Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

摘要

As of last week, there was no word of a suicide note from Hunter Thompson, and it's just as well: that would be a document so scary it should be suppressed, like the Third Secret of Fatima. But isn't that what he'd been writing all these years? Not some self-pitying apologia for punking out when the game got rough, but thousands of pages of reckless confrontation—both with the evils of this world and with the emptiness behind its mask. We should have known it from his first book, in 1965, when he was riding and partying with the Hells Angels. And certainly from "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" in 1971. In that journalistic near-death experience, his willful failure to get the story—he went to cover a motorcycle race and a drug-enforcement convention, and incidentally to find the American Dream—became the story. Playing with guns and speeding cars, incapacitating himself with LSD: not clear enough that he was pushing it to the edge? Then consider that passage about how druggies less tough-minded than himself, the "failed seekers" of the '60s, "never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel... It is also the military ethic ... a blind faith in some higher and wiser 'authority'... 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.