.

Hunter Thompson is the reason I write politics. Period. He was the most honest man in the business. Everyone else had and has an angle, a reputation, or a source to protect. Hunter stripped it down to the raw throbbing nerve and let it fly.

When a giant falls, the earth shudders and the birds cry out. When a giant falls...

When a giant falls, the sky grows dark and the rain pours down. When a giant falls...

When a giant falls, little men rush in to pick and poke his bones. When a giant falls...

But a giant is only man writ large and in death he turns to stone... When a giant falls.

So it is, so it has been, and so it ever will be...

When a giant falls.

history of extreme substance abuse. His legend almost overwhelmed his talent.

Of course, the content of so much of his work remains dangerous--the anguished cry of a betrayed patriot.