More on Hunter Thompson

Here is a great essay on Hunter Thompson by the editors of Signs of the Times:

We are all in great trouble.

Few people have looked into the heart of America, seen it for what it was, and written about it with such clarity of venom and horror as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Almost as few are those who read Thompson and understand how bad the situation really is, who see that the extreme language was only extreme because it was accurate. He was simply describing what he saw.

His readers laughed, but how many of them felt that subsequent shudderin the gut that tells them they are in danger? The warning was given over three decades ago during the Nixon years. We read and laughed, did nothing, and now the trap has sprung.

The praise for Thompson has been sung loudly since his suicide on Sunday. Yet how many of those really see how bad it is out there?

How many of those who praise Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are willing to look seriously at the idea that 9/11 was an inside job? Cockburn and St-Clair from CounterPunch, the online journal that posted Thompson's Nixon article in tribute, are not willing to look seriously at the truth about 9/11. Do they think the good doctor was kidding when he described the scenes of American law enforcement officers morphing into reptilian forms? Do they stop to consider the profound esoteric truth embodied in that description?

But they don't want to go there. They do not want to look into the heart of darkness and see how foul it really is, how rotten lies the American Dream when you scratch its surface...

If a sitting president was responsible for an attack on US property that killed 3000 Americans, while the blame was placed on innocent patsies thousands of miles away in order to justify the invasion, occupation, and control of the Middle East, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose only crime is to be Arab or Moslem, well then, Thompson's descriptions of Las Vegas would have a reality that these lefty scribes would be unable to stomach.

If it were so and you stood by and did nothing... like Cockburn and Chomsky and the other heroes of the progressive movement in the US... what does that make you?What would you see when you looked in the mirror?

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson saw US reality. He described it accurately. He also saw that it was part of himself, that insane, drug-addled, gun-toting persona that we were never certain was altogether real or just part of a public image to keep people away. But it is part of us all, and it was Thompson's admission that it lived within him, too, that was the clincher that he had SEEN it.

Once you've seen it in yourself, you either get violently ill, or you keep swallowing it back down and get about your business. But you can't beat it alone. There is always another bucketful of the "it's not as bad as that" bacteria being brewed inside.

But how much horror can one take? His public laughed at his descriptions, but they didn't really buy into it, not all the way. And they won't see what Hunter saw until they start to suffer, until the reality of it becomes physical and hits them in their stomachs and bank accounts and the repo man comes round to drive off with the SUV. For the moment, it is still only happening to other people, to someone else. Who is going to ACT when it is "only" happening to someone else?

Did Thompson see this, too? Did he recognise that it was too late, that with four more years the horror would begin to outstrip even his picturesque prose? We don't know and wouldn't even wish to speculate. Thompson is gone. It is up to you to decide for yourself. We know our answer.