How Hunter S. Thompson Became a Legend | Hacker News Reader

How Hunter S. Thompson Became a Legend

rollingstone.com

48 pointssamclemens57 comments

"Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas" is one of the best books I've ever read. I made the mistake of reading it on an airplane on my first trip out to Las Vegas. The book is so funny that I'm sure the people sitting next to me thought I had a few screws loose because I kept laughing so hard.

On Rolling Stone at 50 -- trust being something you can develop over decades and lose in an instant, do others feel like "A Rape on Campus" did in the magazine?

To put on the front page something so sensational yet not fact-checked then soon criticized to show multiple levels of abandoning journalistic practice seems to show a move away from journalism and the public interest in favor of agenda.

Curious how others see it.

agreed

I love HST, but a lot of what he wrote in Rolling Stone was not true either. Publishing "A Rape on Campus" was a major error in judgment with very serious and censure-deserving consequences. But RS has never been a magazine to "trust" in the sense you are purporting it once was.

Yup.

Gonzo: of or associated with journalistic writing of an exaggerated, subjective, and fictionalized style. bizarre or crazy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas...

That passage remains one of the most meaningful things I've read in my life.

However, his defining work in my opinion is Hell's Angels. It is prescient in so many ways. Among the most interesting is how early he is able to see, inside the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, the rise of so many later developments in US politics. I will not ruin the surprise, but some of the passages would make you swear that the man had a time machine. I've read it 3 times now.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 will also make you swear he had a time machine. I guess the scale at which things change is longer than we think it is.

Yeah, absolutely. I went through a period last year where I read every HST book in one continuous binge. One of the great pleasures I had was driving SF to SLC via nevada route 50 and listening to the '72 on audiobook. Something about that really helped it sink in.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it surely rhymes.

Excited to see your comments on Hell's Angels. Taking a trip tomorrow and been planning on reading that on the train journey.

Hell's Angels is a landmark in investigative writing -- it's one of my favourites as well. It's sobering and eye-opening. The only other groups with knowledge of their workings that he acquired are in the IC, or the police (at least at the time).

I lent my copy to a friend a few years ago and never saw it back. That reminds me...

>There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

That sounds like rampant hedonism and malignant narcissism to me.

If only he was with us right now. He'd have found a new lease on life. He often said he needed Nixon in a way... Trump would have built him a whole new legacy, I have no doubt.

Last year's US election often made me think of Thompson's brilliant book "Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72", in which he mainly followed George McGovern's campaign, running against Nixon (Nixon ended up winning in a landslide). McGovern's campaign chief Frank Mankiewicz called it "the least factual, most accurate account" of the election... this quote in particular stood out:

"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, for all his mistakes... 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. McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose... Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?"

Absolutely! It was almost uncanny.

I highly recommend the film "Where the Buffalo Roam" with Bill Murray and Peter Boyle. It' split into thirds with a frame of HST writing in his cabin. The campaign trail is cut to a short for one third of the film.

Murray filmed it right around the time of, or before, Caddyshack. It kind of frames his character in the latter for me. He was spending a LOT of time with HST.

For the record, HST hated the film.

Yeah, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. He hated a lot of things.

Not like I know the guy, but Johnny Depp doesn't seem to have been the same person after spending so much time with HST as well.

I think thats a pretty accurate observation. He seemed to have an affect on people he spent a substantial amount of time around. John Cusack was another.

It's almost like a benevolent pseudo-mystic-nihilism... I don't know what else I could call it. There was definitely a change, though.

Felt I should add this in a second comment, but I want to really recommend (if you haven't read him already) Matt Taibbi.

He formerly wrote for an English language expatriate newspaper in Russia during the chaos of post-Soviet society in the 90's (edit: and early 2000's), and now writes for a few magazines in the US. He's covered Trump in a more clearheaded take on HST's writing style.

ex: -------------------------

"En route to taking this crucial first beachhead in his invasion of the capital, Trump did what he always does: stoked chaos, created hurricanes of misdirection, ignored rules and dared the system of checks and balances to stop him.

