Job Discussion Forums

[Justin Trullinger]

Hunter S. Thompson died this week. His voice, which has shouted, farted and belched, loudly and profanely, his own brand of commentary on the American way, is silent for the first time in decades. But then, at least we can say that he died as he lived. I'm sure the gunshot was loud.
Probably there are many out there who won't miss him, but you have to admit, he was a journalistic and cultural icon. Never one to let good taste, good manners, or even good sense get in the way of telling the story as he saw it. (Or perhaps I should say "the story as he lived it." He was never a disinterested observer.) In some ways, he was another version of "the joker." (As referred to by Moonraven, elsewhere on this board.)
So when I heard the news, I mentioned it to some friends, and the prevailing response was, "Who?!" I thought I might rectify the situation a little by using some of his writings in class. I'll admit that the slang, profanity, and extremely bizarre imagery present some difficulties for a lot of classes, but I'm going to have a go.

Has anyone out there ever used Thompson's writing in class? Or have any favourite pieces they'd like to suggest? If anyone wants to play, I'm happy to share materials on this. Or maybe we should just drink an (on-line) toast....

Justin

[slaqdog]

Thank you for that post. Mr Thompson will be sadly missed.
As for using his materials in class, well, interesting. Maybe something from Hells Angels? Lots of nice descriptive writng there, Or you could take one page remove all the profanities and have your students put 'em back in? Filth maze? Drugs and their results mix and match?
We have all experienced Fear and Loathing in the classroom.

[dmb]

Weird. I heard about his unfortunate death yesterday. I thought about posting something about "Have you ever used HST in class"

[XXX]

Have I ever used any of HST's stuff in class? You bet.

[stillnosheep]

Wonderful trib from Guy Ginpot on Gaijinpot:

Today marks the passing of the Father of Gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson. One cannot help but admire the raw wisdom of this man. In the spirit of another great American writer, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson chose to blow his brains out rather than have them age needlessly. But enough of my take. Take it away Hunter:

"The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the difference between a pedophile and a Pederast: the pedophile is a person who thinks about sexual behaviour with children, and the pederast does those things. He lays hands on innocent children - he penetrates them and changes their lives forever.

Being the object of a pedophile�s warped affections is a Routine feature of growing up in America - and being the victim of a pederast�s crazed �love� is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option. Once penetrated, the child becomes a Qweer in his own mind, and that is not much different than murder.

Richard Nixon crossed that line when he began murdering foreigners in the name of �family values� - and George Bush crossed it when he sneaked into office and began killing brown-skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people.

When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill �gooks� in Vietnam he said. �I ain�t got nothin� against them Viet Cong. No Cong ever called me Nlgger.�

I agreed with him, according to my own personal ethics and values. He was Right.

If we had a dash of Muhammad Ali�s eloquent courage, this country and the world would be a better place because of it.

Okay. That�s it for now. Read it and weep � See you tomorrow, folks. You haven�t heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for the spirit of freedom and decency in you. Sh|t. Somebody has to do it.

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - a nation of bullies and bastads who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us � No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we�ll kill you.

Well, sh|t on that dumbness, George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world. We didn�t vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today - and we will not vote for them again in 2002. Or 2004. Or ever.

Who does vote for these dishonest shltheads? 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 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.

And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. fu<k them."

In honour of this great man, my legal council has advised me to drop 2 hits of righteous blotter acid and drink a 40 pounder of whiskey while smoking a bag of skunk bud and snorting a gram of cocaine. Two seconal and a case of beer will then ease me into gentle repose.

God bless you Hunter.

gg

[ChinaMovieMagic]

You're trying to stop the information! You see, that's where it's at... and you can't! You can't stop the information, because the information keeps the country strong! You need a deviate! Don't shut him up!" - Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce in the film _Lenny_ (vhs/ntsc)

Check out this extra-ordinary Website w/music...
http://fusionanomaly.net/information.html

Also...there's the H.T. thread @ China Off-Topic

Regarding the Ali story...yes...back in '67-'68 when I was an amateur boxer during university days in Boston, I was going to see Ali train in the Gym for the Liston fight. He was a Cosmic Being--Sufi Poet--Zen Warrior. A definite threat to the System.

All these people can/should be woven into our classes, especially for folks who plan to live/work w/Westerners.

[ChinaMovieMagic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson

[moonraven]

This is the best piece I have read so far on Hunter's passing:

Published on Wednesday, February 23, 2005 by The Nation
Hunter Thompson's Political Genius
by John Nichols

Norman Mailer had the best take on Hunter Thompson's passing.

"He had more to say about what was wrong with America than George W. Bush can ever tell us about what is right," mused Mailer upon learning of Thompson's suicide.

Anyone who read Thompson knew that the so-called "gonzo journalist" was about a lot more than sex, drugs and rock-and-roll -- although it is Thompson who gets credit for introducing all three of those precious commodities to the mainstream of American journalism. The gun-toting, mescaline-downing wildman that showed up in Doonesbury as "Uncle Duke" was merely the cartoon version of an often serious, and always important, political commentator who once said that his beat was the death of the American dream. Thompson was to the political class of the United States in the latter part of the 20th century what William Hazlitt was to the English poets of the early 19th century: a critic who was so astute, so engaged and so unyielding in his idealism that he ultimately added more to the historical canon than did many of his subjects.

Thompson taught me how to look at politics -- his book on the 1972 presidential campaign, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, remains the one necessary campaign journal of the era -- and I cherished him for that. (When I was writing a book on the Florida recount fight of 2000, I wanted to pay homage to Thompson so I asked him if we could use one of his brilliant "Hey Rube" columns to remind readers that no crime was beyond the imagination of the Bush brain trust. Thompson, who referred to George W. Bush as "the goofy Child President" and saw the Bush family as a recurring cancer that plagued the American body politic, leapt at the chance to be part of the project. He continued to delight in Bush bashing, titling a column published at the time of the 43rd president's first inaugural: "Abandon All Hope.")

