The other side of Hunter S. Thompson's death

Another take on HST, from the wise sage Paul McEnery

Well, now we've got the ugly truth of how the suicide went down. It could be more dismaying, but not by much. Like Eliot said, "after such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

I've lived through the suicide of too many friends to find suicide an acceptable option except in extraordinary circumstances. For one thing, it opens a door to death for other people that's a bad door to look through. For another, any violent death has repercussions.

With Hunter's death, you can feel the psychic shockwave through a lot of my friends in the neighbourhood -- and none of us knew the man, except through his work. But Hunter was a shamanic figure for our tribe, going down into the underworld to bring back unspeakable truths, and conjuring up a new language to speak them: fractured, eloquent, repetative, lyrical, deceptive; the carapace of a man who never truly found a way to live with his own sensitivity, and couldn't keep that sensitivity from snaking through the cracks.

To lose such a man, and in such a way, has consequences. When Kurt Cobain shot himself, it was a similar thing. I'll always admire Courtney Love, no matter what kind of a mess she turns into, for standing up and saying the right thing afterwards. Fuck Kurt Cobain for killing himself. It was a selfish and cowardly act. So fuck Hunter too.

Hunter lived on the edge not for everyone else, as the sentimental fanboys would have it, but for himself and for nobody but himself. He was a weak man who carried a lot of hurt, and couldn't live with the burden of responsibility to anyone, let alone to himself. All he could do was run on impulse. That impulse led him to change the face of journalism, to speak truth to power, and to unlock for a great many of us the chains of puritanical restraint. It was also the long, slow suicide of a man running away from himself. He stopped running fast enough, and the ugly spirit in him caught up.

Hunter's suicide -- weak, cowardly, irresponsible, shitty -- turns his life into a symbol of self-indulgent folly. It turned his life into shit. It turns his work into shit. It says that everything he ever did was nothing more than this final moment. It gives his enemies all the ammunition they needed.

We are horrified because of what his family is having to deal with. We are horrified because of the harm to the community, those of us who belong to his tribes. And we are horrified because it plants the seed of death in our own minds, and we need to reject those seeds forcefully.

So once again, fuck you Hunter S. Thompson, for being a weak, self-indulgent coward.

And thank you, Hunter, for dealing all through your life with being a weak, self-indulgent coward by having such courage. The courage to turn that self-destructive urge towards putting yourself in harm's way in order to live; to live outrageously outside of the conventions of buttoned-down conformity; to wade through the shit pile of a disordered mind and bring back beauty; to stare down the ugly truths of our world for 67 years before the final, impulsive, selfish, and cowardly flinch.

Hunter S. Thompson required a Christload of forgiveness for the manner of his life. We gave him it because of his work, because of what his work gave to us, for what his life gave to us. It is far too soon to forgive him for the manner of his death. His death was nothing but bullshit, and it makes the words he left behind taste of that bullshit. In some ways, it's the final act of truth-telling from a man who spent his life pushing our faces in the shit we wanted to ignore.

Hunter wasn't here to be worshipped or emulated. He was here to steer the wreck of his own life through the rocks. Doing that, he damaged people as much as he inspired them. In the death, we will revile him for the crap he laid on us, and we will revile ourselves for the prison we made for him because we need heroes to worship. And in the death, we will love him again for what he was to the good.

Reprinted, with permission, from Paul's post at CBR