The huzzahs for gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson on the occasion of his suicide last week are greatly misguided, writes the San Francisco Chronicle's executive foreign and national editor A.S. Ross in today's Chron opinion section.

Not since the death of Princess Diana has so much worshipful ink been spilled on the occasion of a mere mortal's passing. He was a giant among men. Who cared that for years he had been a largely burned-out case, more of a circus act than a serious writer, reveling in adolescent stunts with firearms, alcohol, narcotics -- the predictable paraphernalia of the self-styled outlaw who wowed the chattering classes and other assorted rubes and poseurs long after his appeal had worn off for almost everybody else?

Indeed, by coming not to bury Hunter S. Thompson, but to praise him -- unreservedly, remorselessly, endlessly -- his adoring acolytes, who shared the same trade, may be saying more about themselves than about the journalistic practitioner who ended up fantasizing about shotgun golf for ESPN. com.

.....The overwrought, indiscriminate nature of the various Thompson obituaries and appreciations are mirror images of his own work. In a Feb. 2001 ESPN.com column typical of his later oeuvre, he compared the shock of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt's accidental death with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Thompson writes of Earnhardt's fatal road accident: "It seemed to send a message, an urgent warning signal that something with a meaning beyond the sum of its parts had gone Wrong & would go Wrong again if something big wasn't cured -- not just in racing, but in the machinery of the American nation."

Thompson's acuity, on brilliant display in earlier political coverage, had long since left him. Not only did he predict a runaway victory ("I guarantee it") in November for John Kerry, who at one point he refers to as "JFK," but also that the Democrats would win both houses of Congress.

Like his intelligentsia-laden fan club, Thompson doubtless was indulging in abhorrence-fueled wishful thinking, rather than engaging in journalistic fact-gathering when he wrote of George Bush on election day: "His eyes are wild and his voice is shrill and he is acting more and more like a doomed animal on its way to the meat-grinder."

A former managing editor of Rolling Stone, who worked closely with Thompson, John Burks, reminisces about Thompson in this SF Weekly round-up:

Everybody else is partying. There sits Hunter in an easy chair, alternately gazing at the floor and into the middle distance, muttering to himself, loaded. Chuck Alverson, a buddy of mine from S.F. State and a buddy of Hunter's from their Wall Street Journal days, throws endless parties, and Hunter is a fixture. Rarely changing position or making eye contact, he tosses back drink after drink, sucks cigarette after cigarette down to the filter. Hunter is all alone.

His Hell's Angels story for the Journal -- later a book -- is regarded by us second-generation New Journalists as an instant classic of sardonic, coldblooded, fearless reporting and prose. I'm managing editor at Rolling Stone, and I'm thinking that Hunter's skew is right in step with "All the News That Fits." I ask Hunter to send me some clips; I'll connect him with RS founder Jann Wenner. He does, and I do, a move I regret to this day.

After three years, I can't stand the idea of working another day with Wenner and quit. This leaves nobody at RS to question Hunter's escalating bullshit. (Fed up with my back talk, Wenner has decided to proceed sans managing editor.) Wenner himself is often absent, literally and/or figuratively, and Hunter exploits this opening. He files his stories at the last possible moment to circumvent anything like editing and takes sweeping liberties with -- often liberating himself from -- reality.

The result: gonzo, a mix of self-loathing fury, ripped political "insights," and pryotechnique, a sort of let's-pretend journalism. Sad stuff. Sadder yet that anybody takes this plainly damaged '60s bad boy seriously.

Consider poor Ed Muskie, blindsided to oblivion by Hunter. The Maine senator has a pretty good shot at the 1972 Democratic presidential candidacy ... until Hunter zeroes in on him, writing that Muskie is addicted to ibogaine, a slow-fuse narcotic that heightens sexual drive and desire to fevered levels.

The boys on the bus fall for Hunter's fantasia, pick it up, share it with a gullible public, and Muskie, a pro-environment, widely respected good guy who might just have whipped Nixon in '72, is dead in the water.

At a '70s writers' conference, Hunter and I are on a panel, and I ask him if he's proud of helping Nixon win. Deeply loaded, Hunter explains that he wasn't really writing about, ahhh, Muskie, but, ahhh, about America's pathological detestation of sex. This bit of gonzo showmanship generates whoops of applause.

Who gives a shit if Nixon gets another four years?, Hunter goes on. These assholes are all the same, and, ahhh, Nixon's better copy than Mr. Clean.

Hunter played his readers for suckers, chumped and misled them, and I apologize for playing any role, however fleeting, in his career.

Seattle Weekly's Editor Knute Berger has a thoughtful piece on Thompson, as well. His work for Rolling Stone, writes Berger:

....was like Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey doing nonfiction, wading into the dark heart of America—Las Vegas, the Super Bowl—and bringing back truths channeled through drug-and-alcohol-induced trances. Thompson was a poser for stoners. He became an icon for his bad habits, even as they warped and eroded his talents. In recent years, his lingering journalistic presence—a Web sports column for ESPN—had descended into self-parody. But in his prime, he was an archetype that infused many of my contemporaries.

....One of the things that Thompson inspired—as did Tom Wolfe—was the idea that the journey to get the story was the story........Suddenly, getting the news and finding the facts weren't enough; the truth could only be told through the self-revelatory experiences of the journalist in a hostile world. This might be tolerable when reading the outlaw writings of Hunter S. Thompson in his prime, but for the industry as a whole, it spawned a kind of self-infatuation that has helped turn much of the media's work into an ego trip.

Ever a class act, Thompson killed himself while on the phone with his wife, and with his son, daughter-in-law and six-year-old grandson in the house.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at February 27, 2005 02:01 PM

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