After Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist in severe decline, killed himself earlier this year, I blogged some of the rebuttals to the overblown encomiums foisted by the MSM - here, and here. Now, following the recent cannonized scattering of Thompson's ashes - an event attended by John Kerry, no less - syndicated columnist Jay Ambrose has a dead-on commentary about Thompson's, er, legacy. He is former director of editorial policy for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain; edited several dailies; and now lives in Colorado, where Thompson also resided.

I certainly agree that Thompson was a highly talented guy with endless and sometimes captivating chutzpah. He had a breezy, engaging way of writing far less likely to bash brain cells to insensibility than many of us who put words on paper. At his best, he exhibited a vivid, eccentric and original imagination that would take you places you never expected to go. To say all of this seems to me to be saying quite a bit, without somehow elevating Thompson to the ranks of a major literary artist or important political thinker.

Yet, having said that much, we come to the other side, the desk-burning side. He could be exceptionally mean-spirited at times, even vicious, capable of a kind of verbal vandalism lacking in any grace or human understanding. He was likely right in a pronounced theme of his that the drug war went too far, but his counter-stand went too far, as well. As much is shown in these much-quoted words of his: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

The fact is they did not work for him. The drugs and alcohol - an immovable, prominent fixture in his social philosophy and life - appear to have ruined him. His writing lost its verve; sometimes, in the later years, it seemed little more than the work of someone stumbling toward being average. His health deteriorated. I can't know how happy his life was, but some press reports indicate a miserable, unholy shambles at times.

The way he finally ended that life - sticking a .45-caliber handgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger while his wife was on the phone with him and his son and grandson were close by in the same house - bespeaks a horrifying moral degradation.

So what we now get is an actor who played him in a movie, Johnny Depp, spending $2 million to finance this tacky, self-adoring memorial that included multi-color fireworks, the skyscraper sculpture of a two-thumbed fist holding a dagger, blowup sex dolls and a bunch of fancy guests. They included other actors, expectedly enough, but also two former presidential candidates: John Kerry and George McGovern.

Maybe those two Democrats attended because Thompson had written favorably about them, but they might have considered an ages-old observation that a society tends to cultivate what it honors, and that Thompson's story is as much as anything about destruction of self and others.

Hat tip to Greg Wallace, at What Attitude Problem?

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 25, 2005 10:10 AM