Most millennials look around at what’s going on in America right now and conclude our country has never been this screwed up with division and strife. Were it only so. Fifty years ago, the left and the right were torn over the Vietnam war, the rise of feminism, Black Power, Brown Power, hippie culture, drugs, and the newly hatched gay rights movement.
From this morass of political and social upheaval came a singular, unique journalist and author who did his best to beat sense back into people. Most people born before 1980 know of Hunter S. Thompson or at least his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson’s brash, irreverent and brutally honest approach to reportage combined with an outrageous brand of humor that constantly pushed over the top; it was impossible to ignore.
The “Good Doctor”—he often referred to himself as a “doctor of journalism”—pulled no punches whether he was holding a merciless mirror up to hippies, hypocritical politicians or anyone else who offended his sense of honor or propriety. A man of contradictions, he was a Democrat at heart but who loved guns and was an NRA member—an idealist and yet also a ruthless pragmatist—and a man who craved control but was legendary for his drug and alcohol intake.
The reason I go on at length about Thompson is that we need a voice like his more than at any other time since the early 1970s. Ironically, his writing published now would be rejected by this world of cancel culture, political correctness, trigger warnings and nannyism—just as much as the political right would have hated him as a “communist” (he wasn’t). Were he alive today, Thompson would be horrified by what had become of his beloved country. He was a true patriot who believed in the kind of of freedom that makes America unique.
Peeling back Thompson’s outlaw exterior reveals a fearless herald with a deep insight who cut through all the hired bullshit, hypocrisy and hero-worship that beguiles many if not most journalists. He would seize the truth by the throat like a Doberman Pinscher and hammer it onto the page with the IBM Selectric typewriter he cemented his reputation with. He would have savaged both Trumpism and extreme Wokeness.
Around the 2004 election, the integrity of American media began circling the drain, aided by the growing influence of social media and news organs that cared more about retaining viewers than getting at the truth. In his 1971 “Vegas book” he made this wry observation that seems all the more prescient now: “Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.”
We need someone like that, a journalist who uses words as if they were blunt instruments and brings them down with savage force to dislodge the dysfunctional mania gripping our republic. We need that brutal clarity to jar us back to our senses. We need a journalistic bitchslapping and a good talking-to.
Thompson’s style of factual but subjective journalism—shock treatment, if you will—may be our best hope to shove extremist politics and cultural warfare back to the far edges where they belong, before they combine like volatile chemicals and blow us to kingdom come. We’re far beyond where we have the right to be crying about hurt feelings—there’s too much at stake. Wake the fuck up.
Selah.
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