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“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

Hi Everybody! Welcome to another edition of Slayer’s Sports and Stuff! How’s everyone doing? Me..I’m well….not great. A person I admired and thought of as a ‘hero’ of sorts decided to do himself in. I’m a bit upset over it. People say they are surprised but not shocked (or is it shocked but not surprised) and even Hemmingway, a man who adored and loved life killed himself. Either you know who Hunter is or you don’t. If not, I could tell you to stick around and learn something but it’s probably not worth it. This will be more appreciated by those who read his works. Listen, I know this is the sports zone but hey they guy was a sportswriter so BACK OFF! First of all I have this to say about his suicide.

WHAT THE FUCK?
Yes, a bit immature and inappropriate but seriously his suicide is for lack of a better word… annoying. And it’ll be up to all of us to somehow keep fighting the eternal battle against the nazis, elitists ,scum, and pigs of the world. We may never win, and we won’t. But if we keep fighting, we will never lose and more importantly they will never win. You see folks, most of you in the under 21 bracket won’t understand this as all your minds are brainwashed by I-Pod at the moment, hell, your generation makes the one from the 80s look smart. You see kids, the man stood for something. What he stood for? Well, that’s anybody’s guess. But I’ll do my best to explain it to you. And why he killed himself, it’s sort of the same answer.

DRUGS
I will say there is one book that for better or worse defined his career. It’s called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Forget about the movie. It’s a good popcorn flick, but not much else. I’m talking about the book. It is considered by most to be a modern American masterpiece. It is usually thought of as a classic and appears on syllabi throughout college campuses. One of the reasons the book works is because it is so humorous and charismatic that one does not need have personal experience with drugs to enjoy and appreciate it. The drug use in the novel is so extreme and fantastical, many find it difficult to believe such consumption is possible and therefore are not offended. Add the fact that the first chapter describes several forms of consumption and the insanity that comes with it, you are almost desensitized to it before the novel even truly begins to start. But the reasons for the drug use are not always plain within first reading. The social criticism, satire, and natural humor are at such strong exponents it is easy to miss the underlying thoughts and emotions that have caused it. Within the pages lie a writer whom is depressed, angry, and fearful of the world and himself. The drug use is a coping mechanism to deal with the horrors of society and a sadness due to the failures of his generation often called the drug culture or the dope decade.

The New York Times calls the novel “The Best Book on the Dope Decade.” Tom Wolfe called it “The Great Gatsby of the 1960s” . But in the 21st century, these congratulatory statements can also be viewed as enigmatic. Hunter Thompson was part of the school of “New Journalism”, a saying that meant journalism from a common point of view as opposed to the elite and political. Yet, he was also an active drug user and therefore part of the drug culture. In an interview while reminiscing about his friendship with Allen Ginsburg he states, “I had met him before in New York during his poetry readings and things. In San Francisco, it turned out that we did have the same weed dealer. That’s when you bought weed in tins, tobacco tins. Ten dollars, fifteen. I lived in an apartment right next door to the guy he was buying it from.”

He did not exploit his drug use fully until Fear and Loathing, but it was already well known within many circles of his recreational activities. In his novel/report “Hells Angels” he jokingly has a conversation about the first time taking LSD. While this was pushing the limit by having a journalist admit heavy drug use, it was not in the extreme context of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Most saw it as a courageous and brilliant admission. Some simply saw it as a publicity stunt. Regardless, he was now considered the ‘reporter’ of the drug culture.

THE DAM HIPPIES
Exactly what the norms and values of the drug culture was is up for debate, but it is safe to say, Hunter Thompson thought it was a key part of the activist movement. Yet, he also saw the failures and hypocrisies well before most. His earliest criticisms of the drug culture came in 1967, a year before the “Year of Love” and two years before the infamous 1969. Hunter Thompson went to California to write an article for The New York Times Magazine on the ever growing political activism at University of California-Berkeley called the Berkley Free Speech Movement. Hoping to catch a shining example of the angry and powerful youth rallying against the establishment, what Hunter saw seemed to surprise and disgust him especially when he found out the majority of this movement were not active students, but drop-outs. In his article The ‘Hashbury’ Is the Capital of the Hippies, he states “Students who once were angry activists were content to lie back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke–or, worse, to dress like clowns or American Indians and stay zonked for days at a time on LSD” He also noticed the beginnings of the downfall of the anti-establishment movement citing a shift from “pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope, from the hang-ups of protest to the peaceful disengagement of love, nature and spontaneity.” What made the article even more illuminating was that Thompson seemed to understand exactly why this shift was taking place by stating “…all those primitive Christians, peaceful nay-sayers and half-deluded ‘flower children’ who refuse to participate in a society which looks to them like a mean, calculated and soul-destroying hoax.” In this very early writing, we’re seeing the realization that the drug culture seems to be hopeless against the powerful.

