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Jewish World Review Feb. 25, 2005 / 16 Adar I Shevat, 5765 Fear and loathing of the gonzo establishment By Diana West
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If there is one thing that bugs the Left, it's the idea of empire — and
particularly the idea of its own established empire — the media culture
it still dominates by dint of groupthink.
That's why when Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at age 67, the
empire of the Left, a.k.a. the mainstream media (MSM), had to pretend
that a bona fide "iconoclast" had died, someone at odds with the
establishment — "like Galileo or Martin Luther," as Orville Schell,
dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, rather
colossally saw fit to describe Thompson's clip file for the ages.
Far from living life on the fringe — which is not to say he didn't live
a fringy life — Thompson was enshrined as an icon by the so-called
establishment. By "establishment" I mean the prevailing powers that be,
the media and cultural powers for which Thompson was never a threat, but
always a promise. He has long been appreciated, if not celebrated, for
his open and prodigious drug use. (He was "who Mark Twain might have
been if Twain had discovered acid," friend and National Public Radio
foreign editor Loren Jenkins told The Washington Times.) And he has been
consistently applauded for a concocted reportage that divorced
"journalism" from fact. (His work was "true in a way the bean counters
would never understand," said a New York Times appreciation not penned
by Jayson Blair.) Thompson's "gonzo" career was a template for
counter-cultural behaviors and attitudes that had reshaped the American
mainstream by the end of the 1960s. Tantrums. Hedonism. Self-absorption.
And the "craziness," the Washington Post appreciation toasted, "that
comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of
'high-powered blotter acid,' and 'uppers, downers, screamers, laughers.'"
Guess you had to be there. Even if you weren't, even if you tried to
read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" and couldn't, the "gonzo"
sensibility lives on. Indeed, the gonzo sensibility has infused our
culture to the point where it's no longer a relic of the old
counter-culture, but is an innate characteristic of the establishment
today. Who keeps his head up in the mainstream today who isn't
gonzo-"wild" and gonzo-"crazy"? In gonzo we trust. This explains not
only the lavishness of praise being heaped upon Thompson, but also the
extraordinary lengths to which his appreciators — and they are legion
— have gone to palliate his lifelong depravities.
My favorite: His was a "lifestyle dominated by a long and sophisticated
romance with drugs," said the New York Times appreciation, quite
picturesquely dispensing with the ravages of chronic drug use. Then
there is Thompson's "obscenity-laced prose." Not to worry, said his
Times obituary, expletives "broke down walls between reader and writer."
As for his "creative blend of fact and fantasy" (wasn't that Dan
Rather's problem?), his "rule-breaking style" and "outrageous voice,"
they "helped refocus the nation's customarily straitlaced political
dialogue." How? The obit doesn't say, but maybe his political coverage
that "made no secret of his hatred of Nixon" had something to do with
it. And thank goodness. What would the republic have done without him?
Too bad he couldn't have been around to refocus the Constitutional
Convention.
Gonzo-style aside, what's left? According to a line in the middle of the
Washington Post appreciation, not so much. "In fact, he'd never done
very much in his life except write about it, which he did with clarity,
hilarity and big-train momentum." Well, to each his own. On the other
hand, gonzo-style alone, given that it has become a way of life, may be
enough to rate the posthumous star treatment, although a little distance
between star and treatment-ers would be appreciated.
But there is something else. "For a generation of American students,"
The New York Times writes, "Mr. Thompson made journalism seem like a
dangerous, fantastic occupation." This notion is echoed in The
Washington Post: "He was a particular hero to journalists, whose
terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor
fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson ... had the bearing
of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace."
Fear and loathing. Madness and menace. Danger. Fantasy. These are the
moods of adolescent rebellion, the stylistic attitudes of an adversary
culture that has long dominated the MSM. Which tells me that when all
the ink is dry, Thompson's special place both on the Left and in the MSM
is as a sort of adversary mascot, a totem of a mythical time when the
empire still lay ahead.
Too bad the emperor has no clothes.
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© 2005 Diana West | ||||||||||
