Monday, February 21, 2005

So Long, Dr. Gonzo

Way back around 1971, I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone that had a story named “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by someone named Hunter S. Thompson. It started with:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive....” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

I was hooked. I bought the next issue, which had more of the story. Bought the book, bought the lifestyle. ;-) I even still have a framed drawing I did in Ralph Steadman’s style over 30 years ago. I’ve read several other of Thompson’s books and most of them were entertaining. I even enjoyed the movie version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it was fairly true to the book, and I thought Johnny Depp had Thompson’s style down.

Thompson had a way of telling some fairly powerful truths in all that riotous excess. One that has always stuck with me was what was at the heart of his “gonzo journalism” - you must be deeply involved in something as a participant, not as a mere spectator, to truly understand what is going down.

He relentlessly skewered those who he thought were hypocrites and cowards at heart, afraid to truly live and especially those whose whole raison d’etre was to stop somebody else from living their lives as they saw fit. Republicans, authoritarians, moralists of all sorts were some of his favorite targets.

His prose was hyperbolic, staccato, lurching. As whacked and splattered as the drawings that illustrated many of his books. Bursts of truth and profanity in equal measure, spat in the face of the reader - who couldn’t help but grin and giggle as the whole careening train-wreck went on to it’s inevitable conclusion…

As did Thompson’s life and death itself, following in Hemingway’s footsteps.

Thompson was eminently quotable - here are a few of my favorites:

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas.”

“This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel… total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue- severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally… you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.”

“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile.”

“Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole lifestyle a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.”

“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.”

“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

“The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.”

“One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can always turn your back on a person, but you can never turn your back on a drug… especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.”

“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.”

“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 have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts.”

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

So wherever you are, Dr. Gonzo - party on, but watch out for those goddamn bats…

- Bob Woods