I must admit never to have heard of Hunter Thompson until I read in Mere Comments of his sad end. He is the kind of writer I would have met only by accident, having not visited the establishments he frequented when he happened to be in. He seems to have been an important person, however, and a few hours reading some of what he wrote and said have been, I think, well spent.
One might expect to find a good deal of fear and loathing as touching his life, work, and opinions at a Touchstone-sponsored site. He was a crude, angry, proud, foulmouthed, swinish libertine, who used his considerable gifts primarily for destruction of the American “establishment,” but like every radical liberal, had nothing to offer in its place but a ideology with the appearance of kindness and enlightenment that ultimately would have to be enforced, as mass enlightenments of the sort he favored always are, by a tyrant, in a sea of blood.
This, however, must also be said: Whether it was a lingering artifact of a great soul in decay or evidence of an enduring grace (we cannot know), there was in Hunter Thompson, as there is in many liberals of his kind, an interest in truth and a hatred of lies, of sham, and hypocrisy, and an angry frustration with a world in which they are rife. Along with this went a certain kind of clear-sightedness about weakness, wickedness, and stupidity in high places—very often supported by conservative religion. I could not help recalling, when reading his obituary of Richard Nixon, in which he suggested that the recently deceased president be given a burial at sea by allowing his body to float to the Pacific through the Los Angeles sewers, Kierkegaard’s politer but no less damning indictment of the dead Bishop Mynster who was most emphatically not, he said, a witness for truth, but a church functionary whose work was, because of that, at nearly every point opposed to it.
I have known people like Hunter Thompson, and found that if one takes the trouble—and it is a great deal of trouble--to love them, there is something in them very much worth loving. As infuriating as they are, as destructive to themselves and to others they may be, they cannot simply be written off as spiritual refuse. One is reminded in considering his life that great sinners are made of the same thing as the great saints, and in considering his death that the attempt to be a great sinner must end in failure. May the God who loves him far more than any of us could have mercy on his soul, and on ours, and may we here remember to be at least as devoutly counter-cultural as he was, but according to wisdom rather than the dictates of our own hearts.
Recent Comments