Letters

February 21, 2005
Dispatch from a cold, bleak day in the middle of the flatlands.

It was announced today that Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide with a bullet to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado.

Tonight the banshee will scream a long, mournful, soul-wrenching cry. It will echo from the craggy mountaintops of Colorado to the morally diseased swamps of Washington, D.C., where some of the most hideous creatures ever to prowl the halls of power will no doubt take delight in the fact that gonzo is gone.

I had the fortune to see HST speak in person back in the late '80s. This was sometime after the release of the movie "Where the Buffalo Roam" with Bill Murray. I couldn't decide if Bill Murray had nailed his imitation of HST or if HST was doing Murray doing him.

Why did he do it? Why now? Is it that he saw things far worse than the halcyon days of Nixon and his band of thugs coming toward us like a freight train? Did he see a train of cattle cars coming to take away all those who would dare question the neocon right?

Thompson wrote that he would not believe that Nixon was through until he could chew on his skull. He lived to see that day, but in place of the tragic, Shakespearean figure that was Nixon, Thompson also lived to see the rise of the neocon Reich. Maybe it was too much to see Orwell come to life on the world stage, writ large by small venal men whose only claims to greatness arise from familial linage and the manipulation of fear.

Fear is something Thompson could relate to. Not the little fears that plague the common man's everyday life -- like if a car payment can be made, or will my team get in the playoffs? -- but the big fears that all of us know but are too afraid to even mention. The big fears that cause fear to be written in capital letters. Fears of the dark, deep worm-infested places of the soul, where lies the banality of evil. The place where the likes of Goebbels, Himmler, Mengele, Pol-Pot, Pinochet and Rove live, breathe and wait for their time.

Unfortunately time is something that we are granted too little of, and it seems that the time of the great gonzo is over, even when our need for it is the greatest it has ever been. So here we are, fresh into the 21st century with the voices that carried us through the latter half of the previous century fading into the distance, while the shrill bleating of the dark voices rise to new levels.

Amidst the cacophony of the religious right purporting to espouse New Testament Christian values while pummeling all with the sword of the Old Testament, and the neocon neo-empire right shouting down all who question or disagree with their agenda, I think I can still hear the banshee. Somewhere in the distance that lone voice wails on, sad and lonely. Here's hoping that others will hear it, answer and join the chorus.

-- Greg Bowzer

Why, Hunter?

I know why he did it. The man who said it all. I know why he's gone. Because he could no longer see that high-water mark in the Vegas hills, that faint but lofty stratum of independent thought that we lost as the '60s tumbled from grace and into the clutches of nostalgia. That mark is invisible today, obscured by the heat waves of pop fascism. No room left for a thinker in this world of dictators. The known is lost to the wise, inherited by the mindless majority; the unknown is all that is left. Why not move on to the next adventure? And so he did.

He carried his load across the decades, shouldering for us the duty to call bullshit and scream foul and put fire to the fuse that burns its way through gray oppression to the light. He was the Original Gangster, unrepentant and unafraid, in a world where the only rebellion we can muster today is hubcaps that spin at red lights. His was a hilarious, stinging song of self-indulgence, a song most of us never had the guts or talent to sing for ourselves.

So, thanks, Hunter. We understand. And we'll do our best along the way to sting in your unholy name.

-- Bob Lambie

We were somewhere around Barstow, somewhere around Lodi, somewhere around Atlanta, Augusta, Lackawanna, on the edge of the desert, on the edge of insanity, on the verge of being discovered, on the verge of discovering the truth, waking to find ourselves in a dark wood, waking into dream, waking not at all, when the word went out among the hipsters and bopsters and mobsters and creeps and kooks and guttersnakes that the great Gonzo was gone.

NRA to the end, Hunter S. Thompson took a bullet, took his life, stopped the world and got off, flipped the bird, and gasped his final critique. He lived large, wrote long, piled insult on injury, and lived to die in Aspen. High in the mountains, in the clean snow, he waited like a craven until his wife went out to do the shopping, to visit the library, take in a movie, window-shop. He waited and hid his secret desire for one last spurting climax, never going gentle into that good night, but still leaving the mess for someone to step into on the way back from a Sunday walk.

Leave them laughing when you go, or dancing, or singing, or even leave them screaming when you go, and wanting to burn you in effigy. But don't leave them puking because your blood and brains are on the floor, on the walls, on the headboard of your everyday, common normal bed.

I will miss you, old raucous curmudgeon, crank and outrageous hoodoo. But I will not stand for the order of your going. You blew it. The way of your going should be the capstone of life's edifice, an epigram, a metaphor for all that went before, and going is gone for ever more. There are no second chances, no rewrites, no cosmic editor with blue pencil in hand to cut this badly written blunder from your last page. Goodbye, old man. You leave us to the contemplation of this work, your last true fiction.

-- Helen York

Next Page: "Sorry you chose to go just as the party was starting to get real"

• View blog reactions