Thompson’s wit and eye made sense of the senseless Nixon era.
By: Hank Kalet
Hunter S. Thompson, who died Sunday, was one of my earliest writing heroes. Back in the early 1980s, during the short time I attended Penn. State, I discovered Thompson’s amazing and irreverent book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972." They were over-the-top hybrids, a mix of druggy memoir, political and social commentary, fiction and hard-hitting reporting, and drew me into the world of journalism in a way that the staid, often boring prose offered by the major dailies did not at the time.
I reread "Campaign 1972" during every presidential election season since that first read plus a few stray reads on the side missing only the 2004 election, which was one that could have benefited from Thompson’s horrifically skewed viewpoint. He would have had a field day with the raging mediocrities we nominated.
When I heard this morning that he took his life in a way reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, shooting himself at his Woody Creek, Colo., compound I was shocked but not surprised. Thompson had ceased to be the magnet for political weirdness and edginess, but was still a fun read, especially when he wrote about sports and other topics for ESPN Page 2 (Page 2 also offered some unusual basketball writing from the novelist and former semi-pro hoopster Charley Rosen).
Thompson was a gun-crazed libertarian leftist with a mean streak and amazing wit. If you would have asked me how his end would come, I probably would have offered the Hemingway scenario (Hemingway killed himself at his home in Ketchum, Idaho).
Just the possibility that Thompson might turn offer some kind of dark prose concerning the current zeitgeist allowed me to keep moving forward despite the absurdity of the times.