By conventional standards, the system held up fairly well. But this is not a conventional president. He was a new kind of candidate and now is a new kind of leader: one who stumbles like a drunk up Capitol Hill, but manages even in defeat to continually pull the country in his direction, transforming not our laws but our consciousness, one shrivelling brain cell at a time."

Thanks for the recommendation - and I'll have to check out "Where the Buffalo Roam" too.

Regarding the 1972 election, Timothy Crouse's "The Boys on the Bus" (published around the same time as HST's book) is also worth reading. It's about the reporters on the road reporting on the campaign ("one of the first treatises on pack journalism" sez Wikipedia) and includes various colorful characters, including of course HST, who also wrote the foreword.

Never heard of it! Thanks for the recommendation. It will help frame what else I know about the time.

Replying because I can't edit. I just found the quote I wanted to share to showcase some of his style. It's not on Trump, but rather from his writing on the recent crash into recession.

------------

His July 2009 Rolling Stone article "The Great American Bubble Machine" described Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi [2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...

Prior to really coming into the public eye with his coverage of the 2007 financial crisis he wrote a book about American politics called "The Great Derangement". He covers his interactions with 9/11 Truthers as well as going undercover in a conservative religious group.

I'm sure I am missing some other topics that he covers since it has been years since I read it but I would certainly suggest checking it out.

Never heard of that one, thanks for the info. I didn't know he ever did any undercover work -- that sounds really interesting.

I also forgot to mention his former co-editor Mark Ames who's also very good!

Interesting you say that. I've been telling my wife ever since the election that only HST could report properly on this fiasco.

HST's obituary of Nixon is a phenomenal read.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

It really is. Anybody who crosses this comment should read it. I was thinking of exactly this when I made my comment.

Fans of Hunter S. Thompson should check out Transmetropolitan, a comics series (now complete and available in collected volumes) written by Warren Ellis. The main character, Spider Jerusalem, is kind of a HST tribute, turned up to 11, in a transhumanist cyberpunk future.

He may be a legend to some, I'd consider him a cautionary tale.

He had one child, who called him a "basket case"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/12/juan-thompson-...

His resulting memoir nonetheless gives the impression that the good man in Hunter S Thompson was sometimes hard to find. There were long, late-at-night arguments that he, as a child, would try to mediate. Mostly, he writes in the book, he ended up taking his mother, Sandy’s, side. “[My father] didn’t care what she was trying to say, he cared about breaking her,” he said. In the book, Thompson recalls his father’s “deliberate distortions and carefully chosen words that would inflict maximum hurt”.

Hunter killed himself while his only son and only grandson were visiting. Disgusting and traumatizing.

> Disgusting and traumatizing.

People have mental health issues sometimes. Sad, not disgusting.

It's incredibly selfish to do that. Leave a note and go into the woods and blow your brains out so your last act isn't traumatizing your family with the sight of your gruesome corpse.

That's the sad part: if you are mentally ill you're incapable of that kind of reasoning.

This post really highlights a deep level of ignorance mental health issues that's quite common in western society. Similar to depression, where a person just can't "think happier thoughts," a mentally distressed person in many cases cannot just suddenly get out of their own head enough to feel empathy for others.

This can't be emphasised enough. It's utterly unfair to describe a victim of depression as "selfish".

I'm curious, was there a reason you specifically mentioned western society? Is there another region of the world that handles it better?

Life isn't fair, and is full of "victims," real and perceived.

Doesn't it grow tiring, constantly making excuses for people?

> Doesn't it grow tiring, constantly making excuses for people?

Not if you're a compassionate person. If not, some bitterness may apply, but its only going to eat you.

No reason other than I haven't experienced non-western cultures enough to know how their attitudes differ around mental health.

I've struggled with mental health issues my whole life, including depression. It's anecdotal but my feelings of hopelessness and pain were not something I wanted to share and burden anyone else with unless they were professionals. I've had these thoughts, and would never do this in front of family no matter how down I was.

Edit: I've also been on the other side of this. Seeing loved ones and family in this situation is _fucked up_, and leaves lasting emotional damage.

