A number of people have asked me what I thought about Hunter S. Thompson and his recent self-inflicted demise. Mostly, I’ve replied with “I just don’t know, I can imagine he had planned it for a while. I don’t think it was done on passionate impulse.” Then I sort of let it drop.
Although we never like to speak ill of the dead. I never actually dwelled to much on Thompson’s writing. I read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” when I was young. I thought that I had to read it, I thought that I had to read it, like it and “get” it. Lest I didn’t want to “miss the party.” In the past I wasn’t quite inclined to write him off as a drug-addled nut case like Burroughs. I was satisfied with a general liking of him until I read the following, that he wrote before the war in Iraq, from “Kingdom of Fear”:
We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world – a nation of bullies and bastards 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 … 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.
Now, I had something that I can permanently hang my hat on in regards to my feelings for Dr. Thompson. I had never read, heard, or thought of anything that better codified my thinking of the entire kingdom of King George II until then. Many people, most actually, will not agree with him but, I did.