Looking for the soul of Missoula.

"You know Hunter [S. Thompson] typed 'The Great Gatsby'?"

"He'd look at each page Fitzgerald wrote, and he copied it. The entire book. And more than once. Because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece. He was so hungry, yeah. Innocent, and yearning."

Says Johnny Depp, who's played the part of Hunter S. Thompson in 2 different movies now.

I'm thinking maybe that would be a good practice for all of us who presume to write. Pick one book, the book that exemplifies the best writing for you, and type it out, to see how it feels, to learn something elemental in that mysterious eyes-to-fingertips interplay.

What's your book?

The new Miss World is a United Statesian.

Alexandria Mills.

What's her favorite book? "'Guess how much I love you,'my mom used to read it with me." Don't laugh. I'll bet most of the people you know, if they were being honest, would name a children's book as their favorite book.

Tell us a little something about your Country?

The USA is a melting pot for all cultures. My home town is famous for the Kentucky Derby Horse Race.

Yeah, the USA, la la la... let me tell you about Louisville! Louisville, Kentucky:

"... Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place. You're lucky that mental defective at the motel didn't jerk a pistol out of the cash register and blow a big hole in you.... Just pretend you're visiting a huge outdoor loony bin... If the inmates get out of control we'll soak them down with Mace."

That reminds me. The Rally to Restore Sanity is happening today. Are you there? Are you watching it on C-SPAN? Sanity. Are you up for sanity today? I've got the sanity rally recording on the DVR and I'm going to scroll through it — I say "scroll through" these days, not "fast-forward" — later. Meanwhile, remember when the smart reaction to politics was insanity, back when we read Hunter S. Thompson essays?

A radio news bulletin says the National Guard is massacring students at Kent State and Nixon is still bombing Cambodia. The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with beer he's been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild chocking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger's side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: "Bug off, you worthless [censored]! You twisted pigfucker! [Crazed laughter.] If I weren't sick I'd kick your ass all the way to Bowling Green--you scumsucking foreign geek. Mace is too good for you...We can do without your kind in Kentucky."

Can Obama count on a big turnout of youth voters to give him the winning edge? I think not.

And I'll tell you exactly why. But first, look at this Slate article on the "youth vote." ("Youth vote" is a silly and inapt term, and Slate appropriately puts it in quotes. You have to be 18 to vote, and the demographic group in question may be young as adults go, but they aren't "youths.")

On Election Day 2004, kids turned out in record numbers: About 4.6 million more people under the age of 29 voted in 2004 than in 2000. Yet 18- to 29-year-olds accounted for only 17 percent of voters—roughly the same as in 2000—because the geezer vote also grew. As a result, youth mobilization was declared a myth, perhaps unjustifiably. "We rocked the vote all right," Hunter S. Thompson said at the time. "Those little bastards betrayed us again."

Of course, organizers are saying this year could be different....

Primary bump: Youth turnout in the primaries saw a huge jump over previous years....

The '06 wave: Speculators wouldn't be so optimistic if it weren't for the Phish-like levels of participation in the midterm elections....

Phish-like levels, from '06? Doesn't that stink by now, even if wrapped in newspaper?

... Students for Obama has organized more than 700 chapters, the campaign says. Groups like Rock the Vote and Campus Progress are also registering voters on campuses....

[We now have a lot of] e-mail, text messages, RSS feeds, tweets, and social networking....

... But in a poll conducted in February by Rock the Vote and the Tarrance Group, 82 percent of voters under 29 said they were likely to vote in November, including 62 percent who called it "extremely likely."

But who knows? Who knows is Slate's bottom line.

Now, what I want to talk about is mass psychology. My theory is that Obama's popularity took off among young people because he hit a tipping point where his very popularity generated extreme popularity. Once it seemed that loving Obama was the thing that was happening, people wanted to be part of what was happening. There was that inspiring "Yes We Can" period last February. Bonding took place. If that feeling persists, perhaps it propels young people to the polls.

