Seer of the Self-Medicated Generation
Sometime, way-back in the greener part of the mid-80s when the Reagan Revolution was in full swing, I was at one of those university talks that Hunter S. Thompson used to give. You could smell the whiskey before he even walked into the narrow auditorium packed with students and other assorted freaks. Like some latter-day FDR, there, extending from his mouth, was his trademark cigarette holder and a lit Dunhill. In one hand, he held a glistening, even glowing, lowball glass filled with ice and the golden-brown elixir. Just like you’ve heard, bags of high-quality sens and psilocybin along with the occasional pre-rolled number were tossed at him from everyone in the front dozen or so rows.
He mumbled a barely coherent ramble, but it was an experience to be invited to join his posse of fellow questers obligatory student chaperone and all. It was another calling…and another refusal…Hunter like some fox peering out of the brush before whipping a white-tipped red tail in your nose.
America misses Hunter. He was a surgeon with a steel jackhammer scalpel that cut to the core of their black little hearts. The buffoons, that is, the ones in the center of our public spaces…the ones destined to be eviscerated whenever they crossed paths with the good doctor.
That’s what we miss. America needs Hunter now more than ever. Maybe the pain got to be too much. I don’t know. I just know it’s a shame he’s not here to put them all in their proper place.
Young America had Mark Twain. Like Samuel Clemens, Hunter had one true masterpiece – the great American novel. He was the sounding for our age and like the humorist of the previous century who came and went with a great comet, Hunter served as our early warning system. Through a self-conscious and drug-addled geas he tagged Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), Hunter set out to find what we had all lost steeped in this war machine culture that America had become. His failure became an instantaneous American literary treasure.
We count on those who position themselves on the outskirts to throw some light on these harbingers and Hunter was no exception. In another work of magical mayhem, Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) Hunter documented his time with Sonny Barger and the Oakland Angels – a band of violent, white, working-class misfits who felt they had been left behind by society and the elites of like those in nearby Berkeley. Unity and a don’t give a shit attitude of total retaliation gave them strength. Like the scorpions of the Apocalypse, the Angels rode in and rolled on leaving the writer a bloody pulp, afraid and alone in the end. Just like you and me, he wasn’t one of them, and the Angels could never be accused of doing anything half-assed.
Most of Hunter’s works appeared in various periodicals like Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Examiner, the Nation, National Observer, The New York Times and Playboy. He was a journalist by trade. A couple of the more notable anthologies of these essays include The Great Shark Hunt (1979) and Generation of Swine (1988). Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973) is an insightful look at the apparently timeless politics of the time and a crooked president basking in glory and the secrets hidden then, but that would soon lead to his spectacular self-immolation.
Where is Hunter in the time of Trump? Are you out there? Time to ask for volunteers…. Who is training the next generation? Sam Kriss can’t do this all by himself. At least his words are still with us. Help us Hunter!
This post originally appeared on the Reveille website on August 23, 2017.