Hunter S. Thompson: Hell’s Cartographer

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt" -Hunter S. Thompson (HST) 16^th Feb 2005

Hunter Stockton Thompson four days later whilst seated behind his typewriter on the phone to his wife and with his son, his son’s wife and his grandchild on the next room blew his brains out. The last word he ever typed “Counselor” dead center on a clean page. Thus ending the life of a giant amongst men one of the last in his line of giants to be born of the crucible 60’s in America. For HST stands forever together with the likes of William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, who collectively made America take a long hard look at itself and pointed to the storm clouds gathering.

HST perhaps represented more so than his peers, that quest for freedom of the individual within a true democracy that his country was meant to symbolise. In doing so he discovered the dark grey underbelly of the right to pursue happiness was the not necessarily the right to actually attaining it. In a world of ever increasing shades of grey HST unflinchingly and consistently for 31 years sliced open the true body of America to examine the raw bleeding soul within. This was a courage that came from an early understanding of the long intimidating arm of the Law and was expressed at the age of nine through just three words.

“Who?” I said. “What Witnesses?” -HST

Whilst HST was in fact guilty of the crime the two large FBI agents were accusing him of, he nevertheless recognised that they were in fact lying when they tried to intimidate a confession out of him, a nine year old boy. But with those three words HST called their bluff and they duly went on their way never to be seen again (the agents not the FBI, they would return).

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” -HST

This was one of his favourite self styled sayings and one he adhered to with the agility of a mountain goat. It also forms the title of the first chapter in his book Kingdom of Fear (KOF), perhaps one of the more autobiographical of his books, if they can’t all be said to be at least partly autobiographical. Gonzo journalism was its name and it was coined by HST from a comment made by Bill Cardosa then editor of the Boston Globe in reference to his article The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. In dire times HST in desperation wrote this article in a new style that called for the reporter to be part of the article or even the main focus instead of the traditional clinical observer. It was this integration of observer and observed that was to become his hallmark style. Some may call it a blend of non-fiction and fiction and others may call it comedy but as HST quoted in KOF.

“There are no jokes. Truth is the funniest joke of all.”-Muhammad Ali.

Perhaps one may think that his alter ego Raul Duke is a funny fantastical person but his core rings true with a subtle and sometimes not so, ability to laugh and point out the ludicrousness of ones own life and the society in which we live. HST did so whilst fiercely defending that brave inalienable individual human right to look deeper and expose the rot at the core.

“What I learned, in Chicago, was that the police arm of the United States government was capable of hiring vengeful thugs to break the very rules we all thought we were operating under.” -HST

In April 1968 HST marked the death of the sixties movement with the famed Chicago Riots when under President Lynden Johnson the peoples right to protest was squashed firmly underfoot. The 60’s movement which HST believed was essentially a firm belief in the American dream of liberty and justice for all in a land governed by the people for the people. Was doomed the moment the police under orders from the Presidency, thoroughly subjugated the mass of protesters without mercy in Chicago. HST knew then that no amount of mass protest would be heard or considered as had been the case with JFK and to some extent with Eisenhower before him. Johnson had turned a deaf ear to the people’s voice, one that perhaps has only ever again become partially unblocked with Clinton (my opinion not HST’s).

“Fear? I know no fear. There are only moments of confusion” -HST

Many have criticised HST and his illuminating works because of the rampant fearless but intelligently managed illegality that his very life represents. As a man who professed to an amazing intake of a multitude of drugs, and who in death at his own request had his ashes fired from a cannon on top of a towering sculpture of a giant hand holding a Peyote button over 46 meters high, HST was an enigma to the end. When I was 19, I read my first HST, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and it did change my life. I think amongst all the craziness of that book HST showed me a way to travel an independent path through life yet still be of benefit to others. Though this path might take any form and indeed be repugnant to others it would still be a useful part of societal evolution.

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."-HST

The insight that one gains from reading any of HST’s works far outweighs any other element of his life that might have been objectionable to some. Through out the years I have read his works I have come to think of him as a Hell’s Cartographer, a brave and noble mapping of the problems present in his own country and the world to some extent. I suspect that very few people have the brazen bravery to willingly walk (that is when he left actually left his property “fortified compound” in Woody Creek, Colorado from 1968 onwards) into a loaded situation be it criminal or political, jacked to the eyeballs and walk away unharmed, unruffled and not handcuffed whilst retaining a precise anatomy remembered and relayed through his writing. Perhaps it was his understanding that the observer and observed are always intrinsically linked, that there is no such thing as a truly impersonal journalist or cold clinical reporting.

“Maybe this is why I could understand the Hell’s Angels so naturally. They were essentially desperate men who had banded together in what they told one another was self-defence. They were proud and crazy elite of social outlaws, and they insisted on being left alone to do their thing in peace, or else” -HST

This is what HST wanted too, to be left alone to do his thing at Woody Creek, where he perhaps with this in mind combined with a long term fascination, he built a considerably arsenal of guns, grenades, ammunition and a plethora of homemade explosive devices. A veritable pyromaniac he was constantly blowing things up for the pure unadulterated pleasure of non-lethal (but always narrowly so) explosive destruction. HST narrowly escaped arrest once because he set off a rather large surprise above the home of his friend Jack Nicholson. This was just one his of many prickly brushes with the law, but through them all he remained independent and more importantly never served any lengthy jail time. A near miraculous feat on his part that enabled him to doggedly pursue exactly the life he wanted to and so loudly proclaimed through his all his works.

“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people / including me / would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” -HST

In today’s world, where the US is at war for oil and denying its people the basic right to decent heath care, which along with a multitude of other infractions that has seen the rights of its citizens gradually whittled away. To a point where the average thinking American acknowledges that they virtually live in a police state consuming over 80% of the worlds resources yet has an average age death rate lower than many third world countries. One wonders who will pick up the torch that HST held aloft for so long, before it gutters out. Who will so boldly uncover the rot at the core wrench it out for public inspection before the current growing thunderstorm washes away the last individual freedoms. HST lived for himself and his belief in a country that should respect individual rights. He lived bravely as a truly free man until the end when he decided enough, and as was his inalienable human right put his own gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. HST left behind a legacy in his works that should be carefully read by all if we are to, as a global community, survive.

“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel…

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable…In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity…

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.”-HST

Hunter S. Thompson interview Youtube