The Denver Post (February 20, 2005) reported that Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out with a gunshot to the head over the weekend. Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, a friend of Hunter S. Thompson's, confirmed the author's death. Thompson's son, Juan, discovered his body Sunday evening.For at least a significant number of us who lived through the seventies, Hunter S. Thompson defined part of what that decade in the United States meant. His book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), held down a whole generation for us--a generation of pot-heads, drop-outs, rock-n-rollers, hippies, acid-heads, and wipe-outs. "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone," said Thompson, "but they've always worked for me." In a cinamatic version of the book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas--The Criterion Collection, directed by Terry Gillam (link), Johnny Depp plays the Hunter S. Thompson character, the "gonzo" journalist Raoul Duke, in an endless scenes of substance abuse and the hallucinogenic fallout of a road trip to Las Vegas. In the trunk of their souped-up convertible, dubbed the "Great Red Shark," they stow "two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," which they manage to consume during their short tour.
Other books by Thompson include Hell's Angels, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw, The Rum Diary: A Novel, and Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk. While I appreciate much of the humor of Thompson's writing and concede that it reflects a significant slice of an American subculture in and since the seventies, it's difficulty for me to identify with his world. I rubbed shoulders with this world more often than I would have liked in the seventies, and I feel very little but disgust and pity for those who have inhabited or continue to inhabit it. While it's sad to me that Thompson killed himself, it's not surprising.
His world was the absurd world of existentialism gone to seed. Albert Camus asked us to consider as a serious philosophical question why we do not commit suicide. There are two facts, he said, of which he was utterly certain: (1) that he could not live without a meaning in life; and (2) that life has no meaning. He chose to embrace an "absurd existence" and live, though his life was cut short prematurely by an auto accident. The death of Jim Morrison (pictured below, right) of the rock group The Doors by heroin overdose in Paris in 1971 was close in spirit to Thompson's. Morrison had read the philosophical works of the existentialist, Friedrich Nietzsche, and drank deep of its deicidal nihilism. In 
Soft Parade, one of his last albums, he begins a song with the shout: "You cannot petition the Lord in prayer!" The more recent suicide by shotgun blast of Seattle grundge group, Nirvana's lead singer, Kurt Cobain (pictured below) in 1994 is also spiritually akin to Thompson's. He was found with three times the lethal amount of heroin in his system. Shlomo Sher's account of his life and worldview in "Kurt Cobain's journjals: smells like necrophilia," is quite revealing. 
His was a "Generation X" version of the same. And now the doyen of sex, drugs or insanity, the duke of fear and loathing himself, makes his grand exit. How sad, a life with no purpose. The so-called "wisdom of Silenus" of ancient Sophoclean tragedy, cited by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, is that it would have been best never to have been born; and the second best to die as quickly as possible. Neither turns out to have been the case with Thompson. He could have taken his life earlier, but chose to take it only after 67 years of life. Perhaps he enjoyed his sex, drugs, and insanity more than one suspects. Then again, what kind of enjoyment would it be that led ultimately to suicide? The final judgment, of course, is not ours to make, though one fears that someone may be inclined to agree with Silenus in this one point: that when all is said and done, it may have been better for such an individual never to have been born. I, at least, will defer to the divine tribunal on that one.For further reading:
- Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism
- Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
- Tim Celek, Dieter Zander, and Patrick Kampert, Inside the Soul of a New Generation
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