An Era Buys the Farm

This post by Fred Reed, one of the best tributes I've read, is, I promise, the last word you will see here on the recent death of Hunter S. Thompson. It's a fitting parting shot.

"The Sixties look drab now – unkempt Manson girls, the lost and unhappy, kids bleak and bleary-brained after waking up with too many strangers in too many sour crash pads. There was that. It was not a time for the weak-minded. But for those whose youth passed in the freak years, there was something gaudy and silly and even profound, something delightfully warped, that nobody else would ever have. Thompson caught it.

...

"Starting around 1964, a restlessness came over the land, an itch. Kids trickled and later flooded onto the highways as if called by something. I can’t explain it. Few had done it before. Few do it now. They – we – set forth and created the only country in which Thompson could have made sense.

"It wasn’t the war, at first. Nor was it only the usual impatience of youth with authority. Nor was it even that we were young and the world was wide. There was a revulsion against suburban emptiness, against the eight-to-five Ozzie and Harriet gig, a rejection of the Establishment, which meant boring jobs and singing commercials.

"We discovered drugs, then regarded as worse than virgin sacrifices to Moloch, and looked through a window we could never name. If the times were out of joint, we were seldom out of joints. Chemistry defined the life. You found a freak in some rotting slum and said, 'Hey, man, got some shit?' You toked up. You got the munchies, the skitters, the fears. Parents really didn’t understand. Dope, we said, will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope. It did.

"Thompson, a savage writer, a grand middle finger raised against the sky, essayed drugs and found them good. And said so, and we loved him. When he wrote of getting wacked out of his mind on seven illicit pharmaceuticals, and wandering in puzzled paranoia through the lobby of existence, we shrieked with laughter. We knew the same drugs. We too had tried desperately to look straight in public when the world had turned into a slow-motion movie. When it was over, everybody went into a law firm.

...

"Then there was politics, the war. Thompson was rocket smart and knew you couldn’t work within the system since that meant granting it legitimacy. Peace with Honor, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, all the ashen columnists arguing about timed withdrawal and incremental pressure. He knew it was about profits for McDonnell Douglas and egotistical warts growing like malignant goiters on the neck of the country. He was Johnny Pot Seed, a Windowpane Ghandi, dangerous as Twain.

...

"You can see why he ate his gun. Everything he hated has returned. Nixon is back in the White House, Rumsnamara risen from the dead, bombs falling on other peoples’ suburbs. The Pentagon is lying again and democracy stalks yet another helpless country. This time the young are already dead and there will be no joyous anarchy. The press, housebroken, pees where it is told. But he gave it a hell of a try."

There's more, but I'll leave it up to you folks to go there and read it for yourselves. Me, I'm just a few miles out of batshit crazy, on the edge of the desert, and the drugs are beginning to take hold...