Bill's Notes

Lileks gives a living legend a well-deserved crack on the knuckles. Good. The washed-up sot deserves a thorough ass-whupping.

Now, don't get me wrong. I used to be a big fan of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Back at my first job at the daily, I started reading the good doctor. Avidly. Enthusiastically. With relish.

Started with Hell's Angels. Then Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Then Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Then the Great Shark Hunt. Later, I learned some of the backstory.

All Hunter did was take the role of a sociopathic character from J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man named Sebastian Dangerfield, add some postmodern paranoia, and apply the idea to his life. The 1960s took care of the rest — Sandoz acid, the Fillmore, Nixon, Sonny Barger, Ken Kesey, it all just fell into place after that. What made Thompson work was he was funny. And he could write.

But after a few years he started getting cranky, yes, in the sense of a child that needs a nap cranky. By about 1970 he was starting to ossify. He was still great, and he had a good five years of great work ahead of him, but the worldview was getting rigid. On only his second book, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, he was convinced that America was all used up, the 60s were gone, and it was all DOOOOM DOOOOM and YOU MISSED IT KID and IT AIN'T EVER COMING BACK!!!!!! I mean, the world would never be so crazy that some stranger would just lick acid off your shirt in the Fillmore restroom, right?

So, 34 years later, what do we have from HST? No surprise. The same old schtick. Hell, Garry Trudeau does a better job with the same schtick through the character of Uncle Duke than Thompson has. Duke at least adjusts. Thompson is getting ... well, whiny. And gonzo whining just doesn't cut it.

Here's Thompson:

The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

Then comes the anti-doctor, James Lileks. He starts the above quote without attribution. I thought the quote was just some DemUnderground Dipshit bitching and moaning. Even as it continues:

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

When I read "greed-crazed bastards" I thought I was reading someone who'd thrown in a Hunteresque line. The idea that this drivel was HST himself is sad. And pathetic. Like an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo ...

You know what's most ironic? The young HST, the one who made his name in the world, would've probably called the older writer on his pathetic inability to keep up.

Read what HST had to say about Hemingway's suicide in Ketchum, Idaho:

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years....

Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him--not even when his friend came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So, finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

Guy could write at one time, couldn't he?

But it's easy to judge the previous generation, just as it's easy to forgive the generation before that.