But Thompson also taught me how to do politics. Thompson was a journalist in the traditional sense of the craft and, as such, he was entirely unwilling to merely observe the wrongdoings of the political class. He wanted to create a newer, better politics -- or, at the very least, to so screw up the current machinery that it would no longer work for the people who he referred to as "these cheap, greedy little killers who speak for America today."

In 1970, fresh from covering the assassinations, police riots and related disappointments of the 1968 presidential campaign, Thompson waded into the fight himself as a "pro-hippie, anti-development" candidate for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, which included the ski town of Aspen. Thompson wanted to win, in order to save what was still a rural, live-and-let-live county from the influx of Hollywood stars, corporate hoteliers and the rest of the elite entourage that would make it nation's premier ski resort. But he also wanted to teach a lesson about politics that would have meaning far beyond Colorado.

Thompson ran on what he and his backers dubbed the "Freak Power" ticket, declaring in an advertisement in the Aspen Times that, "(In) 1970 Amerika a lot of people are beginning to understand that to be a freak is an honorable way to go. This is the real point: that we are not really freaks at all - not in the literal sense -- but the twisted realities of the world we are trying to live in have somehow combined to make us feel like freaks. We argue, we protest, we petition -- but nothing changes. So now, with the rest of the nation erupting in a firestorm of bombings and political killings, a handful of "freaks" are running a final, perhaps atavistic experiment with the idea of forcing change by voting..."

At a time when many of his contemporaries were disappearing into a drug haze, or shouting silly "Smash-the-State" slogans, Thompson was exploring a more radical prospect. He wanted to combine "Woodstock vibrations, New Left activism, and basic Jeffersonian Democracy with strong echoes of the Boston Tea Party ethic" into what the writer-candidate referred to as "a blueprint for stomping the (conservative Vice President Spiro) Agnew mentality by its own rules -- with the vote, instead of the bomb; by seizing the power machinery and using it, instead of merely destroying it."

The experiment was not an immediate success. But Thompson did win the city of Aspen and took 44 percent of the vote county wide. In fact, only a last-minute deal between the Democratic and Republican parties pulled together enough votes for the incumbent sheriff to beat the "Freak Power" candidate. But, as Thompson noted, "the Aspen campaign suddenly assumed national importance as a sort of accidental trial balloon that might, if it worked, be tremendously significant."

As it happened, even in defeat, the campaign proved significant. Because of all the national attention accorded Thompson's campaign, the blueprint was noted by "new politics" candidates and activists around the country. They won power in college towns such as Berkeley and Madison and Ann Arbor, and eventually in communities that were threatened by commercial and real estate pressures similar to those that were the target of Thompson's Aspen campaign. Indeed, even in Aspen, Thompson's politics would eventually win out -- in the mid-1990s, he organized a campaign that successfully blocked a plan by the Aspen Ski Company to expand the local airport to accommodate jetliners that were designed for "industrial tourism."

Hunter Thompson once said that, "Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why." And, when all the rumination about his adventurous approach to drugs and guns is done, there will remain the blueprint for that better politics that Thompson was wise enough and idealistic enough to believe might yet redeem the American dream.

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent, has covered progressive politics and activism in the United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times. John Nichols's new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books) was published January 30

� 2005 The Nation

[been_there]

Justin,

I've used the last chapter from "Hell's Angels", the part where he is describing a midnight run down the coast highway from SF to SLO. It starts with (something like) "I still have the bike, 200 pounds of chrome and thunder..." and has the famous line, "The Edge ... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

I've used that section in writing class to teach imagry. Great to read aloud.

[moonraven]

A very straight-up piece about Hunter's passing by 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern:

Published on Thursday, March 3, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
Gonzo but Not Forgotten
by George S. McGovern

As the candidate who lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election, I have always been pleased that among the precious few who thought I would have made the better president was Hunter S. Thompson, who went to his untimely grave saying that I was "the best of a lousy lot."
Thompson's position was that I was "honest"--except for one "wicked moment" when I attended Nixon's funeral and said a few sympathetic words to his family and friends. "Yeah," Hunter told me, "you went into the tank with that evil *beep*."

Hunter relished such frightful words. "Evil," "wicked," "fear and loathing." These were the words that described the world best for him.

Once, when he was pressed into the back seat of my car with three other people, he tried to escape to a nearby bar when I slowed for a red light in heavy traffic. Foiled by the baby lock that had been inadvertently clicked on, he raged at me: "Get me out of this evil contraption before I start killing."

On the jacket of his now-classic book about the 1972 election, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," he printed a photograph of the two of us with the following caption: "Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination."

In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively.

It's true, as many have noted in recent days, that Hunter did not devote his energy and talent to the pursuit of factual accuracy. But accuracy isn't everything.

Frank Mankiewicz, the political director of my campaign, was right to call Hunter's book "the least accurate and most truthful" of the campaign books that appeared after the 1972 race.

Hunter was disheartened after the campaign, and it fell to me on several occasions to try to persuade him not to give up on what he called "this f----- up country."

What I didn't get to tell him was that one of the reasons we should never give up on America is that from time to time, as we have been reminded recently, this country produces a genuine original--a Katharine Hepburn, a Ray Charles, an Arthur Miller, a Johnny Carson, an Ossie Davis, a professor Seymour Melman, or an inaccurate and irreverent and truthful Hunter Thompson.

George S. McGovern was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972.