But that feeling has dissipated. Obama is no longer the improbable, fascinating newcomer who rises up to conquer the indomitable overlady. He's the familiar, good but flawed politician who found a path to the nomination and is having trouble holding onto what was once a nice lead in the polls. He was so different, he was magnetizing everyone, radiating an exciting aura. Those crowds of young people wanted to be in on that, part of that.

And now there's another newcomer who is fascinating people too, and even if she's fascinating different people, it dims Obama's power to fascinate or it dims the significance of fascination to those who were once fascinated. Fascination itself has lost its aura now that those people -- those uncool people -- are fascinated by Sarah Palin.

So it starts to feel like just another presidential campaign. The reason to vote for Obama becomes not much more than the idea that the Democrats supposedly have better policies than the Republicans. What's the thrill of that? Where's the "Yes We Can" vibe when it's only a politician trying to get elected? What's the big deal about being part of that? The throng disperses.

I predict that unless Obama is already on track to win by a good margin, the young voters won't turn out in droves. That is, they'll be psyched about voting if they think he's a big winner. But if it looks like he's going to lose, there won't be that extra boost of young voters to put him over the edge. They will slip back into their traditional political lukewarmth.

What the nonfiction writer promises the reader.

Watch the whole diavlog, based on Richard Preston's book "Panic in Level 4." I especially loved this segment about a genetic disease that causes people to cannibalize their own bodies. They need to be guarded constantly, lest they bite off their own fingers and so forth. Preston tells us to think of a person who compulsively bites his cuticles or chews the skin off the inside of his lip and then imagine the volume turned way up.

ADDED: About that embedded clip. Preston talks about the nonfiction writer's contract with the reader. I don't think all nonfiction authors are really offering what he says and certainly, as a reader, there's nothing about a nonfiction author's offer to tell the truth that makes me agree to suspend disbelief. So it's not a contract with reciprocal duties. And in some cases, I might want to read someone precisely because I am entertained by the very aspects of the work that are not on the up-and-up. (I'm thinking of Hunter S. Thompson.) In most cases, I just know that to get what I want, I have be alert, looking for lies and distortion.

I read a lot of judicial opinions and political writing, and I'd be a chump if I read that writing with the idea that they had offered to tell it straight and I was therefore bound to accept their assertions at face value. But I'm not a chump, and in fact, for me, most of the pleasure of reading that stuff is looking for the flaws and reading between the lines.

"I couldn't believe that people would really believe that Muskie was eating Ibogaine."

"I never said he was. I said there was a rumor in Milwaukee that he was. Which was true. And I started the rumor in Milwaukee." Said Hunter S. Thompson.

Scroll to 1:35 in this trailer from the movie "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson":



That sprang to mind when I read this comment, from Simon, on the first post of the day:

Ann said...

"Thanks to Andrea Mitchell for revealing that the campaign is prompting the press to take that line."

That's a positive way to think about Mitchell's role. Being a cynic, though, I can't help but think that another way one could think about it is as lamppost journalism. Mitchell is presumably an Obama supporter, and this rumor would be a useful way to limit McCain's victory last night and grab back the headlines. No one was talking about this before Mitchell brought it up, and if Mitchell wants to maintain the veneer of journalistic neutrality, she can't raise the suggestion herself. Ah, but she can raise it herself if she can claim to be simply reporting what the Obama campaign is saying.

The Bob Dylan song that turned on Jimmy Carter is the one that Barack Obama calls a favorite.

I found it odd — and blogged about it here — that Barack Obama named "Maggie's Farm" as his favorite Bob Dylan song. So I sat up and took notice today, watching the movie "Gonzo" — the documentary about Hunter S. Thompson — when they got to the incident in 1974 when the idiosyncratic journalistic was sitting bored out of his skull trying to ignore a Jimmy Carter speech and this line got him all excited:

I grew up as a landowner's son. But I don't think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More." So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.

