GONZO REVISED The slightly delayed postmortem.
By Matt Taibbi
One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry, surely, that he stopped writing.
— William F. Buckley
Pop quiz: which immensely famous literary hero is described in the following piece of book-jacket copy?
"This newly minted CIA agent—brainy, bold, and complex—began his career by saving the queen of England and quickly took his place in the pantheon of master spies drawn up by Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and John LeCarre."
Shame on you if the name "Blackford Oakes" didn't spill off your tongue in the first split second. You must be a brain-dead product of the tv generation if the leading man of William F. Buckley's famous series of swashbuckling spy novels isn't as familiar to you as a member of your own family. And don't even bother showing your face in public if it somehow escaped your notice that Buckley even wrote novels at all; to confess to such a thing would be to admit to having no culture whatsoever.
Who could forget the stirring opening to Tucker's Last Stand? As the curtain rose on the rarefied chambers of the hero's Yale-educated mind, readers recognized a literary home as warm and familiar as Yossarian's tent, or Phil Marlowe's Hollywood Boulevard office:
"Blackford Oakes tried to remember: Had he ever been hotter?
"There had been that stifling cottage on the beach in Havana where he spent those miserable weeks waiting on the caprices of Che Guevara. How hot had it got there? He tried to remember, on one of the endless summer afternoons. One of his professors at Yale in the mechanical engineering school had said airily to his class that engineers always know the temperature of the air... Yes, Professor Schmidt, the students would nod, mutely..."
According to Bill Buckley, Hunter Thompson wasn't funny and couldn't write. Apparently the correct way to write is to dress up a thinly veiled version of yourself as an action hero, give him the name of a gay pirate and have him navigate 300 pages of blunt implausibilities to save the Queen of England—punctuating the plot along the way with the tweedy aphorisms of your favorite Yale professor.
This is the kind of person who lined up by the dozen last week to tell us that Hunter Thompson was a dreadful hack whose work will be forgotten. The pronouncements were generally accompanied by a moral judgment. Thompson was variously blamed for the moral lassitude of the 60s counterculture (Steven Schwartz in the Weekly Standard), or for the intellectual corruption of the next generation of youth (Austin Ruse of the National Review blamed plummeting GPAs in the 70s on Thompson) or even for the corruption of journalism itself. Numerous critics insisted, with a straight face, that the life of Hunter S. Thompson had made Jayson Blair inevitable.
All of these tape-delay obituaries had the same theme. They all argued that when Thompson died, a long accidental cultural detour had finally ended, and we were back on course again, a purged America. Schwartz actually spelled out this equation directly: "The suicide of Hunter S. Thompson…may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic 'baby-boomer' rebellion." ...
<http://www.nypress.com/18/11/news&columns/taibbi.cfm>
Carl