The Going Gets Weird

He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more--
depart wayfarer, and imitate if you are able one who to the utmost
strenuously championed liberty.-Epitaph for Jonathan Swift

He inhabits his nerve endings; they are on the outside, like the skin of a baby; he seeks thumbprints. The failure of the counterculture--"which values the Instant Reward. . . over anything involving a time lag between the Effort and the End"--to develop a coherent politics infuriates him.-John Leonard, reviewing "The Great Shark Hunt" in the NYT(Registration req'd).

Hunter S. Thompson carried to an extreme the indentification of the personality of a writer with his writing. Working from bits and pieces of factual extracts from his coverage of politics and culture, Thompson expanded and elaborated with manic inventiveness a surreal confrontation between drugged-out adventurers and the more prosaically disjointed unreality of late twentieth-century America. Nothing in the decaying American Dream is as the straight world would like it to be. Rather than join the earnest murmur of conventional journalists, soberly interviewing the rear guard of this decline, Thompson screams and howls in bursts of pyrotechnic stream of consciousness. The result lingers far longer in the collective memory than all the earnest op-ed pieces of the sixties and seventies.

How much this vivid torrent of words owed to the consumption of chemicals of all kinds, and how much to the talent of the writer, is a question which has been asked before, about other writers, especially in the century just past. A large question. Does creativity necessarily flow from excess, from psychological and behavioral dysfunction? Writers especially attract this sort of question, since they deal in words and at least nominally realistic descriptions of experience. Would Faulkner, or Fitzgerald, or Hemingway been better artists if they had been through rehab, instead of drinking like desperate men all their creatively active lives? If Sylvia Plath had been successfully counseled, defusing her suicidal despair, would she have refrained from gassing herself to death in the same apartment in which her children were sleeping, and would this counseling have affected her poetry, for good or ill?

Hunter Thompson embraced the excess that in his writing became a literary technique, creating a satiric juxtaposition between those who have power, and those who shriek that the emperor has no clothes. Who is more dysfunctional, the drugged-to-the-eyeballs gonzo journalist, or the solemn conventioneers in Las Vegas, police professionals learning salient facts about the drug culture, such as a roach is named for its resemblance to a cockroach? Take notes, there will be a quiz. This was ten years before Nancy Reagan told the stoned generation to "just say no." Thirty years on, after "zero tolerance" and mandatory sentencing, busting tons of drugs and lighting bonfires of marijuana across rural America, who now seems to have had the better grasp on reality?

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. We need a pro like HST more than ever.