10.3.05
Big Darkness
Excertos do obituário de Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005), publicado na revista "Newsweek" e escrito por David Gates:
As of last week, there was no word of a suicide note from Hunter S. Thompson, and it´s just as well: that would be a document so scary it should be suppressed, like the Third Secret of Fatima(...)
Playing with guns and speeding cars, incapacitating himself with LSD: not clear enough that he was pushing it to the edge? Than consider the passage about how druggies less tough-minded than himself, the "failed seekers" of the 60´s, "never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel... It`s also the military ethic... a blind faith in some higher and wiser 'autorithy'... The General, The Prime Minister... All the way up to 'God'". In Thompson´s universe, you were on your own, and you took your life in your hands. "This is the man whom Tom Wolfe is now calling "the 20th century´s greatest comic writer in English."(...)
But while major magazines still let journalists personalize a story with their own observing presence, only bloggers (and such documentary filmmakers as Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock) are getting away with what Thompson did at Rolling Stone in the 70s, making the story indistinguishable from their sensibility. That's not "serving the reader" - though Thompson's readers didn´t seem to mind(...)
In a 2003 column, he went from the subject of his hip replacement into one of those rants whose joyously righteous anger used to belie their apocalyptic despair: "I´m surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first come into it", he wrote. "Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security... has been looted and negleted and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ingnominious defeat all over the world... Our armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lifes: Big Darkness, soon come."
As of last week, there was no word of a suicide note from Hunter S. Thompson, and it´s just as well: that would be a document so scary it should be suppressed, like the Third Secret of Fatima(...)
Playing with guns and speeding cars, incapacitating himself with LSD: not clear enough that he was pushing it to the edge? Than consider the passage about how druggies less tough-minded than himself, the "failed seekers" of the 60´s, "never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel... It`s also the military ethic... a blind faith in some higher and wiser 'autorithy'... The General, The Prime Minister... All the way up to 'God'". In Thompson´s universe, you were on your own, and you took your life in your hands. "This is the man whom Tom Wolfe is now calling "the 20th century´s greatest comic writer in English."(...)
But while major magazines still let journalists personalize a story with their own observing presence, only bloggers (and such documentary filmmakers as Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock) are getting away with what Thompson did at Rolling Stone in the 70s, making the story indistinguishable from their sensibility. That's not "serving the reader" - though Thompson's readers didn´t seem to mind(...)
In a 2003 column, he went from the subject of his hip replacement into one of those rants whose joyously righteous anger used to belie their apocalyptic despair: "I´m surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first come into it", he wrote. "Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security... has been looted and negleted and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ingnominious defeat all over the world... Our armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lifes: Big Darkness, soon come."
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