WORK|OUT European Students’ Review

   | Luca Acquarelli (London). I was thinking in a definition of Hunter S. Thompson for a long time and, at the end, I will say that he was a shaman. He had the same strong coherence and the same view of life of the shamans in the forest of Brazil or the ones in the mountains of India. He looked very different from them because he was born in a place nearer to our occidental ways of living.
   After different jobs and some months of jail, he became a journalist and an incredible reporter, living the reportage on his own skin, like a shaman writes or talks about his own trips in parallel universes after living them. Last 20th of February, at the age of 67, Thompson shot himself in his house in Aspen (Colorado) using one of his favourite arms, the 45-calibre automatic handgun. Probably he felt the decline of his body and he couldn’t bear with it. Actually, in 2003 a spinal surgery to relieve compressed nerves left Thompson in a wheelchair. I think it was a great blow to him because he was “the lizard man” and his body was a central issue of his hard critic to the American Dream. A very strong body, “one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to maniac explosions” as Tom Wolfe wrote in his friendly obituary in the columns of “The Wall Street Journal”. His body was one of the examples of what today we call “bio-politics”, offering a magic mirror, that could reflect the inside, to the American society. Thompson could get all “The Fear an Loathing” of USA and could keep the control to writing and being a “lucid” (in the sense of not self-censored) author-traveller.
   His mind was working as much as his body and his spirit. His calculating mind too. He understood the way to make money with his personage, playing the “gonzo journalist” beyond the fantastic inspiration of its origin with Hell’s Angels (reportage on the famous motorcycles band of the sixties). Probably he understand that to live in the American dream you have to be part of it or as he wrote “we’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end”. But this critic doesn’t dim the revolution he carried on in the way to do journalism.
   He wrote a lot of books and articles: he was untiring until the end. He wrote a lot about politics starting from reporting the USA electoral campaign of 1972. He worked out of the laws of journalism and it was the reason why all (politicians and colleagues) considered him a “walking bomb”. As he was until his death. I’d like to say goodbye to him with one of his prayer from his most known book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”: “The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”