Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide earlier this week. He cashed in his chips and put down the highball, giving up a bygone style from a bygone era when it was still possible to write politics with gusto-raw, opinionated gonzo. In the midst of an era looking for answers and honesty, he popped a few pills and forgot all the rules. He pioneered an unrelenting style that called everyone out, and, gradually, he popped all the pills and everyone forgot him. It’s the final blow in a journalistic age that has forsaken the punchy, unapologetic typewriter for the censored, corporate computer newswire.
The New York Times obituary article on Tuesday said Thompson helped tear down walls in politics, but those walls have since been rebuilt, blockading people like Thompson, making him irrelevant, obsolete. If you can’t break through the system, you can’t change it. It’s gotten so that honesty has been sapped out of news organizations altogether; they have become unwilling to support the outspoken, gutsy antics of people like Thompson.
The news is now shaded by corporate necessity, backscratching mergers and political agendas. News agencies controlled by corporate fat cats often use their unilateral appearance as media outlets to support politicians and strategies for their own best financial interests. So how can we believe a word on the page? With Thompson there was never a doubt.
Eventually, though, people couldn’t see beyond the mania-that merciless style became indicative only of the drugs themselves, not the world he scrutinized so incessantly. But if Hunter Thompson with brutal wit and judgment-day reckonings of events and politics became a caricatured, substance-abusing icon whose axe had lost its edge, then where do we look?
Thompson spoke in the voice of a half-sober, half-crazed generation that couldn’t make sense of their world. But he was there, working it all out on the page, visually tumbling through mayhem, connecting and constructing ideas in the midst of an ether binge. The swirling nature of the words didn’t just reflect drug use, it reflected the mood of the moment, the mania that was mainstream society and political bureaucracy. And he just threw in the towel.
Legitimately, the world has changed, his voice was not our voice and our world feels less like an acid trip and more like a fever-induced hallucination. But nonetheless, he was one of those figures, those icons, those heroes of honesty on whom I always counted. So who’s watching it now? Where is our voice? What is our gonzo?
I know this generation is as disillusioned as any before, but it’s as though we’ve got blindfolds and earplugs. The media is heavily invested in our confusion. We’ve been tied to a formula through lifestyle, so we feel paralyzed, unwilling to reject a system that supports the everyday life we take like water, but suspicious of the paths on to which we’re being dragged. But our voices, wherever they may be, have been squashed, overpowered.
Our current media outlets are silencing all the alternative voices. All the honest, urgent pens are being run dry, whether through actual censorship or a system so strong that apathy takes hold. Hunter Thompson and his kind can’t watch our backs anymore, so we’ve got to start looking out for ourselves. How much will we take? Let’s get gonzo again, for ourselves, forsake the mainstream myths being fed to us and tell it like we see it, with all the mayhem and truth, all the awards he’d ever need.