Sadly most people from the younger generation only know HST from his novel turned into a movie staring Johnny Depp filled with drugs and crazy story lines.
Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist who had a quick sharp way with words and love for banging them out on a typewriter daily re or ding his thoughts on any and everything going on that day. Breaking with standard journalist protocol of being objective while writing everything from his POV he was often able to put you in his shoes and with his words forever make you feel like you were there for some of the greatest events in American history. The Chicago Riots, Bobby Kennedy's assassination, Nixon...
He was a man that fiercely loved his country for all the right reasons with no political agenda and was the very icon of what a true patriot is. He loved his guns and had an extensive gun collection. But that doesn't mean he thought we all had a constitutional right to be walking around with assault rifles. Like a lot of Americans he did struggle with the duality between his logical thoughts on guns and his feelings towards loving to shoot them for fun.
Fellow writers have described him as a true American moralist who will make himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.
Luckily thanks is to his typing obsession we have chronicles on current events of the day and predictions on their implications presented in collections like The Gonzo Journals Generation of Swine and Songs of the Doomed: The death of the American Dream.
But most notably for the younger generation are some of his journal entries from Hey Rube. I read this book after his passing and after reading over ten thousand pages of his work and noticing similar predictions he made about Nixon way before Watergate and his words the night Bobby Kennedy was killed.
Hey Rube includes his journal entries from the very day of 9/11 banged out in his typewriter the morning of Sept 11, 2001:
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now–with somebody–and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
[…]
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.
[…]
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once.
[…]
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed–for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush….He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force."
This goes on for pages he mentions things similar to what happened with the PATRIOT act being a consequence and how his beloved but long since gone 'American Dream' and American people will suffer from self imposed cages.
There's no other voice like his. We lost a lot when we lost him, he was much more concise than me and could cut things down to sizes that everyone could understand with very few words.
For the college students out there who may have only read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas maybe take a second to read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 especially if you like Trump. Thompson was never a hippy he was what we would call today a Libertarian. He tells it like it is and gives it out evenly respecting and liking very few people. He did like Booby and McGovern but that's about it. If you're upset about the current state of things in the U.S. He's your man.
This is a man who dedicated over 30 years of his life writing on politics and corruption in a way that no other journalist would dare publish things. If you want some insight on how we got to now his writings from 68 through to his death provides some pretty provocative insight that in hindsight makes a lot of sense.
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The world is a dimmer place without him in it. A voice of truth and experience.
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
I'm going to have to read up on that. I always thought he was a fascinating person, and have always intended to read up on him.
There's a lot to read. F & L on the Campaign Trail is a good place to start. He also wrote a book on his time riding with The Hell's Angels which is a good read. The book actually overlaps at one point with The Merry Pranksters while Tom Wolfe was following them and writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. I really liked that because both authors write about the meeting in their books.