THE KENTUCKY DERBY
So as you can see, Hunter Thompson was disappointed at the new hippie movement, but he still loathed the establishment. This is seen in the historic 1970 article, The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved. This is the big one. The article officially made him one of the top journalists in the country and created Gonzo writing. But it is also the first time the world would see the bitter resentment that is displayed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As a man whom had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky this was a homecoming, and not in a positive sense. Hunter Thompson was part of the of Louisville’s Athenaeum Literary Association for young writers. But after an average GPA and a jailing, the club kicked him out. He felt like an outsider and a delinquent in his hometown . While he was reporting on the Kentucky Derby, several events were happening congruently. The National Guard was sent to Yale to protect it from a possible Black Panther riot, Nixon had extended the Vietnam War to Cambodia, and the Kent St. tragedy had recently shook America. It is also important that it was the year 1970; the first year in which Hunter Thompson realized the end of the decade came the end of their cause. They ‘lost’ and the American Dream died with it . The anger that was boiling up inside him was evident in the piece. The actual race was all but ignored and instead he focused on the rich society and their behaviors. He states in the article “And unlike most of the others in the press box, we didn’t give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had come there to watch the real beasts perform.”

THE DEATH OF REUBEN SALAZAR aka. THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE NOVEL
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which would be published a year later but it was not a book that was planned. It happened almost accidentally. In 1971, Hunter Thompson had become one of the most popular journalists and was writing regularly for Rolling Stone magazine. During that time, Chicano civil rights activist Reuben Salazar was assassinated and many felt it was a conspiracy by the LAPD. Thompson was able to convince the magazine to cover the story; it would be a landmark in the music magazine as it would be their first serious non-music article. Hunter Thompson’s ‘in’ was public aid lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta who had become a friend and confidant over the years The article which would become known as “Strange rumblings in Aztlan” did not lay out any conspiracy theory. Though he was probably eager to lay the blame on the LAPD, he did not let his convictions interfere with the facts he discovered. Hunter stated that the police were too ‘stupid’ to organize such a complex assassination. More evidence pointed that it was the work of drug dealers angry that Salazar was preaching against drug use. As himself and Acosta were spending time together at a hotel bar, Thompson got a call from Sports Illustrated to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas. He looked at it as a nice getaway from the current article he was writing and took the offer. Acosta joined him and they went off to Vegas. While they were there, Rolling Stone also asked him to cover the National District Attorneys Association’s Third Annual Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, being held at Caesar’s Palace.
When Thompson returned to California, he ended up writing a 2500 word piece to Sports Illustrated to which they “aggressively rejected.” Trying to concentrate on the Salazar story (which was starting to grate on him), he ‘relaxed’ by writing about his trip to Vegas with Acosta. What happened was he wrote a 5000 word manuscript documenting his trip. Realizing he may be on to something, he showed it to Rolling Stone and they agreed to publish to it in two parts. Later, the book form was made.

THE ACTUAL BOOK AND WHY PEOPLE GO GAGA OVER IT
No one captures the anger and insanity like the novel. Nothing. He starts the book by dedicating to Bob Dylan for ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ (a song about a drug dealer) and leading off with Dr. Johnson’s quote ” He who makes a beast himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man” . In this story, the fallen hero/protagonist is himself and society is the villain that stands tall. Yet this book isn’t a tragedy in the traditional sense. The tragic downfall of the character already happened. What we are reading is the effect the tragedy had on his body and psyche.
Early on in the book, the main character Raoul Duke already grimaces over the new decade stating “Joe Fraizer, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons people like me refused to understand”. Hunter realized something before most people would even care to admit it. His generation were now outsiders and a relic of the past. In one of the more famous lines of the novel, Raoul Duke describes the Circus-Circus as what the “world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis won the war”). Yet this is not a work of complete fiction, the Circus-Circus does exist and everything the narrator describes does actually happen. I know, I’ve been there. The enemy won the war. It’s showing all the drugs in the world did not completely shield one from the pain and agony that one is feeling. We see this several times throughout the novel whether it be Duke believing the ‘reptiles’ at the bar are going to eat him or Gonzo wanting to commit suicide in the bathtub. Raoul also states when describing the machine that makes anyone 200 ft. tall that Las Vegas is “not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted”. I know what you’re thinking, you’re asking

