WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

GONZO IS DEAD, LONG LIVE GONZO JOURNALISM!

On Sunday February the creator of Gonzo Journalism Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head with a shotgun, ending a life in extasy and agony. Nonetheless he will not be forgotten, especially by the people that knew him or learned from him. A reminiscience of Greg Palast.

   | I met Hunter Thompson when I was twenty years old; that is, saw him from the back of a crowd at the gym at my college where he was performing. I say “performing” because that is what Thompson did, even three decades ago. He had become an astonishing success as a writer — and his writing was astonishing. Then he became very accomplished at success and stopped accomplishing much as a writer. That’s when I decided not to become a journalist.
   If that is what a journalist does, I thought, I would rather do something a little more interesting with my life. I switched to the hospital administration program with a plan to open a community health center in Woodlawn, back then the hardest of the hard-core poverty troughs in Chicago.
   Things didn’t work out as planned; and twenty-five years later I ended up a reporter. Thompson ended up as a cartoon character. No kidding: “Transformer”, the bald-headed comic book journalist hero, drinker, druggie, smart-aleck scourge of bad guys and editors.
   That was the comic book; then there was the man: Thompson the writer kept writing in bits and snips, but it was always a parody of Thompson. His later compilations (he could not sustain a book) like “Generation of Swine” were brilliant one-joke rants. You could read them and you did not know a goddamn thing you did not know before you read them. Thompson stopped taking on the big topics — after all, what topic could measure up to him?
   It had not always been that that way. What impressed me about “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is that it was written as a coda, a needed break, from Thompson’s grueling investigative report on the death of Chicano activist Ruben Salazar. And this I also know: all that cool fear-and-loathing patter was not written on acid in a Ghia doing 140; it was typed alone in a quiet room. No school gyms of adulating audiences on their feet to cheer the genius, no comic book figures dropping bon mots could press those keys.
   When a writer gets bigger than his subjects, he’s dead — though not yet buried. This morning, I heard that Thompson faced this intractable truth, and completed the job; suicide with one of the guns he toyed with for the cameras.
   Goodnight, Mr. Thompson. And thanks for those astonishing words, no matter what they cost you.

| Greg Palast’s website: www.gregpalast.com