In my old post I wondered why Obama had come up with "Maggie's Farm":

Do you believe "Maggie's Farm" is one of his favorites, or do you think they just tried to find a political song that had some appropriate rhetoric? The character in the song is perceiving what's wrong with the farm (the country) and is looking for a change.

A commenter over at Expecting Rain — a Dylan fan site — made the Obama connection too:

Hunter Thompson covered the 72 campaign and championed McGovern. After McGovern dropped the ball by choosing that sweaty Eagleton guy for his running mate, Thompson was disillusioned for years until he saw Jimmy Carter make an early campaign speech to Ted Kennedy and a bunch of lawyers, brazenly criticizing the American legal system.

Thompson was rejuvenated. In the speech, Carter quoted a Dylan song, Maggie's Farm, which Obama is citing now. Maggie's Farm is a metaphor for transcending the political system. Dylan plugged in and played it for the acoustic folkies at Newport Folk Festival to say, "I'm not a symbol of the right or the left, I just want to rock and roll."

I don't know whether this means Obama and Carter are soulmates or Obama is cribbing from Carter's playlist or Obama reads Hunter S. Thompson or it's well known among Democratic campaign advisors that you can push some useful buttons by invoking "Maggie's Farm" or what. I'm just noting the linkage.

And I wanted to tell you I saw the movie "Gonzo." Watch the trailer. You will get an accurate impression of the film from this:



It was a bit long and rambling, but a pretty good documentary about a very interesting writer and his wild life and times. Recommended if you like documentaries and can deal with some heavy-handed comparison of Bush to Nixon and Iraq to Vietnam.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

Just once I'd love to hear a politician who would say something like:

"You know, I don't think I've been the same since I heard the 14th unfinished fugue of J.S. Bach's "Art of the Fugue", specifically the point where Bach inserts as a countersubject the notes corresponding to the letters of his own name. It was that moment that I felt a profound connection between humanity and the universe, between numbers and metaphysics. It was that moment, listening to the ailing old Bach's assertion of his selfhood, coded into his own complex and beautiful system, that I felt truly alive and driven to spend my life devoted to the advancement of civilization and humanity."

But no. It's "Maggie's Farm". Fleetwood Mac. Wyclef Jean. You can't be elected if you actually like music anymore.

"As we get closer to the convention, if it is a stalemate, everybody will be going after everybody’s delegates."

“All the rules will be going out the window.” So says a senior Clinton official, according to Politico. Look out, Obambi, Hillary is working out ways to steal your pledged delegates — the delegates you think you already won in the primaries and caucuses.

Pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, not even on the first ballot. This has been an open secret in the party for years, but it has never really mattered because there has almost always been a clear victor by the time the convention convened....

“Delegates are NOT bound to vote for the candidate they are pledged to at the convention or on the first ballot,” a recent DNC memo states. “A delegate goes to the convention with a signed pledge of support for a particular presidential candidate. At the convention, while it is assumed that the delegate will cast their vote for the candidate they are publicly pledged to, it is not required.”

Should weconclude that the Clinton campaign is evil? Or is this just evidence of the campaign's competence, that it's exploring all the permutations of the fight for the nomination? The Clinton aid prefaces his remark with: "I swear it is not happening now."

Ha. That reminds me of one of my favorite Nixon quotes: "We could do it, but that would be wrong."

Did Nixon really say that, and what was he talking about? I've been using that "Nixon quote" for decades, because I think it's so funny. It reveals a mind that thinks through the wrong things that could be done and even says them out loud — then, realizing how bad it sounds tries to nullify the statement with a terse invocation of morality. Ah! It seems the original quote is: "We could kill him. But that would be wrong."

On the White House Tapes, Nixon and his advisors were discussing what they should do about one of these enemies.... And Nixon said, "We could kill him." During the David Frost - Richard Nixon interviews, Nixon complained bitterly that we didn't get to listen to what he said next, presumably because it had been accidentally erased. What he claimed to have said next was, "But that would be wrong."

I like that. It's a much better quote, that way: "We could kill him, but that would be wrong."