I agree with your point, but which societies other than western have a better understanding of mental health? China, for example, has a huge stigma around it that I would argue is significantly worse than any country in the west, certainly Europe.

Is disgust not ultimately subjective? Who are we to choose what disgusts us.

Disgust implies judgement (IMHO). Would you judge someone who ruins their family because they had cancer or AIDS? Probably not. Mental health is no different.

I don't think disgust implies judgement at all.

"a feeling of revulsion or profound disapproval aroused by something unpleasant or offensive."

Half credit? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pedantic, but "legend" isn't subjective. A legend to some is a legend to all. What is subjective is what each person thinks of legendary people.

The guy was the ultimate narcissist. "Living on his own terms", indeed.

He was a truly great writer who was a flawed human being. An awful lot of great artists are mentally unstable people. I'm not making excuses for him, but simply making an observation.

Hunter Thompson had a very rare talent, I often found his writings hilarious even when I didn't agree with the views he articulated.

From the same article:

“It was really important to me that people understood that this was absolutely not a story about my rotten dad and the terrible things he did,” Thompson also said. “I don’t think there’s anything really special [in my story] in that aspect. Probably lots and lots of fathers and sons go through the same kind of process, it’s just their dads aren’t famous.”

I strongly suggest reading his book "The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967" It's a collection of his letters, and responses, from people he wrote during that era. Incredible insight into this amazing man.

I'm a big fan of "The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time" which is a collection of articles from the first part of his career. I haven't read The Proud Highway but it sounds good.

All energy flows according to the whims of the great Magnet

'In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his name was something or other — “but just call me Jimbo” — and he was here to get it on.'

I absolutely hate this style of journalism. It might have been fresh once, as a contrast with the then dominant writing style. Unfortunately in general it's a pain to read how it was hot and dusty and how the author caught a bus to get into the hotel lobby and meet with whomever he's interviewing during this hot and humid evening... just get to the fucking interview already, you moron.

It's called Gonzo journalism and Hunter S. Thompson popularized the style in the 1970s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzo_journalism).

It was fresh once. I feel the same way about the current style of ranty blog posts where the author drops a lot of excessive swearing, caps, and exclamation marks into a post about some relatively mundane subject, like grilled cheese or wet shaving or whatever. I laughed out loud and genuinely enjoyed it the first time I saw it, but that was like... 2008? It's not really funny anymore.

Clean, clear, and concise language never goes out of style. I wish more writers would learn it.

It was society-wakening at the time. He employed aspects of yellow journalism to draw attention to the dark spots, to expose the mess lying underneath the fading formica surface on American public life and society.

He had to engage. He had to annoy and disgust and enrage. It all started around the time of Nixon's dirty tricks campaign and they bludgeoned politics into the festering pit of corruption and back-hand deals it is now. That game they played didn't slow down. People like Roger Stone doubled down each time they had a chance, and they got rich off of doing so to the great detriment of much of the US. There was no stopping. The "good" people in politics didn't play the same way, and they continually got buried by drama and scandal.

You see, he couldn't just report on it. He had to make it real. The problem was, with time the issues became decentralized and more common. That's when he began to lose heart. This is why by the end of his life he had no laser-like focus any longer.

I understand where you're coming from, but he shouldn't be conflated with the type of the self-indulgent writing you get from the likes of Vice. Those guys just often grew up worshipping this guy because it wasn't "boring" newspaper reporting, and they all want to be him. It's nothing like the same.

There are still takeaway lessons, though. The whole gonzo thing got journalists more interested in the field and long-term investigating on a personal level. I've seen some great docs that occur in first person in really interesting and sometimes life-threatening scenes because of the influence of HST.

edit: grammar

Just to make it clear - my beef is not with HSJ himself but with the followers. Yeah, it made sense for him to write this way. But I hate digging through this shitty "first-person, rich in detail" narration just to get to a mildly interesting interview or report from an event.

Ah, then your best not to turn to him or his followers for that kind of writing.

As a rule I go to newspapers for terse/concise reports and interviews. I go to magazines and long-form articles for a larger picture. Trying it any other way will probably just be frustrating no matter who's writing.

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