HUNTER S. THOMPSON MADE JOURNALISM FUN

Just as every woman has a little Aretha Franklin in her, as I once heard
someone say, I believe that every journalist has a little bit of Hunter S.
Thompson inside, raging to be heard.

Now he lives only within us, his readers. Thompson was found dead on Feb.
20 at age 67 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his famously "fortified
compound" in Woody Creek, Colo.

Thompson made journalism look like fun because he was so much fun to read -
too much fun for us to ruin it by worrying whether his facts were actually
factual, or whether the dark shadows of personal danger that lurked
shark-like beneath the dazzling waves of his rants, revelations and screeds
might someday drag him under.

"Political writing has become too timid in this spin-doctor age," said Abe
Peck, chair of Northwestern University's magazine program. "But Hunter's
hyper-reality changed how we look at political business as usual. And I'd
give a lot to have his 'Hell's Angels' and 'Fear and Loathing' books on my
resume."

His peers admired and envied Thompson for doing what the rest of us journos
wanted to do, if we had an ounce of heart and soul still beating within us:
He was free to report not merely what he saw and heard, but also what he felt.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," Thompson once wrote. He
was weird but he made it work. A lesser reporting talent who took
Thompson's liberties with facts and invective would be fired and forgotten,
but he was blessed with a gift for producing richly detailed, colorfully
written, darkly amusing journeys into American subcultures that became
instant classics.

But all envy now evaporates. His fabulous high-wire act has come crashing
down before our eyes, despite the glimmers of hope he occasionally showed
that he might take charge of his inner lunacies before they took charge of
him. In his 1971 drug-crazed classic "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," he
reaches some profoundly unflattering conclusions about the biggest scam of
the 1960s - that hallucinogenic drugs would fling open our doors of perception.

In a sober and prophetic sermon-rant in his book's final chapters, he
writes: "We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed
that fueled the '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He
crashed around America selling 'consciousness expansion' without ever
giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait
for all the people who took him seriously. ... All those pathetically eager
acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three
bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down
with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to
create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never
understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the
desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending
the Light at the end of the tunnel." Three and a half decades later,
Thompson's self-destruction tells us that maybe he should have taken that
"desperate assumption" of a "force" at the end of the tunnel a bit more
seriously. Belief in a Higher Power has saved countless other souls from
the miserable hopelessness that feeds their own self-destruction. I wish it
could have reached Thompson in time.

Both the book and the Johnny Depp movie versions of "Fear and Loathing"
begin with an epigraph from Samuel Johnson about the perils of alcohol: "He
who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." By
choosing that stunning quote, Thompson shows a better understanding of his
obsessions than of his limits.

His addictions were not only to booze and drugs but also to politics
("Better than sex," he said of politics, an obsession I share, if not to
that extent) and to journalism. His obsessions made him more interesting to
us. Now they only seem tragic.