Searching the web to verify the old quote, I hit upon "He Was a Crook," Hunter S. Thompson's essay on the death of Richard Nixon:

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

Hey... badger! That reminds me: I've got to go vote in the Wisconsin primary.

But, Hillary and Hillary people: Think about your legacy. Maybe this Hunter S. Thompson quote could help you think clearly:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

UPDATE: The Clinton campaign says: I'm not a crook.

"Football Season Is Over."

That's the title on Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note:

[Thompson's biographer Douglas] Brinkley writes, "February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high- water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time."

That puts Thompson in a new light.

The whole text of the note appears at the link, including his final sentence, written before shooting himself in the head: "This won't hurt."

Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide -- redux.

Here's a long piece by Hog on Ice about the Hunter S. Thompson suicide. ("I guess that if there's anything more ignominious than scrambling your own brain because you wasted your life and you can't write any more, it's having your dead body used by your own wife and son, as a grisly prop in a pretentious 'counterculture' celebration.")

My "Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide" is here.

The other day, Tim Russert reran his old interview with Hunter S. Thompson from February 2003.

RUSSERT: Tell me why you oppose the war against Iraq?

THOMPSON: Well, it seems like not just dangerous but insanely dangerous for us, for me. I don't even think it's our war. I think it's Mr. Bush's war. And I think it's just like they say about the Civil War, that's Mr. Lincoln's war. But it just seems incredibly stupid to go off--here's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace to a broken nation of war. You know, that's kind of hard to--to vote for him it would seem when--the people keep voting for him. And that's what baffles me about the American people now.

RUSSERT: You said it appears our nation is having a national nervous breakdown.

THOMPSON: That's what I--I recognize it as.

RUSSERT: Explain that.

THOMPSON: Oh, God, explain that. Well, it seems that I think in a n--in a nervous breakdown, I believe, you kind of seize up and go sideways, more or less paralyzed. I wouldn't want to get into psychetry--psychiatric research here, but that's how it seems. I--the--the utter torpor of the American people in voting for a person who makes them broke, takes away their education and their libraries and tax refun--you know, you got--tax refunds--seem to be wrong with these things, but I live out in the mountains and the woods and that's the way it seems to me. And I've--I've done this for a long time, you know, governed a lot of elections and seen a lot of politicians. But I've disagreed with a lot of them. But I haven't been appalled. Nixon--yeah, Nixon--well, he was fun compared to Bush. He was a liberal.

RUSSERT: Nixon was a liberal.

THOMPSON: Compared to Bush.

"[H]ere's a man who's taken the country in two years from a prosperous nation of peace..." -- it wasn't as if anything other than Bush knocked our prosperous nation off the path of peace. "[T]he people keep voting for him" -- he said that in 2003, so that referred to nothing. "I've ... governed a lot of elections" -- well, we all misspeak sometimes. But all of this was said in horrendous muddle-mouthed speech. I turned it off after a few minutes.

Don't romanticize Thompson's suicide.

Under big red block letters that say "ENTERTAINMENT" over on CNN.com:

Thompson shot self while talking with wife

'He set the receiver down and he did it'

...She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column -- but instead of saying goodbye, he set the telephone down and shot himself.

Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn't know what had happened. "I was waiting for him to get back on the phone," she said.

I have a hard time thinking of this suicide as a rational act, like that of a person in the advanced stage of a painful, fatal disease. He kills himself while he's in the middle of talking to his wife and trying to get her to come home and help him do his work. He doesn't say goodbye. And he shoots himself in the head, leaving the gory remains to be cleaned out of the kitchen. And meanwhile, his son, daughter-in-law, and 6-year grandson are in the house, doomed to come upon the scene before the wife comes home from the health club. That seems like a sudden, impulsive act that expressed some strong feelings toward the wife. The wife characterizes things this way:

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," she said. "It was a problem for us."

The wife is 32. He was 67.

UPDATE: Ambivablog adds her thoughts. And here's news of family and friends sitting at around the kitchen table with the hours-old corpse, drinking Chivas Regal and exchanging stories.

"It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky," Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon's death Sunday. "It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here."

Anita Thompson also echoes the comments that have been made by Hunter Thompson's son and daughter-in-law: That her husband's suicide did not come from the bottom of the well, but was a gesture of strength and ultimate control made as his life was at a high-water mark.

"This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure," Anita Thompson said by phone, recounting that she was sitting in her husband's chair he called his catbird seat in the Rockies.

She added: "He lived a beautiful life and he lived it on his own terms, all the way from the very beginning to the very end."

And so begins a new legend, a story spun by the survivors. I repeat the point from my title: do not romanticize a suicide. I'm sure the family needs to find ways to deal with their own loss and their own sense of responsibility and, less sympathetically, has an interest in preserving and promoting the reputation of the author, but statements like this are reckless and dangerous. How many young (and older) people read and admire Hunter S. Thompson and sometimes have thoughts of suicide? Portraying it as a beautiful thing, a triumph, and an act of sublime control over destiny is profoundly wrong!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bebere joins the plea not to romanticize suicide and reminds us of the Werther effect.

Comparing the reactions to the deaths of Hunter S. Thompson and Arthur Miller.

Have you noticed the difference in how the press has covered the deaths of these two prominent writers? When Arthur Miller died, the press did what was necessary to mark the passing of the man who was generally recognized as a major literary figure (and had the celebrity plus factor of having been married to a mega-celebrity). But the outpouring of interest in Hunter S. Thompson doesn't seem to be an effort to give coverage equivalent to his literary standing. It seems to be an expression of genuine, spontaneous love. That's my impression anyway. Do you disagree? I realize part of it is that journalists have a special feeling for another journalist. But the coverage of Thompson has been extraordinary.

Just to take the NYT, in addition to the usual obituary, there are a number of extra articles, like "The Thompson Style: A Sense of Self, and Outrage" ("To Mr. Thompson, it was all true, every word of it. Maybe not literally, you-can-look-it-up true, but true in a way that the bean counters would never understand.") and "With an Icon's Death, Aspen Checks Its Inner Gonzo" ("Some said that Mr. Thompson's suicide on Sunday night marked the stilling of a voice that kept some of Aspen's old counterculture alive. Others said the roots that he helped establish here ran too deep and would live on without."). In contrast to the usual circumspection about the use of guns, the Times picks up an AP story that begins this way:

Hunter S. Thompson, the "gonzo journalist'' with a penchant for drugs, guns and flame-thrower prose, might have one more salvo in store for everyone: Friends and relatives want to blast his ashes out of a cannon, just as he wished.

"If that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off,'' said historian Douglas Brinkley, a friend of Thompson's and now the family's spokesman.

Thompson, who shot himself to death at his Aspen-area home Sunday at 67, said several times he wanted an artillery send-off for his remains.

"There's no question, I'm sure that's what he would want,'' said Mike Cleverly, a longtime friend and neighbor. ``Hunter truly loved that kind of thing.''

Shooting the remains of a gunshot suicide out of a cannon? Isn't it extraordinary for the NYT not only to refrain from the usual headshaking about the suicide risk from keeping a gun around the house but also to seem to celebrate the craziness of shooting a gunshot victim from a cannon?

Why does the word "bloggers" appear in the NYT's Hunter S. Thompson obituary?

A bold-faced, pull-out line in the paper NYT reads:

Like bloggers, building his case for the state of America around his opinions.

Here's the whole context:

[T]his early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson's approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions.

So what do you think. Is this one more sign that the NYT is obsessed with bloggers? Or is it actually a pretty damned accurate insight?

Wolfe on Thompson.

Tom Wolfe writes a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, who shared his first-hand research for "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Sage" with Wolfe, giving him what he needed to write "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." People like to say Hunter S. Thompson invented something new, Wolfe writes:

Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization.