Spike Magazine

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Feature [published March 2005]
Hunter S. Thompson: A Real American Patriot
Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters
I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log
in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter
S. Thompson is dead.
Distraught isn’t the word.
Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in
the last couple of decades, a victim of his own mythmaking,
the crazy old bastard on the hill permanently
altered, packing guns and delivering apocalyptic pronouncements
on the rare occasions he could bring
himself to look at a typewriter. Loaded magazine got
to the point where they were interviewing him every
six months, just so another bunch of wannabe fanboy
journalists could make the pilgrimage to Woody Creek
in Aspen, Colorado and meet the man.
I periodically had a silly little fantasy of making
that pilgrimage myself one day and spending some
time shooting guns with the good Doctor. Yes, it’s
embarrassing to admit and possibly even more so to
read, but the point is, Hunter S. Thompson was one
of those writers who changed your perception of the
world. Irrevocably. So much so that you’d want to
meet him just to check he was real and shake his hand.
Because Hunter S. Thompson Got It.
He saw the world as it truly is, and the drugs and
guns and women were just a way to temporarily escape
that. (Hence the famous Samuel Johnson quotation that
prefaces Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – “he who
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being
a man”). Similarly, they are incidental to his work, not
the core of it. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas may
be a depiction of a drug-crazed doomed sojourn in Sin
City, but it is also what it says on the cover: “A savage
journey into the heart of the American Dream”.
That was what Thompson chronicled for four decades.
He was first and foremost a political journalist of
the highest calibre. Read the first journalism collection
The Great Shark Hunt or his penultimate, Kingdom Of
Fear – Thompson sees America through unmasked
eyes, and as a true American patriot, he despairs of
what he sees. And he has the guts to say so. Calling
President Bush a “whorebeast” in print was funny, but
Thompson meant it with deadly sincerity. He considered
Bush worse that Nixon. There was no worse accolade
he could award. There’s no irony involved with
BUY Hunter S. Thompson books online from and
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