SO WHAT WAS HE SO ANGRY AND DEPRESSED ABOUT? WHY TAKE THE DRUGS IF THEY DIDN’T HELP?
Good questions. The insanity of drugs seem so damaging and terrifying, one has to wonder why sobriety would seem worse But I’ll try to answer this for you. The character points out in several occasions about a once glorious past. A time of unity and direction. Feeling they were going to change the world Duke while reminiscing about the past states “San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not…. but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world……There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave” . Of course, they did not win. This is what the characters of Duke and Gonzo are hiding from. The ABSOLUTE FAILURE OF THEIR CULTURE. A fact that pumps such an incredible amount of emotion, the characters feel they have no choice but to de-humanize themselves.
What angered Hunter most of all, and until the day he died is he knows it wasn’t so much that THEY won, but HE and his generation lost. The rebels were just as much to blame as the establishment He states “All those pathetically eager Acid Freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit… What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel” .

SO WHAT’S THIS AMERICAN DREAM BUSINESS?
Tough call. Thompson is stating something very significant was almost found and lost in the 1960s. He hints at a rebirth of some kind, a world where everyone could be a Horatio Alger. Not just the selling of it which represents Las Vegas. There are three theories to what it may be.
1) The American Dream which they seek to discover may not exist and is simply a transcendental representation of a false utopia that could never be found such as “Paradise St.” (read the book to understand the metaphor). .. According to this theory; then the American Dream is just a romantic ideal made up by imaginative people
2) Or perhaps it is Las Vegas itself and the Circus-Circus hence the America Dream is corruption and greed. If that’s the case then the answer Duke was looking for was not the one he was hoping for. That the American Dream is shallow. The third way of looking at it was that the American Dream was found and lost.
3) The third way of looking at it was the dream being harmony and togetherness (the 1960s) and it being quickly discarded or misused (the 1970s). That which was almost garnered but lost due to ignorance.
Whichever the scenario, it is safe to say it was driving Hunter insane.

SO DID HE REALLY TAKE ALL THOSE DRUGS?
Years after the book has been published, people still wonder whether it is fiction or autobiographical. In some libraries you will find it under Fiction, others non-fiction, and some even have it under the ‘travel’ section. Hunter Thompson states in an interview that “Obviously, my drug use is exaggerated or I would be long since dead. I’ve already outlived the most brutal abuser of our time—Neal Cassady. Me and William Burroughs are the only other ones left. We’re the only unrepentant public dope fiends around, and he’s seventy years old and claiming to be clean.” So with that admission, one can guess that the drug use within the novel was most likely hyperbolized. But what isn’t fictitious is that it captures the emotion and angst of his generation and the use of drugs to maintain. So he admits in the same interview, “They’ve (drugs) given me the resilience to withstand repeated shocks to my innocence gland. The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs. They’ve given me the strength to deal with those shocking realities guaranteed to shatter anyone’s beliefs in the higher idealistic shibboleths of our time and the “American Century.” Anyone who covers his beat for twenty years, and that beat is “The Death of the American Dream,” needs every goddamned crutch he can find.”

WRAPPING UP
I do want to quickly focus on Hunter Thompson’s biggest criticism which is his ‘glorification’ of drug use and that it outweighs in his novels what he is trying to articulate. Yet he warns readers many times of the danger of rampant drug use. He stated it himself that drug use could be the primary reason the movement he was involved in failed. Yet, he also feels without drugs there would be no way he could cope with the world today. I think at the end, he was for intensive purposes, a DRUG ADDICT. He may have been a somewhat successful one, but ask people what he was doing for about 15 years from the 1980s to mid 1990s, and most people will tell you he wall falling apart and staying afloat due to the monthly checks he got in the mail from his past written literature. His ‘books’ were simply old drafts and letters that most likely his publicists put together. His last gig on ESPN Page 2 was actually very good and he was back on the interview circuit. It seemed Hunter found a second life….

Guess not…

He was genuinely angry and sad at society, the establishment, himself, and his own generation. To conclude he states “I’ve always felt like I was born in defeat. And I may have written everything I’ve written just to win back a victory. My life may be pure revenge.”

I’ll be back tomorrow to write about College Basketball.