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“Iconic Clowns (3): Hunter S. Thompson, Duke of Despair”

On the occasion of election night in 1988, Leonard takes the opportunity to put Thompson out of his misery…~17 years before his actual death in 2005. I think HSTs writing in the 70’s (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, F&L On the Campaign Trail) are phenomenally entertaining and energizing pieces of writing…the best of gonzo journalism literature.

Having said that, hard to disagree with Leonard that Thompson had gone completely ‘round the bend in his old age….should not be surprising given how far around the bend HST lived his entire life. Writing about HSTs collection Generation of Swine:

It’s as if, on his mountaintop [in Colorado], Thompson is picking up, by ham radio in his limbic wastes, all those radio signals from red dwarfs and black holes; as if he amplifies and modulates all the madness and paranoia of the dying culture.

This reads like an homage to Thompson’s writing style as much as it is a eulogy for his writing. Leonard writes “I think he’s going crazy so I won’t have to. This is a dangerous favor. It means I owe him.”

He closes with a sad but accurate recounting of HSTs appearance at an election night event in NYC:

…friends would call to say that Thompson had shown up at the Ritz only two hours late, waving a rifle , wearing a rubber Nixon mask, embarrassing himself…It occurs to me…that America hates the sixties and one reason for this hatred is that many of us who came of political age in that decade are tiresome performers.

New phrase: limbic waste = old memories?

New learning: Not new to me, but, you can’t think of Hunter S. Thompson without seeing Ralph Steadman drawings. Ralph is also the artist behind the labels for Flying Dog Beers: