“Hunter S Thompson is the bad ass intellectual friend your parents don’t want you to hang out with.”
Have you ever had a friend your parents or peers don’t much care for? I think we have all been there, even politicians and authority figures have had a friend or acquaintance like that. Someone whose lifestyle doesn’t quite measure up to everyone else’s expectations of the social type you should be cavorting with. Well for the certain generation of the rich, famous and powerful that friend happened to be the gonzo journalist, Hunter S Thompson, bubba. (Bubba a reference to Bill Clinton, who’s nickname, as funny as it happens to be is, bubba. In addition, these side notes, like this one, happen to be everywhere in his books. So there’s another little inside joke for your enjoyment.) What I am trying to say is that everyone at some point or another has made friends with someone who is nothing like you but somehow they have a lot in common with you. This special kind of bad ass friend influences you to ditch out on your responsibilities to go behind a dumpster, per say, and smoke cigarettes for a while and discuss current issues; politics, sex, conspiracies and other dumpster talk. For the politicians in the 1970’s to mid 1990s that friend was Hunter S Thompson. (For me that friend isn’t so much a friend but family, my brother. For the record, he talks about sex and I continuously tell him, I am his sister and don’t care to know about his sick fantasies besides… I’ve had better.)
Aside, from Hunter Thompson being a total bad ass, he was an incredible writer, he wrote for The Rolling Stone and has at least 10 books published on various subjects. He is the Godfather of a writing style similar to dirty realism, a style known world wide as gonzo. (It is not titled after the puppet created by Jim Henson, that came after his time.) The saying goes, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”. That was Mr. Thompson’s trade mark saying for his gonzo journalism, you can find it referenced in some of his works and it is on the cover of almost every one of gonzo journals. He also refers to himself as a “political junkie”, a term which sounds derogatory but actually it is negated as a positive term. Essentially it means having an addiction to politics, every waking and breathing moment is devoted to the study and analyses of modern politics. (It’s an insult to real politicians, unlike bloggers who whine about the injustices done to the green party and vegetarian animal loving Liberals’ and baby boomers that were and are hippies.)
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S Thompson
I was assigned to read a book by Thompson and the one that really caught my eye was, Better than sex: confessions of a political junkie. This book was one of his later gonzo journals. It basically fallows the election race of 1992, candidates Bill Clinton and George Bush. At this time Thompson had (allegedly) given up the former life of being a political groupie, who moved from place to place with the candidate he was interested in but this election caught his attention and he gave his best efforts not to get involved. (He was so interested due to his burning hate for George Bush and basically his entire family and anyone in cahoots with him. As well as, the fact that he felt it was his main purpose in life to literally shit on the Republican Party and cause as much upset amongst the political parties and the American government as possible, from what I gather at least.) However, on some occasions he was simply in the wrong place at the right time and got wrapped up in his former mistakes, past articles and publications connected with The Rolling Stone magazine. It was an inevitable situation that he would be a slave to politics for the rest of his life, weather he liked it or not. Once you’re in there is no getting out, that saying goes for any politician or aspiring politician, you have been warned, bubba.
Mr. Thompson did much more than just follow political scandals and publically criticize the Republican Party. He was a pioneer for the counter culture of the American dream, Here you have the American dream a mythical life where everyone is happy with two kids a house, a healthy relationship with a spouse and the world turns round. WHHOOOPPIIEEE! Hunter Thompson introduced a generation to the darker or opposite side of that dream. This is the underground world of drug addictions, swingers and free living with no responsibility (financially and morally). Here you have a man rubbing elbows with societies finest, who embody and lobby for the progression of the very dream that the guy next to them (Thompson) doesn’t believe in, participate in or generally speaking doesn’t give a fuck about, that’s irony bubba.
“My Beat is the death of the American dream.” – Hunter S Thompson
So far I haven’t really drawn any finally conclusions from his book but I am getting there. In the light of recent events I have drawn a few conclusions about politics in general, curious aren’t you. I’ll cut straight to the chase and let you ridicule and criticize me, so we can just get that over and done with, because I know that’s the main reason your reading this now. (We all know it, so I’ll put that out there. Besides, if I wasn’t grammatically outrageous and didn’t write exactly what I am thinking at this very moment, I’d end up letting you down and we don’t want that now, do we?)
Politics, economics and communication, three things high school student struggle to understand. However, I’ve learned a very valuable trick to help me better understand complicated subjects such as politics. What you have to do is find a similar system that can correspond with the system or subject you are studying. For example, the United Nations resembles to a typical high school, the main powers (China, Russia, England and America) are the popular kids who run the show. Then you have the bad ass kids (Cuba, Venezuela and ominous African Countries) on Sprague Avenue in a back alley talking trash about the popular kids and those countries tend to be communist run or dictatorships. It’s my belief that if you can understand the basic social workings of an average American high school then you should be able to comprehend politics at a very elementary level at least.
Do you remember ever playing a game called, Telephone? This comparison matches the game of telephone and communication between major powers in the world today. Telephone is a game in which a message must be passed from one end of a line to another without changing. Sadly, there is no possible chance of winning because even if your team is determined, there is always one funny guy a real class clown (Media) who thinks it will be funny to purposely change the message to something usually inappropriate. Today, a giant game of telephone is being played right in front of your eyes. From country to country, however, the message is changed viscously from place to place by news networks, radios talk shows, world leaders, and celebrities (Angelina Jolie, Bono and other hippie celebrities, looking for their 15minutes of fame because the acting/movie business has dried up and no one wants to hear their empty words and broken promises to change the world one song/film at a time.) ect. These are vigorous little lessons you can learn from an accesses of TV, paranoia, conspiracies and Hunter S Thompson.
“Life is about balance, you can only achieve the American dream to a certain extent in this day and age.”
These are just some brief thoughts, which I found entertaining enough to jot down and share with you. All politics are, are vicious rumors, misunderstandings and poor communication. The time has come again to rap up this rant and move on to a duller topic that has to be completed. If you can learn anything from Hunter Thompson I would say it has to be that life is about balance. You can achieve the American dream to a certain extent, as well as, living free with no responsibilities and swinging from partner to partner. In the end it all comes down to you and the choices you make everyday but if you ask me each life is fulfilling, I grew up in the light of the American dream, I made it through Clinton, Bush and even the regime of the satanic Christine Gregoire. I have no doubt in my mind I will someday, find where I belong and I know I will be happy no matter where I end up.
~Hilary's blogtastic bloggage~ 