By February 23, 2005
It was always a little uncomfortable to imagine a slow death for Hunter S. Thompson, who spent much of the last 30 years as a recluse in Woody Creek, Colo before ending his life on Sunday. How could this idealistic and outraged journalist, an iconoclastic truth-telling prophet of American decay, carry his AARP card gently into the night? He could not write about anything other than what he knew, and whenever his recent writings, on espn.com and in books of essays, veered to the contemporary, it read like a lukewarm parody of his own earlier style. He will be remembered most as a furious satirist, a comic chronicler of the period when America lost its innocence and the American Dream died. The argument that the 1960s were not as Thompson wrote them is for pedants and college professors. So what? Better than the new journalism of Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or the self-indulgence of Norman Mailer in Armies of The Night, more than even Woodward or Bernstein, Thompson revealed the political truths of his era, and curses its lies. Reading the weird interaction of idealism and anger in his letters and essays from 1968 to 1976 thirty years after they were written, published in the book Fear and Loathing in America, is like discovering a window into the last 30 years of American life. Idealism shines through even as he grows bitter about the idiocy of the culture, from John Wayne to hippiedom, a change wrought by assassinations, Vietnam and the rise of Richard Nixon. His antics and ability to entertain shine even as he was deeply affected by these events; as he wrote in a 2002 espn.com column, “My brain is covered with scar-tissue. I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it … Never.” It is hard to remember that Thompson was a fairly straightforward journalist before he broke out. His first book was a first person narrative non-fiction account of his year hanging around a motorcycle gang in Hell’s Angels. The characters, not the form, were the freaks, albeit freaks who were a “logical product of the culture that now claims them to be shocked at their existence.” Even so, in Hell’s Angels, Thompson begins to identify with the loser outlaw, the loser who takes action, a pose that would bring about the best book of its generation. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas introduced Raoul Duke, a Thompson alias, who abandons the pretense of objective journalism in favor of an embellished style to speak deeper truths. As Duke and his attorney go on a drug-binge adventure through the West in search of the American Dream, the paint comes off the walls and a hellish vision is realized. Thompson anticipated the paranoia and nervous breakdown brought about by the deceit and scandal of Watergate and Vietnam, events that sent the nation toward paranoia: by way of satire, he preceded by years the belief of a large part of the nation that the government was run by crooks, that martians killed JFK, RFK, and MLK, and that a massive conspiracy was underway to conceal these facts. And he also introduced a new vocabulary, largely adopted today by television shoutfests such as those on Fox News. Political adversaries are “Nazis,” “fascists,” “pigs,” “thugs,” “crooks,” “Christ-killers,” etc. Thompson did it best, however, and when he did it first it could still be entertaining. His cultural influence extends into music, where he championed the song, “White Rabbitt” by Jefferson Airplane, which must now be included in every montage of the 1960s. For all of his own excesses, Thompson was a moralist, one who will be remembered more fondly than many of the figures he wrote about. His judgments of Richard Nixon, (“he was a crook”), Hubert Humphrey, (“a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack”), and Edmund Muskie (an Ibogaine addict) are, for better or worse, the most memorable and final things ever said about them. As for the state of journalism, whenever an attack is made on the political coverage of the objective press, the critics borrow a page from Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972. While Thompson veered to the left, supporting the Democratic candidate in presidential races, he was not a liberal. He clearly had no use for hippies or hipsters, writing in Hell’s Angels, that, “Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell’s Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted … The Angels didn’t masturbate, they raped.” In fact, in almost any other era, one can imagine the Doctor as a conservative: a pessimist with regards to human behavior, a reclusive, gun toting patriot, isolationist about American entanglements overseas, and throughout his writings suggesting that he was shocked by the total depravity of the late 1960s. The conservatives who baited Thompson in their attacks on the counterculture of the 60s are not intelligent enough to realize they are assaulting the author of the version of events they so detest. The genius of Thompson was his ability to exist outside normal considerations, political or otherwise. He was an enemy of the status quo, who reached back to a Horatio Alger ideal of Americans and found his contemporaries lacking. In his time and for his country, as Mark Twain skewered the Gilded Age, and Mencken did the Roaring Twenties, Thompson captured the zeitgeist. We will not soon forget it. Archived article by Pete Norlander Sun Senior Editor
By February 23, 2005
The Shit Bitch Bear Every single day I must pass at least a handful of girls that make me go, “Shit, bitch! You is FINE!” (Just ask my friends; I fall in love each day without failure.) Until now, I have never been able to express that (at least in the “you’re so cute, cuddly, and romantic” kind of way). For some odd reason, there is a stigma associated with the phrase. Well guess what, bitches, it’s giving time. Armed with an adorable face and a satin heart that says it all, The Shit Bitch Bear is the “keeper gift” of Valentine’s Day 2005. Forget that — more like Year 2005 (hands down). Any guy can “cold call” you at a bar and tell you that you’re attractive. Any guy, for that matter, can write you a note. But a man who gives you a delectable trinket to display to all that you, indeed, are fine? –yeah, that’s a man to hold on to tightly. If you didn’t get one of these bears this year, your man either doesn’t sweat you, isn’t cool enough to buy you one with pride, or doesn’t understand R.O.I. (“Return On Investment”– see graph). Citizens of Humanity Jeans How do I know that men run the corporate world of fashion? Because one of them developed the greatest thing to happen to denim since “washes.” Clearly there was a man out there (definitely straight) who realized that “tailoring” and “jeans” should be paired like fine wine and aged cheese. Have you seen the way a pair of these pants can sculpt an average woman’s behind into the most buttery contraption on earth? Have you finally figured out why women will spend four to five times what the average man will spend on booze in a night for a single item of clothing? Have you realized that it is now acceptable for men AND women to stare at a random girl’s ass as long as the statement, “I was looking to see what brand of jeans those were…” is used? Wake up, Neanderthal. A higher power somewhere loves you and I have no idea why. A Bathing Ape — Bapesta Sneakers In case you’ve been sleeping, the biggest thing to hit Japan since atom bombs is fashion celeb, Nigo, of the highly sought after line known as A Bathing Ape. (If you’ve seen the new Snoop music video with Pharrell, he’s the tiny Asian guy with the shark hoody on–not some extra the director pulled from craft services.) From his wild choice of bold, candy colors to the slightly “animated,” oversized fit of his clothes and apparel, Nigo has brought the fun back to hip-hop. Forget the tough-talking’ velour suits and the white t-shirts that drop down to your ankles. Nothing provides more excitement, inspiration, and glances of “what-the-hell-are-those-kicks?” looks from young urban dwellers than a pair of Bapesta sneakers. Nigo recently opened his first U.S. store in SoHo, but good luck finding a pair. They’ve been sold out for months. If you don’t have a hipster Harajuku neighborhood friend, try giving a ring to graffiti artist Futura 2000, hip-hop legend James Lavelle, rap legend Mike D. of the Beastie Boys, production guru squad The Neptunes, or everyone’s favorite Puerto Rican Fat Joe who all make A Bathing Ape their shoe of choice. Archived article by Ari B. Cantor Sun Staff Writer