Hunter and prey. posted by Richard Seymour

He who lived by the gun died by it. Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most gifted (if erratic) voices in journalism appears to have shot his filthy, perceptive, drug-addled, humorous, seething mind out yesterday. There's no point in pretending otherwise: he was probably pissed, tripping and gripped in a knot of self-hatred at the time. It wasn't a heroic death, but at least he left life on his own terms. My guess is that this is a belated reaction to Bush's victory. The government which he so despised, and which he characterised more than once as Fascist, being re-elected by his compatriots must have driven him crazy. So, he decided that the world was fucked and he wasn't waiting for the final orgasmic show-down. Pity that some newspapers can't work out what age he was when he snuffed it (he was 67).

I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1997, and it insults pedantry to note that I was shaken, stirred, rocked by a series of lexical explosions, foul-mouthed insults and hallucinatory landscapes. High on cocaine, ether, mescaline, LSD, marijuana and tequila, he still saw more truth about the American dream than most serious authors did in sober tomes (it was violent, frigid, electrically obsessed with money and status, sexually perverted and stale). Similarly, his book on the Hells Angels, although a more sober account, was still highly involved and involving. He exposed press lies about the group, showed how they revelled in their outsider status, yet were oddly closer to their cop enemies than they imagined, inasmuch as they were violent, anti-intellectual, contemptuous of the effete, elitist and infinitely corruptible.

Aside from his published books, he wrote articles which bristled with wit. Forget the stupid films about him (Bill Murray should be so ashamed), read some of his work. An epigrammatist with a penchant for obscene, he produced a number of memorable phrases and passages which should be plagiarised, often. I present a few of them here, and casually piss on his bones as he would have wished:

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts."

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

"So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms."

"Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

"Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything."

Bush "is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters."

"I watch three or four frantic network-news bulletins about Iraq every day, and it is all just fraudulent Pentagon propaganda, the absolute opposite of what it says: u.s. transfers sovereignty to iraqi interim "government." Hot damn! Iraq is finally Free, and just in time for the election! It is a deliberate cowardly lie. We are no more giving power back to the Iraqi people than we are about to stop killing them."