This Won’t Hurt - Hunter S Thompson

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They shouldn’t try to be objective, they should try to be honest. And they’re not being honest. Their so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality. They report what one candidate said, then they go and report what the other candidate said with equal credibility. They never get around to find out if the guy is telling the truth. […] What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality.

Journalist Brit Hume on the 1972 Presidential Election campaign [1]

He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it.

He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.  

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream [2].

The Fear and Loathing guy had committed suicide. So said the more alt-aspiring bright-eyed teen undergrads sitting in the common room. They’d had a hero for the future. An adult who did and wrote about drugs. Proof that life’s not all gonna be over by 21. Soon I had a commemorative copy of Rolling Stone and more interest in Hunter S. Thompson as a politics writer than drug chronicler.

Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks.They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.

There’s Thompson’s (slightly majorly hypocritical) opinion that, whatever your stance on drugs, the single most uncool thing in the world is someone who needs to tell people they’ve done it. I am cool! Don’t judge me sober; I’ve done cocaine on other occasions! Thompson was admittedly more about detailing/channelling the experience than offering an inventory for street cred.

Coolest people in the world are those that do the notable stuff and don’t bother mentioning it. Clearly. Like soldiers who don’t volunteer their best deeds. Drugs are there, but so normal to how you live your life that you don’t think about it.

And Thompson’s coolest stuff is the stuff that isn’t hawked about. His ‘Strange Rumblings in Aztlán’ article was written alongside Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Thompson could Johnny Depp it for hours then switch into the other piece. ‘Aztlán’ sees his Las Vegas voice reined in, speaking with poised, sardonic conscientiousness about the death of a journalist.

Then there’s his publicity push and aid to the cause of Lisl Auman, a 22-year-old jailed under felony murder laws (where you, in this case she, can face life imprisonment for a murder that occurred while you were handcuffed in the back of a police car).

Some of Thompson’s deepest shit is barely visible. Reagan’s neglect of the AIDS epidemic? A 1985 Thompson notes that Debbie Reynolds ruined her career doing a benefit: “AIDS is not chic. It is one of those extremely contemporary gigs, like herpes and poison rain, that not everybody wants to discuss” [3].

Pre-fame, 26-year-old ‘straight journalist’ Thompson here:

Talk to a man with his house for sale and you’ll be given to understand that he is not moving because of any reluctance to live near negroes. Far from it; he is proud of Louisville’s progress towards integration. But he is worried about the value of his property; and you know, of course, what happens to property values when a Negro family moves into an all-white block [4].

Conservative paranoia is skewered: Thompson easily convinces a dude at the Kentucky Derby that the Black Panthers are coming to instigate a riot [5]. Passed out teen girls in his car live out the political apathy, the “subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything,” that the sixties left behind [6].

Screaming drunks in hotels and airports spit about trumped-up felony charges, drug laws, police discrimination and beatings, politicians’ fetishes, stockbrokers and judges snorting fashionable drugs off of children’s bodies – hysterical composites of the countless and nameless high-level scandals that bubble along constantly in the news.

The vignettes, the cameos, the craziness – it’s not random; it’s commentary. The same as they are in movies, plays, books, everything: laugh first; think later. The craziest characters/scenes always offer the most profound truths. They embody fundamental aspects of the culture they were crafted in.

Thompson’s shtick: yea, so this is what I do when drunk and stoned – but look at the shit America does SOBER.

The fear and loathing Thompson was writing about – a dread of both interior demons and the psychic landscape of the nation around him – wasn’t merely his own; he was also giving voice to the mind-set of a generation that had held high ideals and was now crashing against the walls of American reality [7].

The blubbery, mean-tempered rule-crazy cops, spitting and betraying their prejudices at desk clerks before attending the woefully ill-informed National District Attorney’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The mindless patriotism and rationalized ‘could care less’ conservatism towards hideous problems in the country. Petty prejudices in swathes of Middle American brains young and old.

Nixon will be re-elected by a huge majority of Americans who feel he is not only more honest and more trustworthy than George McGovern, but also more likely to end the war in Vietnam. The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.

Well…maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern [...] understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon [8].

The low-rent, base level crime and human behaviour at America’s highest levels. People at the top with more than enough money and intelligence and experience to render their continued racism, bullying, greed, fraud, smears, violence, divisiveness, populism and discrimination wanton… malevolent. There are no circumstances forcing these people to do this stuff; all the information’s at hand for them to know better, and yet they still do it and peddle it.

If you could fuck people and get away with it – even look good doing it – you would, wouldn’t you? They commit these acts in spite of their knowledge and circumstances, not because. They do it for fun, for convenience and for the thrill. These minds are rotten. They are swine.

[The ‘Reagan Revolution’] ushered in eight years of berserk looting of the federal treasury and the economic crippling of the middle class. That was the eighties, folks. That was the feeding frenzy of the New Rich, who found themselves wallowing in excess profits as their maximum income tax rate got chopped down to 31 percent and who were welcomed like brothers into the White House at all hours of the day or night [9].

Of course he’s controversial and disliked here and there. There’s neat narratives of ‘funny as fuck and sharp as hell for Vegas and that period; addled has-been rehashing everything later on.’

Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. That is terrifying. 

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or where will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? [10]

Well, just occasionally, throughout his career and in both good pieces and bad pieces, he lets rip with something really special. Not simply entertaining or analytical – you get right inside his head and he offers up some heartfelt advice or philosophy, the nakedness of which is profound. The Raoul Duke/Thompson of Fear and loathing in Las Vegas would call it bullshit. But stoned, sober or whatever, Thompson lets you in on something. There is no fiction there at all. No character. No front. Just eerie honesty.

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 [11].

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Then there’s that other thing:

There was paper in the typewriter. Hunter had several varieties of stationery. This sheet was for the Fourth Amendment Foundation. He had typed one word in the middle of the page: “counselor” [12].

Returning to the cool Thompson. The smart, oceans deep guy, the gentleman. Here goes: he went out on his own air-punching terms. Sure. He sucked on a bullet while he still could. Maybe millions of rock ‘n’ roll kids can stay jacking off to that image if they want, like a final chapter to Las Vegas.

But, and no ego here, Thompson knew the legion of fans and searchers would think about him doing it. That that last action would become his ultimate judgement, some kind of influencing thought, an authoritative answer to life’s shit from a wise man. His writing inspires readers to live, promote, worship and just... fucking cherish… FUN – fun in life, in the American character, in the human experience; he needed to offer something here, too.

So before he went he typed that first. ‘counselor.’ Maybe as in: ‘get one.’ If you’re in this place, don’t do what I did. Seek help. That’s what I should have done, that’s what the real me inside here wanted, underneath all the shit weighing on top of it. After a lifetime’s-worth of making suicide references/promises and now having to make good on them, this is the option I’d like to pass on to others during the final wisdom and deepest thoughts I have left – the definitive conclusion.

That’s why he’s a hero. Maybe.

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[1] Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus, (New York; Ballantine Books, 1973), p.323.

[2] Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, (New York; Ballantine Books, 1994), pp.241-246.

[3] Hunter S. Thompson, Songs of the Doomed, (London; Picador, 1992), p.242.

[4] Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, (London; Picador, 1980), p.47.

[5] Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, (London; Picador, 1980), pp.29-30.

[6] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, (London; Harper Perennial, 2005), p.59.

[7] Mikal Gilmore, ‘The Last Outlaw’, Rolling Stone, 970, Mar. 2005, p.47.

[8] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, (London; Harper Perennial, 2005), p.389.

[9] Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie, (New York; Ballantine Books, 1994), p.37.

[10] Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness, (New York; Simon & Schuster, 2005), p.90.

[11] Douglas Brinkley, ‘Football Season is Over’, Rolling Stone, 983, Sept. 22^nd 2005. p.68

[12] William Mckeen, Outlaw Journalist: The Life & Times of Hunter S. Thompson (London; Aurum Press, 2008), p.352.