Dr. Gonzo we need your help

The other day I was lucky enough to see a film in the Queenstown film festival that really struck a chord. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479468/) is as you’d guess the story of Hunter S Thompson. He’s the infamous writer of books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, countless Rolling Stone articles and other works of literary note. Many people assume that his writing is just the drug addled musings of a post-bohemian madman who’d done too much acid back in the day. Knocked out on pills and dancing to warped Grace Slick records, musing about the good old days when the sex was dirty and the water was clean. This veneer of debauchery distracts from the fact that Dr. Gonzo was in fact an exceptional writer.

Hunter wrote with an emotionally evocative power that was keyed into the time and rendered immortal. He was able to crystallize an era of our time that was so hard to define in traditional terms. You compare the writings of the day, Norman Mailer, Thom Wolfe they all fall flat with the dull thud of a past generation. Hunter was able to conceptualize the mad times of the 60’s into a narrative that described it in all of its non-linear beauty. But Hunter was more then this; he was also a damn good reporter. He followed politics with the fervour of a dumb-struck rabid dog. He got amongst the establishment and ripped it apart form the inside – and he ushered us all in.

In 2005 Hunter blew his brains out with a .45cal revolver – exactly as he promised to do for the quarter century leading up to his death. Better to burn out then to fade away? Hunter had lost his edge, if only in his own mind. But what a pity, couldn’t we have used him now. What would Hunter have said had he been imbedded into McCain’s campaign? What would his dispatches have described? One can only wonder and long of the musings that never came to pass. All we are left with is the words and the influence of a writer who went beyond his station and spoke from his heart with honesty, flair and the rye grin of wordsmith at the top of his game.

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
-Hunter S Thompson form Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas